Makgeolli?
"Wooooow...!"
The moment they stepped inside, a wide, open enclosure spread out to greet them. A panda sat atop a wooden barrel, working its way through a pile of feed. She had no idea how an animal could keep a body that massive moving on nothing but a heap of grass, but the panda was cute. Honestly, if it weren't cute, it would have gone extinct ages ago.
"So cute...!"
"I wanna raise a panda too!"
Jiyu and Yumi were watching it right alongside her. The panda had been eating with single-minded focus when it suddenly lifted its head, as if it had sensed that someone had arrived. Her eyes met the panda's—and then, as if under a spell, it began to amble slowly toward her.
"Huh?"
A dumb little sound escaped her. In sharp contrast, the people around her burst into excited chatter.
"Whoa, the panda's coming this way!"
"Pictures—take pictures, you guys!"
"So cuuuute!"
The panda stopped right in front of her and launched into a vigorous greeting, waving its arms. The people nearby assumed the greeting was meant for them and waved right back, but she knew better. This panda was looking at her. The greeting was hers.
"Hello...!"
She had no choice but to wave back with everything she had. Having received her greeting, the panda bounded around in pure delight, then launched into all sorts of tricks, showing off as if to say don't you dare look away.
"Good job, good job!"
"But doesn't it kind of seem like it's moving for just one person?"
Yumi had cut straight to the heart of it, but no one was listening. They were too busy laughing, delighted by the panda's antics. She didn't particularly mind either. The panda was incredibly cute!
She'd expected nothing more than a panda chewing its food, not a whole variety performance. Then again, she should have seen it coming. She seemed to have some kind of affinity with animals. She'd felt it the last time they went to the zoo, too—a giraffe licking her face, lions circling around her again and again.
They watched in a daze, and before they knew it, viewing time was over. So many people had come to see the panda that visits were strictly timed. Stay past a few minutes and you were ushered out whether you liked it or not. Wanting to keep watching didn't mean you could.
"All right! Please head on out now~"
Staff wearing earpiece mics called out to them. They'd already seen plenty of the panda's tricks, so there were no regrets. They followed the staff's guidance back outside, and somehow the clock was already pointing at their meeting time.
"Ah, that was fun!"
"I've never seen a panda show off like that!"
Jiyu and Yumi were trading their impressions.
"Seeing a panda in real life is totally different from just seeing one on your phone!"
"Me too, me too! Is that why people come to see them in person?"
It was her first time seeing a panda as well, and she understood them completely. Watching in person had a presence and a realism that a phone or a TV could never match. If she ever got the chance, she wanted to see one again.
"Let's head to the spot the teacher mentioned! We've got less than an hour left."
She said it to Jiyu and Yumi. The meeting time their teacher had set wasn't far off. Making the most of leftover scraps of time was usually her specialty, but an amusement park made that impossible. Just riding a single attraction ate up an hour. Better to get to the meeting place early and rest.
They must have walked tens of thousands of steps today. For someone who barely moved on a normal day, it was a staggering number. She had a feeling she'd walked a whole week's worth of steps in a single afternoon.
She had no idea how much Jiyu and Yumi usually walked, but she figured today had been a lot even for them.
"Hnnn... I wanna see more!"
Jiyu whined, but she'd seen it coming. She shot Yumi a quiet look. Yumi nodded as if she understood, then spoke to Jiyu with firm resolve.
"Let's just go, Jiyu. The timing's awkward anyway. There's not really anything we can do."
"Yeah? If you say so, Yumi, then I guess we should..."
Jiyu really did listen to Yumi. Sometimes their relationship looked a lot like a zookeeper and a puppy. Yumi, of course, was the zookeeper, and Jiyu was the puppy.
And so they set off for the meeting place where their teacher was waiting. It was a fair distance from here, and walking there now would take a little while.
Kim Chun-il ran a brewery out in the provinces. It was a small operation, but it had been passed down through the generations, and its lineage still held. Even a brewery this modest turned a quietly decent profit. A niche market, you might call it.
Today, as always, he was brewing makgeolli—cloudy Korean rice wine—alongside his son, Kim Jae-chang. Makgeolli had been riding a wave of popularity lately, and they could brew all day and still fall short of demand. The one mercy was that summer had mostly passed, so it wasn't selling quite the way it had at the peak.
In the heat, plenty of people liked a cold glass of makgeolli while they worked the fields. Of course, if you said you drank makgeolli while working at an office, people would treat you like you'd lost your mind—but a single glass alongside hard farm labor was no problem at all. Sometimes a light buzz even helped.
"Dad. You worked hard today, too. Go on in and rest. I'll handle the cleanup."
Kim Chun-il was proud of the son who had given up college to carry on the family business, and he pitied him, too. While other kids were enjoying campus life, his son was making makgeolli in a brewery that barely let in the light. He hadn't been a top student, exactly, but his grades had been more than good enough to get into a university in Seoul.
Kim Chun-il had been the one to suggest he try college. His son had shaken his head and refused. Maybe it was because he'd trailed after his father and grown up in the brewery since he was little, but he'd said his purpose was to inherit his father's work.
"Son. We're making dinner with that rice again today, right?"
"Aigoo, don't worry. I bought two full sacks. We've got plenty to eat."
Their mother was away on a short trip, so father and son had to fend for themselves at mealtimes. She'd left side dishes behind, though, so all they had to do was cook the rice.
Once the cleanup was finished, Kim Jae-chang went to prepare dinner. The rice was Starlight Rice, the kind that had been spreading lately by quiet word of mouth. For reasons no one quite understood, it wasn't sold in Korea at all—only in Japan.
Once you added tariffs and everything else, the rice alone came to well over five hundred thousand won. Considering that a single twenty-kilogram sack of rice in Korea ran in the mid-forty-thousands, it was a price that bordered on outright gouging. Of course, Kim Jae-chang, who had tasted this rice, thought it was a price he could absolutely pay.
The difference between people who had eaten it and people who hadn't was simply whether they thought the price was reasonable. Those who hadn't tried it called it insanely expensive. Those who had said that even this much was perfectly fair.
And since a single sack lasted several months, the price was worth thinking over. Paying five hundred thousand won every month would sting, but paying five hundred thousand won every three or four months was a burden of an entirely different order.
They laid out another lavish spread, and partway through the meal, his father spoke.
"Jae-chang."
"Yes, Dad."
"If we made makgeolli with this rice, don't you think it'd turn out incredibly good?"
His father must have taken a real liking to the Starlight Rice. He used to eat only a single bowl, but these days two bowls was the baseline. Kim Jae-chang had thought the same thing himself. He'd just never tried it, stopped short by the practical problems.
"Dad, I've thought about that too, but one full bale of rice only makes about a thousand bottles of makgeolli, doesn't it?"
Eighty kilograms of rice yielded somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand bottles. In one sense it seemed like a lot, and in another, it fell a little short.
"I know that."
"With the Starlight Rice we have, we could only make two hundred bottles. And the biggest problem is, if we use Starlight Rice, we'd have to charge thirty thousand won a bottle."
When you considered that a bottle of makgeolli at the supermarket went for two or three thousand won, makgeolli made from Starlight Rice would have to sell for at least thirty thousand. Otherwise the numbers didn't work. They'd lose money every time they brewed it. This wasn't some bleeding-price war to grab market share. There was no reason to make it.
"People will never buy this. Who in their right mind pays thirty thousand won for a bottle of makgeolli?"
It was a reasonable thing for a son to say, but Kim Chun-il couldn't quite let it go.
"Then let's just try it with one sack. The way this rice tastes, I swear it'd make a makgeolli that clings right to your tongue."
Faced with his father's plea, Kim Jae-chang had no choice but to agree to brew a batch from a single sack. The only way to cover the loss was to make it back by selling the rest of their makgeolli.