Married Off
"Fuck. Time to get up."
Thirty-two-year-old Choi Seonggi hauled himself upright in his room at the gosiwon, one of those cramped single-room flophouses where a man could disappear. His tracksuit had started out green and surrendered somewhere around a filthy yellow-green, stiff with ground-in dirt. His hair was plastered flat with grease, his beard had gone scraggly, and his face hadn't met water in two days. Soju bottles lay where they had fallen, cluttering the floor. Once, the state of himself would have been unbearable. Now it didn't touch him at all.
"Haaah..."
Not everyone who lived in a gosiwon was the same. For some it was a short stay, a place to keep a little hope. For others it was the bottom—nowhere left to fall.
A click, and he opened his phone to check the overdraft.
He'd been wanting a cigarette for a while. At least there was still enough for a pack, a cup of ramen, and a few bottles of soju.
"Son of a bitch..."
He worked his feet into a pair of three-stripe slippers, one of them ripped nearly clean through and flapping, and stepped outside. The day was blindingly clear.
"Weather's offensively nice."
Maybe it was time to wrap this life up, too. Was the Han River all he had left? He wasn't fond of the water. Throwing himself off a bridge still felt like a story that happened to other people. He was on the floor with nowhere lower to go, and yet, strangely, Choi Seonggi remained an optimist.
He'd quit the civil service, thrown himself into crypto, and blown seven hundred million won—and his parents' house along with it. All of it to win back Oh Sunyoung, the woman who had left him with a bright little I think I need to get married. Live well!
If you wanted to make the impossible possible, you had to do something insane. So he had walked away from his government post and joined Big Coin Company.
It was the gamble of a lifetime. But Oh Sunyoung had been the woman he loved enough to stake everything on getting back.
Life is one big shot!
Big Coin Company's slogan was childish, and it hit hard. On paper they were a specialist crypto investment firm. Seonggi had smelled the fraud before his first week was out. He stayed anyway, stink and all, because he had a secret of his own—an ability, picked up over five years as a civil servant, to tell the instant someone spoke in his presence whether the words were truth or a lie. And there was this, besides. Within a week of joining, a seed of thirty million won had become something like a hundred million.
Greed swallowed him whole. A thousand-square-foot apartment in Gangnam swam up in front of his eyes, and with it the feeling that he could still hold on to Oh Sunyoung before she married that doctor.
He took that hundred million, borrowed against the apartment his parents had bought in his name for their old age, tapped the guys he called friends, and scraped private lenders and his overdraft until he had seven hundred million won, and he poured in every last bit. Thirty million had come back a hundred million. Put in seven hundred million, he figured, and three billion would turn up in no time.
Just work hard. Do that, and every one of you succeeds.
The world is full of open doors. Seize the chance! Right now!
Astonishingly, every word President Jo Jintae spoke registered to Seonggi as the truth. They were only plain, obvious things to say. Seonggi, blind with money, never noticed.
A few days later he showed up for work and found the office empty, as if the whole thing had been a prank. Seven hundred million won, gone. The hundred million he had taken from the loan sharks had already swollen to two hundred, and even now the interest would be breeding at a terrifying pace.
Two impossibly beautiful women caught his eye, drinking on a café terrace. One glance was enough. They weren't ordinary; good breeding poured off them in a stream. Owners of the luxury cars parked out front, no doubt. While he thrashed in a gutter, those women were probably drifting through heaven, wearing and drinking and smoothing nothing but the best onto their skin. Same hour, same stretch of street, people from another world. So what. They had their lives, and Choi Seonggi had his. Though that life of his was probably nearing the end of the line.
And that café—he had never set foot in it, but he knew the reputation. Designer coffee at fifty thousand won a cup, wasn't it? Fuck. That was three days of his living money.
"Hm?"
Just then his eyes met the woman in the designer sunglasses. She smiled wide enough to show white teeth. She was a tremendous beauty.
The hell are you smiling for, making my heart jump. And she can tell I'm handsome, too.
Choi Seonggi had survived on baseless confidence alone. Ride the dead-end skill tree of a ruined life all the way down, and all you had left was the bluff of come what may. He looked at her, grinned, and turned his feet toward the convenience store.
"So what are you going to do? Just run overseas?"
"I can't. Do that and two hundred billion won vanishes—no, the money isn't even the point. They're going to take the company I'm supposed to inherit. How do I run from that? Even a rough count puts it at several trillion won."
"Then what are you going to do?"
"I'm thinking..."
Cha Jiyeon, second daughter of Gwangmyeong Group, had come up against the problem of her life. Her grandfather, Cha Wonseok—founder of Gwangmyeong Group, one of the five largest conglomerates in the country—lay in a hospital bed.
"Any grandchild who fails to marry while I still live shall have neither inheritance nor company. One way or another, you are not a person until you are married!"
He had said it, and then had a lawyer notarize the will. Now Cha Wonseok was slipping in and out of consciousness, and things were moving so fast it would not have been strange if he died tomorrow.
He was a grandfather she treasured. She still could not afford to look away from what was happening. If he passed like this, Cha Jiyeon could be driven out of Gwangmyeong Group with nothing but the clothes on her back. She was the woman who had clawed for seven years to reach Marketing Director at Gwangmyeong Electronics.
In truth, she already had a fiancé the two families had agreed upon. The problem was that the man was absolute scum. Worse, her father—Chairman Cha Jinpyo of Gwangmyeong Group—was inseparable from that fiancé's father, Chairman Park Taeseok of Howon Group.
"You really hate Mingi that much? The engagement party's next week, isn't it?"
Yoo Segyeong, seated across from her, asked it carefully.
"You know what kind of man he is."
"Fair..."
Having said it, Yoo Segyeong quietly looked away. Park Mingi, eldest son of Howon Group, was a peerless legend in chaebol circles—if you asked the wrong people. Drunk driving, hit-and-runs, celebrity scandals, drugs: he had been tied up in every sordid case there was, and far from sitting in a cell, he was out roaming free and having a wonderful time. Hence the nickname Chobeobnam. The Man Beyond the Law. A title soaked in mockery, for a man whose real distinction was how deftly he slipped the net. She didn't know the details, but rumor had it tens of billions of won had already been burned keeping him clean.
"That snake gives me chills just looking at him. I'd rather marry some beggar walking past than marry him."
Cha Jiyeon shuddered at the thought of Park Mingi. Even for a marriage arranged between families, how did you settle on a man like that? An ordinary person would at least have been properly introduced a few times. She had told her father what kind of man Park Mingi was, more than once. It had done nothing.
"That's all baseless rumor! If he were that kind of bastard he'd be in prison—how could he be out wandering around? I've known his father for years, I know the man. Like father, like son. Mingi is absolutely not that kind of boy. Stop talking nonsense, and if you want to remain a child of Gwangmyeong Group, get married! Get to know him and Mingi's a decent kid!"
Chairman Cha Jinpyo had chosen to cover for another man's son rather than his own flesh and blood.
"Plenty of people like you. Jeonggyu, Hyeokjun—they both say they're crazy about you. Why not pick one? The greatest beauty of the age, Miss Cha Jiyeon, worrying about marriage?"
"I don't want to do it that way. I'm not ready to get married, and say I married one of them—then what?"
"Well, all hell would break loose. The son-in-law of Gwangmyeong's second daughter would redraw the map of the business world."
"That's exactly what I don't want. Isn't there some manageable man out there who'd actually listen?"
"Sounds like you'd even fake a marriage..."
"If I can, I should. This is two hundred billion won and a company worth trillions of won. Inherit it, or lose it."
"You really are something. I just don't get it."
Yoo Segyeong shook her head as they talked. Jiyeon should have gotten a boyfriend ages ago. The men Segyeong had personally watched trailing after her numbered in the dozens—hundreds, maybe. Looks, ability, family: she lacked for nothing. That damned personality was the problem. Falling in love with the work, dreaming with all her ambition of someday chairing the greatest company in the world—that was fine. But you had to actually meet a man if you wanted to reach for the stars.
Jiyeon and Segyeong sipped their coffee. Worry sat heavy on Jiyeon's face. Segyeong only wanted to enjoy a brilliant spring day.
"God, the weather's perfect! On a day like this I should be on a yacht..."
She had tipped her face up to the sky, and her eyes were just coming down again.
"Oh—over there. Your husband's walking by."
"What are you talking about?"
Jiyeon had been about to snap, and her head whipped around.
A man in a worn, yellow-green tracksuit, hair plastered flat with grease. One slipper torn and dragging, a few thousand-won bills clutched in his hand. When the two beauties looked his way, he looked right back and grinned. What was that confident, shameless face supposed to be?
A stunned no way escaped her on its own. Cha Jiyeon was so dumbfounded she laughed, hollow and helpless. She couldn't believe it.
"Weren't you just saying you'd marry some beggar bastard off the street before you'd marry Park Mingi?"
"Hey! I was just talking..."
She had meant it as a joke. The smile lingering on Jiyeon's face slowly went serious. No. This wasn't something to laugh at. A nobody like that—put a little money in his hand and he would follow orders, docile, running some shallow little scheme, just green enough to be useful.
By the time she came back to herself and looked again, the man was gone.
"What? Want another look at your husband's face?"
"Where did he go?"
"Looked like the convenience store."
"Hahaha... You really are a genius!"
Jiyeon turned Segyeong's words over, then said it with her face suddenly bright.
"What are you even saying?"
"Oh, for the love of—just buy a lighter! How much could it possibly be?"
"I only got a light! Just a light."
How many lighters were already rolling around on the floor of his gosiwon. He lit his cigarette off the store's, stepped outside, and blew out a lungful of smoke. They wanted him to buy a lighter for a single flame, and he didn't have the money.
"Hooo..."
He was walking through the brilliant weather and the clean air, trailing smoke, when it happened.
Riiip.
The slipper that had been hanging by a thread finally tore all the way through.
"You have got to be kidding me. How lucky am I, for the morning to start like this?"
He should have put superglue on it ahead of time. Hop along on one foot and the other slipper would only tear too. So the answer was to walk barefoot. What else. Cigarette butt in one hand, the ripped slipper in the other, Choi Seonggi went on with a single bare foot.
A middle-aged woman and a schoolgirl coming the other way took one look at him, edged aside, and passed with their guard up. He knew perfectly well how he looked. He didn't care. It wasn't as if he was walking around like this because he wanted to.
"Those beauties still around?"
Who didn't like looking at something pretty? And she had smiled at him, bright as anything.
"Oh, they're still there!"
Past a big truck, the two women were still on the café terrace—looking his way, no less, as if they had been waiting. Haha. He might look like this, but class was forever.
He was smiling at them with his whole face when one of them called out.
"Mister!"
Mister? Who? Surely not him. He glanced around. There wasn't another soul in sight. Jesus, is she trying to pick me up now? He pointed at his own chest.
"Yes. I mean you, mister. Come over here a moment."
She looked young at a glance, and she was ordering a grown man around? No manners at all.
"Why should I? I'm good!"
He shook his head and waved her off.
"Puhahaha..."
The other woman dissolved into wild, helpless laughter.
"Oh my god, I'm losing it. Did Cha Jiyeon just get shot down? Is that what just happened? Oh my god!"
But the woman who had spoken to him was relentless.
"Just come over! I have something to say."
"If you've got something to say, you come here. Why are you ordering people around?"
A man had his pride. Where did these kids get off. He was just turning away when she drew a banded stack of fifty-thousand-won bills from her handbag, smiled, and spoke.
"Come over here and I'll give you this."
He swallowed.
In a flash he counted the fifty-thousand-won notes. About twenty. A million won—two months of living, for him. A few bills, and she thought that bought a man? She had people figured for easy. But it was too much money for the Choi Seonggi of right now to refuse.
"Well, well. At least you know how to look at a man..."
One slipper on, listing as he went, he headed for the café terrace.
"Aaah, I'm dying! I'm going to laugh myself to death. 'At least you know how to look at a man,' he says... aaagh."
The other woman was practically fainting from laughter. He closed in and snatched for the money, but her hands were far faster.
"You said you'd give it to me."
"Not until we have a deal."
"What do you want from me?"
"Nothing all that extraordinary."
"Then say it."
In the brief moment she scanned him, Cha Jiyeon reached her conclusion. He looked like a beggar, but his manner was unflinching, not the least bit cowed. Perfect.
"So..."
She let a beat pass, then went on.
The cigarette butt dropped from Seonggi's mouth.
The woman in front of him, beautiful enough to seem unreal, was asking Choi Seonggi to marry her. More astonishing still—it was the truth.