Choosing a Building
"Hwaaaahm..."
It must have been the weekend, because I slept like the dead. The fact that it wasn't even nine yet was a secret. Past nine, Maru would wake me and haul me off to eat. The food at the company was good, but sleep was sweeter, and maybe it was this child's body of mine — I was always addicted to it.
I drew the curtains and let the warm sunlight fall over me. Autumn was creeping closer, and the days were turning, little by little, cooler. I hadn't even switched on the air conditioner while I slept. In summer that same unit had run at full blast.
"Hana!"
"Boss!"
Today the boss had come in person. She was dressed as impeccably as ever, and I dove straight into her arms. As if she'd seen the dive coming, she caught me without so much as a stumble. From inside that embrace, I asked.
"What brings you here today?"
On days off she came by less often, as if she were trying to give me room to breathe. If she sought me out herself on a holiday, though, something was definitely going on. She did show up for no reason at all sometimes, but that was rare on a day off.
"Well, it's like this..."
The boss began.
"You want me to pick one of the buildings here?"
My mouth fell open. I was pretty sure I'd asked to be moved to a different building, but I had never imagined she would act on it this boldly. A single one of these towers ran to several hundred billion won, and my hands started to shake. They were buildings I couldn't have bought with my own fortune. For that matter, a private person buying an office building this size was extremely rare. You could almost say it never happened.
Conglomerates bought towers like these for office space. Ordinary people had no need for them. Wouldn't you be better off putting that money into something else? I didn't know much about real estate, so I had no idea how any of it actually worked.
"Mm-hmm. You just pick whichever building you like. You don't have to feel the slightest bit of pressure!"
She said it kindly, watching my face, and I looked over the list she'd brought. Six buildings in all. I had to choose the one I liked best, and I sank into thought. Paper could never capture what a building actually felt like. It would be far better to go and see them for myself.
Photos, or words on a page like this, gave me no sense of what any of them were really like. I looked at the boss.
"Can I go see them in person, Boss?"
"Hm?"
She looked puzzled, so I spelled it out.
"I think seeing them myself would be better than looking at them on paper... Is that not allowed?"
She seemed to understand. Her eyes went wide.
"Of course it is! If you're choosing the building you want, going there yourself is much better!"
With that, she started hurriedly gathering her things. The buildings were all in Gangnam and Seocho District, so a single day's effort would be enough to see every one of them. They weren't scattered across the country.
"Whoa!"
The moment she stood, I stood with her. To think that I — someone who used to live in a studio apartment — would live to see the day I got to choose a massive office tower... I truly couldn't imagine it. Only last year I'd been just another ordinary person with no money, and now I was earning this much...
They say all sorts of things happen if you live long enough, but I never saw this coming. Who would ever think a grown man would turn into a little girl? Not even a prophet could have predicted it.
"Let's go, Boss!"
I grabbed her sleeve and said it like I was about to bolt out the door. She took one look at me and broke into an awkward laugh.
"Hana... you're not planning to go out dressed like that, are you?"
"I am. What's wrong with my outfit?"
I was wearing an enormous dinosaur onesie. A dinosaur onesie was everyday clothes, something you could wear anywhere. Of course you could wear it outside! But the boss shot a look at the other staff, and a moment later Maru came over.
"Waaah!"
Maru caught me and, with ruthless efficiency, changed my clothes. There was nothing I could do. I was perfectly fine with it. The boss, clearly, was not.
Hana and Kim Sehee wore out their shoes, diligently making the rounds of Gangnam and Seocho. It was almost impossible to believe that one of these many office towers would become her new nest. For Hana, whose whole life had been studio apartments, it was beyond imagining.
Hana didn't know it, but if it came to that, Kim Sehee had even considered tearing an older building down and raising a sleek, state-of-the-art tower in its place. She dropped the thought almost at once. Putting up a single building took a year at the very least, and she could not wait that long.
What made an impression was the sight of not green rookies but long-seasoned real estate brokers trailing after Kim Sehee. They hadn't limited their search to a single agency, so brokers who specialized in large buildings came in person and explained everything in careful, friendly detail. Simply connecting a buyer to a building of this scale would earn them more money than they could imagine. Even the brokerage fee on an ordinary apartment ran to several million won; there was no predicting what the fee would be on a tower worth hundreds of billions.
Perhaps because they had selected only new construction, Hana seemed satisfied no matter which building she looked at. After seeing them all, she chose one: a large office tower in an excellent location, not long since it had been built. Kim Sehee wanted to know what standard Hana was choosing by, but she didn't ask. Some secrets were better left tucked away.
What came as a surprise was that Hana never once whined or fussed — and this despite their having been out from morning until late in the evening. On the ride back, of course, she fell fast asleep in the back seat. She looked thoroughly worn out from the day. Which, in fact, she was.
At any rate, the building had been chosen. All that remained was to negotiate the price. The going rate for a tower this large was shaped by the buildings around it, but it was shaped by the negotiation as well. They had a ballpark figure. An exact price had not yet been worked out.
Word that Starlight Food was moving its headquarters spread outward from the real estate brokers. The factories and the other farm facilities would stay exactly where they were, so to the securities world and to people in other fields, it might not have been especially important news.
And Starlight Food had no intention of stopping the rumor. It wasn't the sort of news that would harm the company. It amounted to nothing more than moving the headquarters.
Many firms, like those with industrial complexes in Ulsan, kept their headquarters in Seoul and ran their factories and other facilities out in the provinces. Even so, there was one group that was not pleased to hear that Starlight Food's headquarters was on the move.
And perhaps because Starlight Food's people had been in and out of real estate offices in Seoul, the rumor spread faster than anyone had expected.
"Chairman, we received a call this morning from Provincial Assemblyman Choi Jeongcheol's office. He says he would very much like to meet with you. Shall I set an appointment?"
Kim Sehee's plan to move the company to the capital had leaked, so this was only natural. Gyeonggi Province had no desire whatsoever to lose Starlight Food. If the company were still the small-to-midsize firm it had once been, they wouldn't have batted an eye at one such company packing up for Seoul.
But Starlight Food now was a rising sun. The taxes it paid were climbing higher by the day. Its headquarters was registered in Paju, Gyeonggi Province — not Seoul, but Gyeonggi. That was what mattered. There were local taxes as well as the taxes paid to the national government.
Local governments got by on the tax money they received from the central government, but losing what Starlight Food contributed would leave a sting. If Starlight Food paid ten billion won in corporate tax, it paid one billion won in local tax to Hwacheon City, Gyeonggi Province. And local tax was not the only levy. There were many other kinds of taxes besides.
Starlight Food was a company with bright prospects ahead. There was no guarantee it wouldn't one day become a world-leading firm like Apple. Hadn't they already come to sit on an enormous pile of money simply by inventing Tangle, the cure for baldness?
"Tell them to wait."
Kim Sehee was looking at a photograph of Hana, and she felt no warmth at all for the Gyeonggi side, who had needlessly unsettled her. The move to Seoul was unavoidable in any case. No matter what anyone said, she had no intention of changing her mind.