Paper Folding
"Ugh..."
I was short on sleep. I got ready for school in the morning sun, and no matter how drowsy I was, five minutes of that light snapped me wide awake. I had no idea what the principle was. Still, if all it did was wake me, wasn't that good enough?
Today, too, I rode to school in Maru's company car. Even as she drove, she said owning a car like this was her dream, and I caught myself wondering whether I ought to give her one once she finished her first year.
A single car was nothing to me, after all. Once you counted the cost of keeping it, though, a reasonably priced one made a better gift than something expensive. A present the recipient had to fret over was nothing but a nuisance.
Hand her some imported luxury and Maru might end up car-poor. I wasn't even sure a conglomerate salary could comfortably cover it, and she hadn't finished her first year. She didn't have a home of her own yet. An expensive car was pie in the sky.
I was still turning that over when we arrived at school. I cracked another enormous yawn and climbed out.
"Have a good day in class, Hana!"
"You drive safe too, Maru!"
I stepped down at the usual spot and started toward my classroom. I still couldn't get used to any of it. I had been certain that, so long as I lived, I would never set foot in an elementary school again—and here I was, a little kid, walking into one. If someone had told me this before I ended up in a little girl's body, I would have told them to stop talking nonsense.
Thinking that, I went into the classroom. These days elementary school seemed to have more days for playing than days for actual study.
Then again, elementary school only needed the basics. Real studying could wait until middle school. Elementary grades didn't even go into your academic record. If they did, you would have to work hard, but the record only started in the first year of high school, so grades from elementary and middle school were mostly useless.
Of course, if you wanted a specialized high school you had to study in middle school, but that didn't appeal to me. I didn't need to grind that hard anyway. I wanted to be the kind of boss Kim Sehee was—the kind who gave a great many people jobs.
I was already doing some of that, but I figured there would be even more to do once I was an adult. You couldn't run a business in a third-grader's body. No one would even take you seriously. Try it like this, and it would look like a little kid showing off.
"Hi, Hana!"
"Hi, Jiyu! Hi, Yumi!"
I chattered with the kids again today, hoping class would never come. It came anyway. You could have beaten it to death and it still would have shown up. I yawned my way through the lesson, though the whole day wasn't studying.
"All right, today we're going to do paper folding!"
Paper folding?
We tended to do two hours of class and two hours of some hands-on activity, or something that was basically play. That suited me. Studying was boring anyway. I could solve middle-school problems without a second thought; elementary level was a piece of cake.
Memorization subjects you had to memorize, but the ones that actually mattered—Korean, English, and math—I could solve on knowledge alone. Of course I could. It was only to be expected that children just now becoming third-graders couldn't catch up to someone who had already spent decades studying.
The teacher passed out paper, and I took mine. Paper folding stirred an old memory: folding a crane in elementary school to give a friend as a gift. If I gave someone a gift like that now, would they just ask for money? I was curious.
Even a ten-year gap felt like a generation gap, and I was nearly twenty years removed from these kids. If I hadn't ended up in an elementary schooler's body, I wouldn't even have been able to talk to them. An adult chatting with little children like this was bound to draw ugly looks.
Maybe it was all the child-abduction cases lately. Or maybe society had simply grown harsher. Either way, the moment the paper was in my hands I finished a crane without thinking. My body remembered.
"Whoa, Hana, you can make cranes too?"
"That's amazing."
Jiyu and Yumi, who had been watching beside me, said so. This much was basic.
"This is nothing."
I had made about two cranes when the teacher put a paper-folding example up on the big screen. Today was time to fold whatever we wanted.
"Okay, everyone, open the file Teacher sent to your tablets~"
The tablets the school issued were wonderfully convenient. In my day they didn't use anything like that; they just handed out printouts. Skipping the paper and doing it digitally was simple, and I liked it. Once the technology advanced, you felt it at once. To someone who had lived in the analog age, it was beyond imagining.
Who would ever have thought you'd sit through class holding a tablet? If I had pulled one out back when I was in school, the teacher would have torn into me. Who takes out a tablet in the middle of class? In a way, that was only natural. In my day, phone or tablet, pull either one out during class and it was confiscated.
The chief charge was goofing off. These days you could take out a phone or a tablet in class and no one said a word, so long as there was no ringtone or other noise that would disrupt the lesson. Which meant I could goof off legally. My seat was in the back, too, out of the teacher's line of sight.
Even so, out of respect for the teacher's authority, I rarely actually did it. If word got out that the top student in the school was messing around during class, there was no telling what the reaction would be. People might say I was goofing off because I didn't like the teacher's lessons.
Let a kid who couldn't study goof off, and the reaction was, well, figures. Let a kid who could study goof off, and people checked whether something was wrong. That was how things worked around here. Anyway, I opened the file the teacher had sent. It had come through the school email.
"Hey, this is actually really good."
Kim Jaechang said it with the makgeolli—Korean rice wine—his father had insisted they make. The ingredients cost a lot, but the flavor more than made up for that. Even a famous brand's makgeolli probably couldn't match this.
Stroking his chin as he looked at the bottle, a strange thought occurred to him. Sell makgeolli like this in bulk, and it would fail without question.
Hardly anyone would buy rice wine at forty thousand won a bottle—about thirty dollars. The taste was extraordinary, yes, but companies moving product at scale had to sell thin and sell lots. That was the only way to survive.
There were only so many people who bought makgeolli. The game was to sell a great deal of it, cheap. Kim Jaechang, though, thought wine like this was better sold by a small brewery like his own.
The ingredients cost plenty, but that was the only problem. They already made and sold in small batches; they weren't turning out tens of thousands of bottles a day the way a conglomerate did.
Which meant they could actually meet the demand. Compared with makgeolli that sold tens or hundreds of thousands of bottles a day, what Kim Jaechang produced was only a few hundred. It occurred to him to sell it at a premium price, like a luxury brand—not thin margins and volume, but a steep markup and small lots. People lost their heads over anything called a luxury.
With that thought, Kim Jaechang hurried to his father.
"Dad. Should we try selling this batch of makgeolli online?"
Kim Chunil set aside the bottles meant for the neighbors and left the rest to Kim Jaechang. Jaechang rushed to put the makgeolli up on the website he ran, then fired off a round of messages telling his friends to buy some for now.
He priced the bottles for his friends cheap. He had begged them hard to drink it and spread the word, so the discount was their publicity fee. Once word of mouth got going, it would sell fast. There weren't that many bottles, and if it truly wouldn't move, he could always pass them to his regular shops at a slightly lower price.
For mediocre makgeolli it would have been a hopeless strategy, but even his father—who had been making the stuff for decades—had nothing but praise for the taste. Ordinary people would feel the difference even more sharply. He meant to turn them into people who couldn't live without this makgeolli.
And so, by calling in his friends, Kim Jaechang was able to send out the first batch. After he shipped the carefully packed boxes, he felt as if a new path had opened. The conglomerates' makgeolli had been squeezing him out little by little. He wanted to make the most of this chance.