After some polite preliminaries, she excuses herself, and calls out to her aides. Could someone please serve some tea to the gentleman, she says, resuming the conversation where it had broken off.
For Ms. Kim, the 57-year-old police chief, it was an unremarkable moment, one she had repeated countless times. But for a visitor who had been in and out of hundreds of offices in East Asia, seeing a woman served tea by a male subordinate was a conversation-stopping first.