Let's Sell Beef to America
I stared at the scraps of balloon on my desk. With no air in them yet, they looked small and pathetic.
They called these magic balloons, and it had been ages since I'd last seen one. I was pretty sure the last time had been in kindergarten, before I even started elementary school. All I remembered was someone with a clown's face twisting them into every kind of animal.
And so long as you didn't handle them in some truly bizarre way, they didn't pop easily. Acts that would have destroyed an ordinary balloon, a magic balloon had the durability to shrug off. Jab it with something sharp, like a needle, and it would burst—but that was about it.
"All right, everyone! Today we're going to make rabbits out of balloons!"
The teacher walked us through the method with practiced ease. Making a rabbit wasn't particularly hard. Four or five steps, more or less, and you had one. She put a video of the process up on the projector and set it to loop, then went on.
"I'll be walking around to help, so if there's anything you don't understand, raise your hand and ask! All right—begin!"
At her starting call, the kids busily set to work. Watching them, I got ready to make a rabbit of my own. I picked up the hand pump and started forcing air into the balloon. The moment it entered that straw-thin tube, the volume shot up—it must have grown hundreds of times larger. That it could swell like that without popping was honestly amazing. Rubber really was an incredible material.
Patter-patter-patter!
Jiyu and Yumi came over to my side as if it were the most natural thing in the world. When we did hands-on work like this, shoving our desks together and playing as a group was basically an unwritten law, and the other students were clustered with their friends too. I spoke while I kept filling the balloon.
"They say it's super easy. Want to see how many we can crank out?"
"Oh yeah? Think you'll even manage one rabbit today?"
"I'm voting that you can't!"
Jiyu and Yumi seemed to be underestimating me far too much. I knew I was weak at this sort of thing, true enough. Strangely, though, anything to do with studying was fine—I already had the knowledge stored up, so I could solve the problems without trouble. Even Korean, my old weak subject, was now at a respectable level, and the other subjects went without saying. Decades of hard-won inner arts didn't vanish that easily. Not unless someone struck a pressure point and sealed them off.
But when it came to creative work I had to do with my hands, my body refused to move the way I wanted. I was acting as if fog had settled over my brain. I'd managed to get air into the balloon, and yet I couldn't get my hands to take the next step. The teacher had explained it kindly, and even now the video on the projector was diligently walking through the whole process.
I made up my mind to do my very best and make that rabbit.
"Waaah!"
I clutched the balloon and despaired. It simply would not come out the way I wanted. Jiyu and Yumi had already each produced a rabbit. I was the only one left holding a scrap of balloon, and at the sight of me they came over as if they had no choice.
"Hana's good at studying, but she's hopeless at stuff like this."
"The gods are fair!"
I listened to their kind explanations and set my hands moving again, determined to make the rabbit.
"I told you, you have to twist it here!"
"Ah! That's not a rabbit—that's a snake!"
"You have to make it like this!"
Thanks to a two-on-one tutoring session—one student, two teachers—I finally succeeded in making a rabbit. Jiyu and Yumi had practically spoon-fed me the whole thing. If it hadn't been for their kind, painstaking explanations, I'd still have been standing there fretting over a scrap of balloon. That was how hard it was to make, even if the two of them made it look simple.
Yumi even produced animals other than rabbits. She'd looked up the method on her phone and made them herself.
Watching her, I could only stare in shock. I still couldn't make anything but a rabbit!
Layla was thoroughly put off by the change in her boss. Back when he'd been bald, he'd been sharp as a blade and prickly about his work; ever since his hair had grown in, he'd turned benevolent.
If he'd been gentle from the start, that would have been one thing. Watching someone who had never lived that way transform overnight was unsettling. She was beginning to understand why people said the hairless were aggressive. That said, the only work that drew out his benevolence was anything involving Starlight Food. His other duties had softened compared to before, but the edge and the prickliness remained.
It was true, though, that the prickliness and the sensitivity had lessened. Being a woman, Layla had no way of knowing how fatal and grueling hair loss was for a man.
Some things you only understood by living through them. No matter how handsome and impressive a man was, without a full head of hair he looked ugly and shabby. You needed a genuinely handsome skull and a manly face just to break even. Hair loss was that fatal, that vicious a disease for men. There was a reason they shelled out hundreds of dollars a month on hair-loss medication.
"I wonder what Starlight Food called us in for today."
"What else could it be? They're going to talk about Tangle, aren't they?"
"I just hope the supply has gone up."
In America, Tangle was such a hot item they couldn't keep it on the shelves. When it first launched, some people had insisted it was a scam. The prevailing view was that even in an age when every disease and every cancer could be cured, a cure for hair loss would never appear.
And no American was about to believe that a fruit good for hair loss had come out of some far-off backwater of a country. They figured it was an ordinary fraud—the sort of multilevel scam that whipped up rumors, raked in the money, and then vanished.
But once proof photos started going up of people genuinely certifying that their hair loss had been cured, it began selling like wildfire. One rich man living in a mansion had bought a hundred million won's worth of Tangle—some seventy thousand dollars—fully resolved to eat it until the day he died. Tangle did have a shelf life, though, so eating it until death was a stretch.
Kept out of direct sunlight, that shelf life was long enough to stretch several years, but stockpiling it to last until you died was impossible.
At any rate, people had once had to stand in line at Walmart just to buy it. A certain amount of stock had been released by now, of course, so the lines were no longer as long as they used to be. James walked into the chairman's office at Starlight Food with his heart swelling. She was the benefactor who had cured his hair loss, and coming to see her in person was only proper courtesy.
Look at the scale of the company, the scale of its sales, and everything else, and Kim Sehee ought to have been the one coming to Walmart in America—but that much consideration was basic. James found himself curious what sort of proposal she might make.
"We'd like to distribute beef through Walmart."
"B-beef, you say?"
James was thrown by a proposal he hadn't seen coming. He'd naturally assumed it would be Tangle, or some food related to it; beef appearing out of nowhere was something he hadn't dreamed of. Starlight Food was famous for food, yes, but it was all fruit and vegetables. They were not a company that produced meat.
And yet today's proposal from Kim Sehee was unmistakably a declaration that Starlight Food meant to enter the meat market as well. Beef, alongside pork and chicken, was one of the largest meat markets in the world.
It would not be easy. For one thing, the cost of raising beef cattle differed enormously. America possessed farmland on a scale that felt like cheating. The crops that came out of it were staggering, and feed was vastly cheaper than in Korea.
The land for raising cattle was far broader, and far cheaper, too. From the costs alone, there was no contest. And beef raised in Korea had a richness that struck American palates as heavy. No matter how well you raised the cattle, meat was bound to differ from country to country.
"Walmart will support you with everything we have."
All in all, Kim Sehee and James were talking in a warm, easy atmosphere. Beside them, listening in, Layla's expression was anything but good. She wanted to rein her boss in, but he was charging ahead as if he'd lost the brakes.
If Walmart took on the distribution, swallowing an enormous loss would be unavoidable. Had her boss gone blind with gratitude for Tangle and decided to betray his own country's company? She had to put a stop to this absurd contract.
Midway through his talk with Kim Sehee, James stepped outside for a moment with Layla. He'd said he needed to contact headquarters.