Diplomat with honest face
By Oh Young-jin
Our team was going through a kaleidoscope of thoughts for about five minutes or so while waiting for Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister Kim Sung-hwan at a reception room on Monday afternoon.
At least one of us was critical of Kim, a career diplomat who has followed the so-called royal road any foreign service bureaucrat would envy. Our impressions were that he was too bland for my taste.
Kim has kept a low profile and avoided confrontation, which triggered speculation that he was too docile to speak from his heart.
Sometimes, a person’s bad reputation proves incorrect when you meet face-to-face.
Kim entered the room after his staff told us he was coming.
Our team bowed respectfully and shook hands with him. The handshake was nothing out of the ordinary, not firm or soft. But the unimpressive handshake seemed to be the result of long-term training from so many handshakes he has had as foreign minister over the past two years.
But what caught my attention was his face.
It was not about his being handsome or any definition about his appearance but a sense of honesty. It was only after the interview ended that it was apparent Kim’s face is one of his strong tools to get him ahead in his career. The effects of his honest looks were reinforced by his demeanor.
While asking questions and listening to him answer, he maintained eye contact with his interlocutors, who felt they were appreciated.
Not once did he give a chance to show he was upset during the 30-minute interview.
He was well-organized on his talking points but there appeared to be a pattern to his speech.
First, he gave short, responsive answers. Obviously, he put out feelers to check out the other party in temperament, speech habits and the like.
It was after only five minutes or so that he got into his groove. Once he hit his cadence, he sounded at one point as if he were speaking from a script. He didn’t have any text. When challenged on a point to divert from the subject he was speaking about, he didn’t show any reservations and went directly onto the new topic.
When he spoke in a well-informed manner from one subject to another, one could feel that the depth of his knowledge might not be in proportion to the width of it. We know that the extent of a foreign minister’s portfolio that covers from climate change to North Korean affairs.
We had a chance to check this on why Korea is not participating in the U.S.-led missile defense (MD), and he was stopped in the middle of his speech by a new line of questioning he danced away from it with ease.
Kim proved not to be the type of bureaucrat who feels antsy about his schedule.
We were given written answers to our questions ahead of the interview with his assistants asking us to limit our questions to two. In the end, we asked eight and the minister answered them fully.
It was we that worried about taking away too much time from the minister but his aplomb was hard to miss. Interestingly enough, the staffer who warned us of the minister’s busy schedule, didn’t show much emotion, making us wonder whether she had over-alerted us, having the wrong idea about journalists’ punctuality. Still, the 30 minutes we had were too short a time to really get to know the minister. We decided to postpone our judgment about him until the next time he promised us to get together.