The Village's Gatekeeping
"All right, we're warming up before anyone gets in the pool!"
The teacher said it dressed for ease of movement, not in a swimsuit. I did kind of want to see her in one. She always went around bundled up so tightly that the thought was hard to shake. Anyway, I dropped that weird idea and started the warm-up.
"Hut, two! Hut, two!"
At her count the kids moved as one, neat and disciplined. Third grade was old enough that you didn't charge straight into the water; you warmed up first and went in after. First graders would have ignored the teacher completely and jumped in to play. Little kids ran on instinct.
Once the warm-up was finished, the explanation began.
"Now! We didn't come here just to play, so you have to listen to Teacher, all right? Listen well, and later I'll give you time to play on your own!"
If this had been a pool trip out in the world, playing right away would have been plenty. But this was school. We were here to learn survival swimming. That stung a little, because I wanted to get in the water and play at once. Still, if the teacher said not to, then I wasn't supposed to.
"All right, look over here~"
From somewhere she produced a life jacket, then sat and scanned the children watching her. She was clearly looking for someone worth putting it on. Our eyes met, and she called my name.
"Hana! Come up here for a second?"
She probably meant to teach us how to wear a life jacket. Little kids drowned at the water often enough that they drilled it as a precaution.
"Okaaay..."
I shuffled over. Using me as a teaching prop, she showed the class how the life jacket went on.
"All right! Once you've got the life jacket on..."
I flopped along with every gesture of her hands. I'd wanted to play in the water the moment we arrived, but that had been shortsighted of me. There was no way the school had built a pool just so we could mess around. They must have put it up for some other educational purpose, which was why the kids were learning about water play like this.
Teacher Kim Yeonwoo was young, and yet her thinking was old-fashioned through and through. The life-jacket lecture was so dull that the kids yawned at her through sleepy eyes. Sensing the mood, she clapped to clear the air.
"All right, everyone! Focus! Just a little longer, and then I'll let you play in the water!"
The moment they heard it, their eyes went wide and bright. Who knew they wanted in the water that badly. I wanted to play too, so I stopped flopping and drew myself up straight—and, as a bonus, twisted this way and that so the life jacket was easy to see.
With that, the lecture on wearing one was over. The instant the kids caught the shift, they fired eye-beams at the teacher: we want to play in the pool, now. She must have read them, because a faint smile crossed her face as she spoke.
"All right! You all worked hard listening to class. You get one hour to swim!"
The words were barely out before the kids poured into the pool, fish finding water. Watching them go, I got ready to follow. Jiyu and Yumi were already in. The pool was enormous. It wasn't all that deep, but it was wide enough for twenty kids to play without crowding.
"Hana, get in!"
Jiyu and Yumi called from the edge. At their waving I ran straight for the water. We'd already warmed up, so there was no need to loosen my body again.
Splash!
I jumped, and spray burst up around me. Jiyu and Yumi took one look and shrieked.
"Hana!"
"Hehe!"
I floated on the cool water, letting it hold me. My swimming was twenty years ahead of these kids. In pure skill, not one of them could catch me. I cut the water and started to swim.
They had gone looking for sparsely populated land in Gyeonggi Province to grow Tangle, but finding a true wilderness there, a place with no human trace at all, was impossible. Mountains and bare rock with nobody on them might have existed, but you couldn't grow Tangle in places like that.
Even so, Byeolbit Foods had secured farmland as empty of people as possible where Tangle could still be raised. At least no village lay inside the acreage where it grew.
What they couldn't prevent was a village sitting on the outer line—right beyond the boundary. They couldn't bulldoze a village where people were living perfectly well, and there was no reason to. The village wasn't included in the cultivated ground, so they left it alone.
What they also couldn't stop was the villagers' old-fashioned way of thinking.
Kim Chunbae, head of the village that lived just outside the Tangle line, called the people together.
"Even so, there's no need to show consideration to people who won't keep our village rules, is there?"
This village had a code of its own. To the residents, the village code sat higher than the law. There was a reason country gatekeeping was feared. Perfectly decent people usually lost to rural territorialism and ended up leaving.
"Exactly! They went and took the mountain behind our village whenever they felt like it! Utterly unreasonable bastards."
It was a mountain the village had used for generations, but it stood on land Byeolbit Foods had purchased. The villagers were not, of course, its owners. Details like that didn't matter to them. What mattered was that Byeolbit Foods had stopped them from using the mountain behind the village.
Another middle-aged man spoke up.
"They haven't paid our village fund, either!"
Anyone who moved into the village was expected to pay a village development fund. Detestable Byeolbit Foods had not. Village Head Kim Chunbae had demanded the money several times, and Byeolbit Foods hadn't so much as pretended to listen.
The villagers put their heads together, hunting for a solution. A way for ordinary people to beat a conglomerate, though, was a long way off. Even a lawsuit wouldn't be entertained. The company had broken the village's rules, and that was never going to become a case.
Ordinarily the residents would have harassed them as a group until they coughed up the fund, or else driven them out, but Byeolbit Foods was not in that weight class. If the villagers were ants, Byeolbit Foods was an elephant. No matter how desperately they bit with everything they had, from the company's point of view it was something to snort at and walk past.
Then one of them offered a different kind of solution.
"I looked up this thing called Tangle... people say it's really expensive?"
"How expensive can a piece of fruit be..."
The evidence that followed shut his mouth. A single Tangle fruit went for several thousand dollars. Hearing that, Village Head Kim Chunbae found exactly what they needed to do.
"Looks like we'll have to teach Byeolbit Foods a lesson for not paying our village development fund."
Kim Chunbae and four middle-aged men from the village slipped into the Tangle farm Byeolbit Foods was cultivating. Today was a harvest day, the kind that came once every two weeks.
The outer fields hadn't been planted with Tangle yet, so Kim Chunbae and his group pushed deep into the farm. They must have walked nearly an hour. To keep the guards from spotting them, they didn't even switch on flashlights, following only the faint farm lights they could make out.
Tangle came into view in the distance. It was the first day of picking, and the fruit still hung in heavy clusters.
They picked their way carefully through the moonless dark. By the time they had taken about ten Tangles, a flashlight beam showed far off. A guard, most likely.
"All right, all right! That's enough—we're heading back!"
Kim Chunbae gathered the villagers and they fled. There was no way anyone could watch a farm this vast all at once. Without so much as a huge fence, how were you supposed to guard this much land?
Village Head Kim Chunbae and the others returned to the village hall, then set the Tangles they had secretly picked down on the floor. At a rough count, there were more than ten.
"Is there somewhere that sells these on the side?"
"Don't even get me started. From what I saw, there are dozens of places screaming that they want to buy."
Black-market routes for buying Tangle were everywhere. There were retailers who sold to people who couldn't get it at a regular store, charging a little extra for the privilege. Maybe it was because Tangle had expanded into the United States, but the volume circulating in Korea was anything but generous.