The Best Charity Is Flexing
Our company building has a parking garage in the basement. Head down there, and you'd find three sizable, well-maintained vans parked in a row. One of them was the very van I'd ridden out in for the end-of-year awards ceremony. The other two, I figured, probably belonged to Cheon Yua. After all, the only celebrities at our company who rolled around in vans were her and me. Past those three vans sat a humble twenty-four-seater bus, waiting patiently at attention. An all-black bus of mysterious origin. It was the same one that had made me wonder why on earth is that down here? when I came down to head to the awards show. Truth be told, back then I was still in the grit-my-teeth-and-deny-it phase about Cheon Yua. I hadn't expected her to live and board at the company either. So a black bus with absolutely zero sense of style about it was bound to strike me as strange.
“I kept wondering what that thing even was. Turns out it's for times like this.” The personnel mobilized for this volunteer trip were me, Yang Yuri, Cheon Yua, and ten guards. The guards, who had apparently known Cheon Yua since long ago, escorted her aboard the infamous bus as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Their reactions were so smooth you could tell they'd been on deployments like this many times before.
“Hey, Rando. Have you guys ridden this bus out on trips before?” “Sure have. Less often here in Korea, though. Back in the States, we went out on it pretty regularly.” “Really?” “S&M Group takes its charitable foundation seriously. It's been running for decades now.” The guards' movements looked so practiced that I sidled up to my big Black friend from the gym — the one I enjoy lifting with — and asked him about it. Turns out this bus had always been the designated vehicle for off-site trips. According to him, when Cheon Yua was in America, they went on outings like this far more often than they did now. And as he talked, he kept subtly connecting Cheon Yua to S&M. These guys didn't even seem to bother hiding the fact that she was S&M people anymore. I'd had my suspicions, but sure enough — our Heavenly Demon really did come from an extraordinary family. Well, it's not like anything else could explain the suspicious mountains of money. This building, too — no matter how successful an actress might be, this was genuinely beyond believable.
“So it's S&M Group's charitable foundation, huh...” And on a slightly different note, I also learned that S&M Group ran a foundation and conducted all manner of donation campaigns.
“Actually, every guard out here today was recruited through the foundation.” “Really?” “Of course. Me included. If S&M hadn't reached out a hand, I'd probably have spent my life selling drugs in that godforsaken slum, or something like it.” “I see...” So that was the story lurking behind all their excessive displays of loyalty. It seemed S&M recruited talented kids, raised them, stationed them in various units, and then reclaimed them into the S&M guard corps once their service ended — a self-sustaining pipeline for personnel. And this kind of talent supply surely wasn't limited to the guards alone. I'd wager a good number of people at S&M headquarters and its subsidiaries had also come up through the foundation. Truthfully, scholarship programs are something even Korea's major corporations approach with real seriousness. Co-opting promising talent from their school days to exert influence across every corner of society is the signature move of Korean chaebols. Why else do people call Korea a republic of the chaebols? Law, politics, media — you'll find beneficiaries of that patronage in every field you look.
But unlike Korea's conglomerates, who cherry-pick only the proven performers, S&M seemed to run its support programs on a much broader scale. You only have to look at Rando, who received their benefaction as an ordinary Black kid from the slums. That kind of approach requires far more capital, sure — but the resulting loyalty must be incomparably deeper than what selective scholarship programs produce. Getting support after your abilities have been recognized, versus being supported when you're nothing at all — those are simply different feelings. These people really do operate like a religious order. Come to think of it, the Demonic Cult used to do the same thing — take in children from desperate circumstances and raise them into fanatically loyal cultists. Loyalty means something different now than it did back then, but I'd say the devotion of S&M employees still outclasses that of any ordinary company by a wide margin. And they'd repeated the process for decades, so their numbers must be staggering. Why does it feel like the more I dig into this side of things, the more urban legends keep crawling out?
I boarded the bus, mulling over S&M's human infrastructure for a moment, and found Cheon Yua already seated, beckoning me over with a wave. When I approached to see what she wanted, she pulled me down firmly into the seat beside her and launched into a lecture on the importance of image management. Right — Cheon Yua was already in her ninth year as an actress, and yet somehow had almost no antis. At first I was baffled about what she was getting at, but on reflection it was perfectly sound advice from a senior, so I listened attentively, wondering if she had some trick to share.
“Volunteer work and charitable giving do help an actor's image management.” “I suppose they would.” “Do you have any experience with that kind of thing, Siwoo?” “No. I was never well-off enough to be looking around at others, to be honest. Of course, there are people who give even when they have nothing — but that was never my temperament.” “I don't think that makes you a bad person. Everyone's circumstances are different. Truthfully, I'm not volunteering out of pure-hearted goodwill either.” “You're not?” “No, I'm not. Giving in hopes of getting something back — no one would call that pure, would they?” “Hmm...” “That's why you should prepare a trump card of your own for when you make it big as an actor. Prepare things properly, and you might just acquire yourself something like an anti-hate insurance policy.”
Cheon Yua, who seemed to have drifted from place to place over many years carrying out one charitable activity after another, admitted outright that her volunteering hadn't exactly come from a pure heart. And then she advised that, as an actor, it was wise to do the occasional bit of volunteering or donating to maintain a good public image. So that was the secret — Cheon Yua's near-total absence of antis was thanks to good deeds like these. If she'd been doing charity work in partnership with S&M, the motive wasn't purely image management, but it must have helped on this front considerably too.
“But for someone doing all that, almost nothing about your private life ever came out.” At first I just thought, huh, interesting — but the more I turned it over, the more I realized: this woman was a top-tier mystique star whose private life was virtually unknown. Even stories like 'Cheon Yua donates' or 'Cheon Yua volunteers' had never once leaked to the press. In that situation, what did image management have to do with anything? And yet she was telling me to build up a good-deeds portfolio through donations and volunteering. Something smelled off.
“So did you ever actually benefit from managing your image through volunteering or donations, Yua?” “Ah, my situation was a bit different. I blew up so suddenly that it never really...” “Really?” “Yes. My very first work was a massive hit. After that, I actually became more cautious.” “Ah...” “Even if I'd released stories like that, people — reporters especially — would have started by suspecting me of something. Tax evasion, that sort of angle.” “Spinning it that way too, huh...”
Cheon Yua had carried on her donation activities for years without ever revealing a word of it to anyone. No wonder I'd never seen a single related article — she'd guarded her mystique even in this area, thoroughly. Then what on earth explained the lack of antis? For an actress of Cheon Yua's caliber, having a fair share of antis should be the natural order of things.
“Then what did you do about your antis? You had remarkably few for your level of fame.” “That? I just handled it legally.” “Ah. Legally.” “For the record, our company's staff are even more capable than you'd think. In this particular field, they're simply unmatched.” As I'd suspected, Cheon Yua had accumulated quite a lot of antis early in her career. Pretty and young — malicious commenters and haters had swarmed her all at once, and it was apparently utter chaos. But every time new antis sprouted, she showed them reality without a shred of mercy. The Cheon Entertainment staff, who grew ever more competent feeding on those miscreants' blood, hunted the antis down with increasing zeal. After enough cycles of this virtuous loop, the antis had all but vanished. They couldn't have disappeared entirely, but they'd been reduced below the level of visibility. Once someone learns the lesson that one careless keyboard stroke can wreck your life, anyone would learn to be careful.
“Well, once I resume activities, someone will start running their mouth again. When that happens, our legal team and media management team will be busy at work once more.” So the most efficient way to eliminate antis, it turned out, was thorough in-real-life consequences. And this was the woman lecturing me about image management. Image management matters, yes — but hearing it from someone who doesn't spare image management so much as a thought for herself was just absurd. If she actually cared about her image, she wouldn't have carved through her antis so ruthlessly. There's a reason other agencies can't dispose of antis so easily.
“...Guess I'll just rely on the company's help, same as you, Yua.” Actors are celebrities who ultimately live off the public's love, so a certain degree of image management is essential — but being remembered as too good a person seemed exhausting. When someone who looks kind does something bad, the world flays them twice as hard. That's just how it works. So I'd give up on the donation-angel image and just live as I am.
“What a shame. I was hoping the company could have at least one donation angel.” “Forcing your own abandoned virtues onto others is a bad habit, you know.” “That's my point — it's a waste. If a virtuous image sticks from your debut, then...” “If it sticks?” “You naturally become more careful with your actions. You wouldn't go swinging an umbrella around wildly like last time.” “That's it? That's your whole reason for wanting me to...”
This woman was dangerous. We were supposedly headed to volunteer work, and she'd had this trap card hidden up her sleeve the whole time. The way she gave up the moment I refused suggested she didn't think it was very likely to work, but there was no denying it had been a rather perilous trap. Once again, it seemed clear that any volunteer work or donations of mine must never, ever be made public.
“So what exactly are we supposed to do when we get there?” “Ah, nothing much.” “Really?” “What would there be to do, in this day and age? Back in the day you might lend a hand with actual labor, but nowadays that's just a nuisance to everyone.” “Hmm...”
After lightly deflecting Cheon Yua's trap card, I asked what we were actually supposed to be doing. She'd surely know far more than a volunteering novice like me. But her answer was somewhat puzzling. Going all the way to volunteer, with nothing in particular to do. Which meant that Cheon Yua's “volunteer activities” were, in the end...
“Flexing?” “Yes. Flexing.” “Ahh.”
Volunteering and donations are covert operations that must never be revealed to anyone — and the finest charity of all, in the end, is the flex. Well, look at the world we live in. Another useful piece of wisdom added to my collection, courtesy of Cheon Yua, yet again.