The Beef That Hid Its Strength
Click. Click. Click.
Today, too, Assistant Manager Gu Junyeop was merrily at work as a salary thief—which is to say, getting paid to do absolutely nothing. He had every right to be shameless about it. There was genuinely no work to be done. Come five o'clock on a Friday afternoon, he would have bet his life that every office worker due out the door at six was running the very same scam he was.
Cast his mind back to the day he first arrived in this department, and the change had been nothing short of the world cracked open and made anew.
Assistant Manager Gu Junyeop. Departmental transfer.
A personnel order handed down in March, once the long holiday had passed—and not during the rightful reshuffle season at the turn of the year—never came to any good end. He was certain some unpleasant business lay behind a notice like that.
Struck hard by the sudden move, Assistant Manager Gu Junyeop went so far as to wonder whether he ought to pack his things and resign. He had clawed through a brutal hiring process just to get into the institute, and now he was supposed to quit?
Part of it was that he had felt, in his own bones, how poorly the Starlight Institute was faring. This was a place that only barely kept breathing on subsidies scraped together from other corporate groups. The interview he had fought his way through to get in, of course, had been on the level of a major corporation.
The department he walked into, luggage in hand, was peculiar in its own right. A unit that had gone by the name Nonhuman Lifeform Support was promptly rechristened the Hana Support Department. Ordered to devote himself to actively minding and raising a single child—as if he had been assigned to a daycare—Assistant Manager Gu Junyeop became certain the hour of his resignation had truly arrived.
A childcare department inside a research institute. No such division could exist anywhere on earth. He even found himself wondering whether the higher-ups had simply been too lazy to bother naming the dumping ground where they parked their failures.
To be stuffed into a department this absurd felt like a wordless command to vanish from the company, as cruel as having one's desk hauled away. And yet, once he actually reported in, the volume of work proved beyond all imagining.
Crushed under overtime, he decided it was a mercy all the same. If they were working him this hard, then at the very least they weren't about to let him go. The office's staffing was reasonable, too—six men to four women. A room overrun with women seethed with invisible faction wars, and a room overrun with men enforced the stifling, military brand of rank beloved by old hard-liners, and either one made a workplace miserable.
"Mister!"
"Ghk—!"
Today, too, Hana called him mister. He was only in his early thirties, and already the word had found him. It didn't actually bother him in the slightest, but Hana loved it when people played along, so he clutched at his chest as though her words had cut him to the quick.
"Hana, you're supposed to call me oppa!"
"Oppa, my foot! You're a complete mister, that's what!"
With that she went wandering around the office. Her sheer cuteness sent the staff's job satisfaction climbing, and now that Junyeop had come to understand that cuteness for himself, he liked the department enough to want to drive a stake into the floor and never be moved.
"Nom!"
He popped into his mouth a strawberry Hana had grown in the garden plot and brought in. That he could eat a berry this sweet, its juice bursting in a flood, only deepened his affection for the place. No office in Korea could possibly offer a snack like this—because Hana's strawberries were golden apples, the kind only her own people were ever allowed to taste.
And when he looked at the astronomical economic value she generated, his jaw dropped and refused to close. This was no modest little firm walking around on two legs. It was a major corporation.
The office's chief purpose was to clear away, in advance, anything at the institute that might make Hana uncomfortable or put her in danger. Today, too, Assistant Manager Gu Junyeop basked in that happiness and went right on thieving his salary. The work had been overwhelming only at the start; now that things had settled into a stable stretch, nothing piled up beyond a reasonable load.
"Hana! Time to wash up!"
"Waaah!"
He was surfing the web when Maru caught Hana and hauled her back to her room, and watching them go, he let a quiet smile slip out. If he could have a child like Hana, he thought he might get married on the spot and start a household of his own.
Once she had vanished, he drank in the crisp, sweet air and passed the time singing the praises of whoever in Personnel had seen fit to plant him in this department.
"We doing this right, son?"
"I... I think so."
The Choi father and son were hard at work feeding their cattle the rice straw sold by Starlight Foods, and the animals, as if determined to live up to the investment, were shooting up taller by the day.
"Dad! You don't think they put some kind of growth hormone in this, do you?"
Faced with a rate of growth that simply wasn't normal, the son clicked his tongue and put the question to his father. Unless the straw really had been made with growth hormones, the speed these cattle were putting on made no sense at all.
But his father shook his head.
"If there were anything like that in it, the other farms would've caught on. Chances are we're the first place to buy rice straw off Starlight Foods. I heard they only started growing the rice not long ago."
"You think so..."
The cattle, for their part, seemed to find the straw delicious. They ignored their feed and ate nothing but straw, and that suited the Chois just fine, because straw came cheaper than feed.
"We've got beef to deliver to a client before long. Seems to me we could use these ones?"
"That's right. That's right."
They had raised the cattle as dearly as their own children, but if a man wanted to eat, he had to sell. Feed, the cost of the barns, and every other incidental expense were not things you could dig out of the ground. And perhaps because they had been in the livestock trade so long, the old grief of selling a cow had faded from what it once was.
Now and then, sensing how dull their own feelings had grown, they couldn't help a flicker of fear—but there was nothing for it but to adapt. Firefighters and police were the same. At first the sight of a corpse made them retch and struggle, yet after long years on the job they adjusted, until they seemed perfectly all right.
"Then let's slaughter just two head and send them on. And I think we'd best send them to that client from last time. They paid us better for our cattle, so we ought to give them the good ones. Way I see it, the meat on these—and the flavor—ought to be something fine."
"Yes, Dad. I understand."
Deoksugung was a specialty beef house in Seoul that sold premium hanwoo, Korea's prized native cattle. On a weekend, a single day's sales cleared well over seven thousand dollars; even on a weekday the place still boasted takes of several thousand. For the people of Korea, who would gladly die for a bite of hanwoo, figures like that were only to be expected—and the price of the beef, to begin with, was ruinously high.
It was to this restaurant that Kim Minsu, brand new to the working world, brought his family, in honor of having received his very first paycheck. Spending that first salary on your family was the correct answer, was it not? And yet the moment he caught sight of the prices posted from the entrance onward, he regretted it in the privacy of his heart.
On the first floor, cuts of beef sat packed on display, as if inviting you to simply pick one up and carry it off. On the second were private rooms, where you took the meat you'd chosen downstairs and grilled it yourself. The prices, however, were anything but ordinary. Each pack was said to hold two or three servings, and they started at a hundred and ten dollars.
A hundred and ten dollars would buy eight whole chickens.
And a single serving at a barbecue house wasn't enough to fill one person. You had to eat at least two before your stomach would quiet. Which meant that once he added the meat to the various side costs, a single meal would run him three hundred dollars at the minimum. His monthly pay was fifteen hundred, and he was about to burn three hundred of it on one sitting. Even so, swallowing his tears, he made up his mind to sacrifice the money and feed his family until they were full.
"Aigoo, our boy gets himself a job and turns into a real person. That's my boy."
"I know, right!"
His mother and his younger sibling chattered as they took their seats, waiting all the while for nothing but the beef. When at last it came out on a platter, the family cried out as one.
"Whoa, look at that color! It's gorgeous!"
"You can tell it's hanwoo. Completely different—totally different!"
Honestly, to Kim Minsu's eyes, it all looked like the same thing. Whether that was because he was simply dull to such matters, or because he never ate beef in ordinary life, he couldn't say. Unless you were an expert, ultra-premium beef and ordinary beef looked identical from the outside.
But the moment they began to grill it and eat, the reactions turned fierce.
"Wait—is beef supposed to taste this good?"
"It sticks right to your mouth. I'm serious."
"See? That's top-grade hanwoo for you. Completely different!"
Watching his family eat with such relish, Kim Minsu picked up a single slice with his chopsticks and put it in his mouth.
The instant he began to chew, the juices that burst free were no laughing matter. It was like a fireworks show going off against his tongue. A clean, toasty savor flooded his mouth and filled it. This was not a flavor ordinary beef could manage, nor even the finest hanwoo. It was a taste from some other world entirely.
And so Minsu's family reached for far more meat than they had ever meant to, and paid a bill that blew straight past a budget already well beyond three hundred dollars. Even so, they had no regrets. Not when they could eat beef like this.
