Let's Make Bread
For half a year, Starlight Food's meteoric climb went on without a break. Kim Sehee decided the moment had come to pay a dividend. A dividend was one of the clearest measures of how much a company was truly worth: the higher the payout, as a rule, the stronger the sales behind it, and the sounder the books. Unless you meant to grab the cash and vanish, a generous dividend meant the firm had built up a deep reserve.
Kim Sehee felt it was time to unlock the retained earnings piled up over those six months, and she intended to pay a dividend every year from here on. By the time Hana grew up, she meant to make the girl the richest person in Korea. Hana was a child worth every bit of it.
Starlight Food had only just stepped into the two-trillion-won sales club, and crossing that line carried real weight. It meant the company had earned the standing to surpass most mid-sized firms—and it had not even properly settled into its new size. Only half a year earlier, Starlight Food had been a small company with annual sales of a few tens of billions of won. To set a firm like that on this trajectory in six months was enough to call the person responsible a god of business.
Kim Sehee, of course, was no god. She had simply seized a heaven-sent fortune by the name of Hana. Short of oil erupting out of the ground, there was no ordinary way to multiply revenue a thousandfold in half a year. And once she counted Tangle, now pushing into the American market, along with the rest of their foods, even ten trillion won next year no longer seemed out of reach.
Having swept up money from every corner, Starlight Food took the occasion to announce its net profit for the past six months. The retail investors drifting through the stock market could only gape when they saw the figures.
"A net profit of five hundred billion won?"
"That's impossible. Just last year this company did twenty billion in sales. How does that make any sense?"
The securities district itself could not hide its astonishment at Starlight Food's dazzling pace. People had known, more or less, that the company was raking in cash, but seeing it confirmed in hard numbers felt like the whole view had shifted. As a result, the stock was lurching like a seesaw.
Kim Sehee had originally held a hundred percent of the shares, but she had sold some to raise capital for expansion. Only five percent, naturally. That much had been more than enough.
As things stood, Kim Sehee held 55 percent, Hana 40, and the retail investors the remaining 5. Shareholders erupted in cheers. The dividend was all well and good, but the stock they already held had hit the daily limit up.
A share that had been thirty thousand won was suddenly eyeing a hundred thousand. Think of what Starlight Food might be worth from here, and no one could even imagine how much higher it might climb. They knew the place the company already held in the Korean market, and with its push into America, nothing but good news lay ahead.
"To the moon!"
Investors who had bought Starlight Food could shout it through their grins. Look wherever you liked, there was no hint the stock might fall. It was the sort of name that could only rocket, so hardly a share was left circulating. Everyone was simply digging in and refusing to sell.
At any rate, the five-hundred-billion-won dividend was split according to ownership. Kim Sehee took about two hundred seventy billion, and Hana two hundred billion. Taxes and the rest would trim it, true enough, but it was still a tremendous sum.
Without Hana even noticing, the money was stacking up, neat and quiet. It was time to find someone to put that fortune to work, and Kim Sehee decided to assign her a wealth-management team of her own.
By the time Hana graduated, an unimaginable sum might have piled itself up. Even now, park what she earned in a bank and another Seoul apartment seemed to copy itself into existence every month. That was the scale of it.
They had come far enough that Starlight Food and Hana were one and the same. The upper hand, of course, belonged to Hana. Without her, Starlight Food would collapse overnight, but the reverse was not true. If Starlight Food disappeared, she had only to find another company. The foods she brought into the world carried a power all their own, so that much was only natural.
"Jiyu! Yumi! Hi!"
"Hana, you're here?"
I greeted Jiyu and Yumi and dropped into my chair, setting my bag up on the desk. Snacks for later filled the inside. My books were already in the locker, so the bag's only remaining job was to serve as a snack launcher.
"Hana, why'd you pack this many snacks?" Yumi asked, peering into my bag.
"For when my blood sugar drops!"
"Your blood sugar drops...? Hana, sometimes you say exactly the things my dad says!"
Yumi was ten. At my real age, the gap was wide enough that she could have called me uncle—or just plain mister—and nobody would have blinked. So that's how old I am. I pointedly ignored the remark and hung my bag on my chair. They'd said today was a hands-on activity day, so I wouldn't have to sit through a boring lesson. That, I thought, was one of the good things about elementary school.
Or maybe it was just how elementary school worked these days. Back in my time, all we ever seemed to do was clutch a textbook and grind through class, but schools now were different. They weren't teaching every single day; they were trying to give children as many different experiences as they could. I was in violent agreement with that idea.
Nothing but lessons was neither fun nor satisfying. You had to clear your head with a day like this now and then if you wanted your mind sharp and actually working. Besides, studying hard in elementary school didn't buy you much. Starting in earnest in middle school was plenty. Of course, if I said that out loud the other kids would seethe with envy. I was first in the whole school, after all.
Chatting away with Jiyu and Yumi, I hardly noticed until it was nine. The door at the front of the classroom opened, and the teacher came in, greeting us with a wide smile.
"Hello~"
"Hello, Teacher!"
Maybe because they were still only third-graders, they seemed full of an innocence nothing had stained yet. Not me, of course. I was a fossil among fossils. The teacher and I were probably about the same age. She took her place at the podium and spoke.
"For today's hands-on class, we're making pizza bread! Everyone up, and line up outside the classroom!"
Pizza bread. The words alone made my mouth water. I'd heard that overseas they wrote the stuff off as a heresy too strange to even call bread, but Korea was different. It had to be one of the most familiar breads people ate. Beaming, I stepped outside and got in line.
"Pizza bread! Making bread sounds like so much fun!"
"I know, right? Baking cookies last time was fun too!"
Jiyu and Yumi were just as wound up, bubbling over with laughter. Simply not sitting through a dull lesson was already worth a heap of bonus points. This was the age when ignoring the textbook and doing something else was the greatest fun there was. We followed the teacher's directions to another room. One of the nice things about this elementary school was all its different practice labs.
The other kids and I arrived in a room crowded with ovens. It looked like the place where we'd made cookies last time... Then again, cookies and bread could fairly be called the same family.
"Hana, look at this!"
"It's so pretty!"
Seats had been assigned, and Jiyu and Yumi were delighted by the aprons waiting in front of them, each printed with a pretty pattern. One had been laid on the table for every child, clearly meant to be worn. I picked mine up and turned it this way and that. It was, when all was said and done, an ordinary apron.
"Hmm..."
While I was studying it, the door opened and the teacher came in with another woman. Dressed like a cook, she looked like a baker from the staff, here to show us how the bread was made.
"All right, everyone! Put on the aprons at your seats~"
At that, the children burst into a noisy chatter and started putting them on.
"Hana, tie my strings!"
Someone practiced enough could reach back and tie an apron alone, but we were nowhere near that practiced, so we agreed to tie one another's strings. I carefully knotted Jiyu's, then Yumi's, and asked them in return.
"Tie mine too!"
I said it with my back turned to Yumi. She beamed and cinched the strings tight—tight enough to feel like a squeeze. Aprons on, the three of us looked like chefs and nothing else.