Chapter 23: Lotte World
Minji’s Lotte World campaign had been relentless.
It started with subtle hints (“I wonder what Lotte World is like this time of year”), escalated to direct requests (“You promised, oppa”), and culminated in a full PowerPoint presentation—printed on three sheets of A4 paper, stapled in the corner, with hand-drawn graphs showing the “Optimal Lotte World Visit Window” based on crowd data she’d found online.
“She gets this from you,” Daniel told his mother.
“She gets the stubbornness from your father.”
“I heard that,” his father called from the living room.
“You were supposed to.”
They went on a Saturday in late December—the last weekend before Christmas, which Minji had identified as “the second-least crowded window after the first week of January, but we can’t wait because I’ll die of anticipation.” The “we” was not just Daniel and Minji. It was the entire Cho family.
The entire Cho family had never gone anywhere together.
Not to a theme park, not to a restaurant, not even to the movies. Daniel’s father considered leisure spending a luxury that came after necessities, and since there were always more necessities, leisure never made the list. The family’s idea of an outing was walking to the Bupyeong market on Sunday mornings, which his father insisted counted as “recreation.”
But Daniel had 18.4 million won in a brokerage account, and his family had earned a day.
“I’m paying,” Daniel announced at the breakfast table. “Tickets, food, rides, everything. Non-negotiable.”
“You can’t pay for everything,” his father said. “I’m the father.”
“You’re the father who taught me how to earn money. Let me use what I learned.”
“That’s manipulation.”
“That’s gratitude.”
“Same thing, different packaging,” his mother said, using Daniel’s own line against him with the precision of a woman who remembered every word her children had ever spoken.
The train to Seoul took an hour and forty minutes. Minji spent the entire ride with her face pressed against the window, watching Incheon dissolve into the grey sprawl of the greater Seoul metropolitan area, as if the scenery were a movie she’d been waiting her whole life to see.
Daniel’s father sat rigidly in his seat, wearing his “outing” clothes—the same white button-down from the bank, a jacket his mother had ironed that morning, shoes that had been polished within an inch of their lives. He looked like a man attending a job interview, not a theme park.
“Relax, Dad.”
“I’m relaxed.”
“You’re sitting at a ninety-degree angle.”
“That’s how chairs are designed to be sat in.”
“Nobody sits at ninety degrees voluntarily. You look like you’re being interrogated.”
“Byungsoo, lean back.” His mother pushed his shoulder gently. “You’re on vacation.”
“I don’t know how to be on vacation. I’ve never been on vacation.”
“That’s the problem. Lean.”
He leaned. Approximately three degrees. His mother sighed.
Lotte World was chaos.
Not the bad kind—the overwhelming, sensory-overload, every-surface-is-sparkling kind. The indoor theme park blazed with lights. Music pounded from every direction. Children screamed with a frequency that suggested either extreme joy or imminent death, and it was impossible to tell which. The air smelled like churros and synthetic fog machine fluid and the specific sweetness of industrial-scale fun.
Minji disappeared into the crowd within thirty seconds of entering, dragging their mother by the hand toward something called the “Gyro Spin” that looked, to Daniel’s forty-two-year-old sensibilities, like a liability lawsuit waiting to happen.
“She’s going to be sick,” his father observed.
“Probably.”
“Should we stop her?”
“Have you ever successfully stopped Minji from doing anything?”
“Good point.”
Daniel and his father stood in the middle of Lotte World’s main atrium—two men who were fundamentally more comfortable in factory floors and brokerage offices than in a theme park—and watched the world spin around them.
“This is loud,” his father said.
“Very.”
“And expensive.”
“Very.”
“And your sister is having the time of her life.”
Daniel looked across the atrium. Minji was in line for the Gyro Spin, bouncing on her toes, talking at their mother with the velocity of a twelve-year-old who had just discovered that happiness could be purchased at thirty-five thousand won per admission.
“Yeah,” Daniel said. “She is.”
His father was quiet. Then he said something that nearly knocked Daniel off his feet.
“Let’s ride something.”
“What?”
“A ride. One of these things.” He gestured vaguely at the chaos around them. “I’ve never been on a ride.”
“You’ve never—”
“Never. Not as a child, not as a teenager, not as an adult. My father couldn’t afford it, and by the time I could, I had a family to support.” He looked at Daniel with an expression that was simultaneously vulnerable and determined. “So. What do you recommend?”
Daniel blinked. Cho Byungsoo, the man who considered fishing his most extreme recreational activity, was asking to ride a roller coaster.
“The Atlantis,” Daniel said. “It’s a water ride. Not too intense, but exciting enough to count.”
“Will I get wet?”
“Probably.”
“I’m wearing my good shirt.”
“Dad, you’re at Lotte World. The shirt can survive some water.”
Cho Byungsoo considered this. Then he nodded, once, with the gravity of a man committing to a military operation. “Atlantis. Let’s go.”
They rode the Atlantis. The drop was five stories, the splash was enormous, and Daniel’s father emerged soaking wet, his good shirt plastered to his chest, his carefully combed hair destroyed, water dripping from his nose—and laughing.
Cho Byungsoo was laughing.
Not a chuckle. Not a suppressed snort. A full, open, unguarded laugh that Daniel had never heard in either of his lives. His father was laughing the way children laugh—without self-consciousness, without restraint, with the pure physical joy of a body doing something it had never done before.
“Again,” his father said.
“Again?”
“That was—” He wiped water from his eyes, still laughing. “That was good. Let’s do it again.”
They rode the Atlantis three times. By the third ride, his father had abandoned any pretense of dignity and was raising his hands during the drop like a teenager, his laughter drowned out by the rush of water and the screams of other riders.
When they found the rest of the family at the churro stand, dripping wet and grinning like idiots, Minji stared at their father like she’d never seen him before.
“Dad rode a ride,” she said, the words coming out as if she were describing a natural impossibility, like the sun rising in the west.
“Three times,” Daniel said.
“Three times?!”
“It was adequate,” his father said, attempting to restore his dignity. But his hair was sticking up at three different angles and there was a wet patch on his left sock, and dignity was not in the cards.
His mother handed him a churro and a napkin. “You look like you fell in the Han River.”
“I fell in the Atlantis. Different thing.”
“Equally undignified.”
“Dignity is overrated.” He bit the churro. “This is good. How much?”
“Don’t ask how much. Today is free.”
“Nothing is free, Soonyoung.”
“Today is. Daniel said so.”
They stayed until closing.
They rode every ride that Minji wanted to ride, which was all of them. They ate hotdogs and tteokbokki and ice cream that cost four times what it should and was worth every won. They watched the evening parade—floats and dancers and music so loud it vibrated in your chest—and Minji sat on their father’s shoulders for the first time since she was four, because twelve was apparently not too old for shoulder-sitting when the floats were this pretty.
Daniel’s mother took photos on the family’s one digital camera—a cheap Samsung point-and-shoot that produced blurry, slightly orange images that would sit in a drawer for years and become, with time, the most valuable things the family owned.
“Smile,” she said, aiming the camera at Daniel and his father. They were standing in front of the illuminated castle, still slightly damp from the Atlantis, churro crumbs on their jackets.
Daniel smiled. His father attempted to smile, which resulted in an expression that was halfway between “mildly amused” and “enduring a dental procedure.” It was perfect.
On the train home, Minji fell asleep against their mother’s shoulder within five minutes. Their father was asleep within ten—genuinely asleep, not the light doze of a man who never fully relaxed, but deep, unconscious sleep, his mouth slightly open, his face completely slack.
Daniel sat across from them, watching his family sleep, and felt a wave of emotion so intense it was almost physical. Not happiness—something beyond happiness. The feeling of holding something precious that you know is fragile, and choosing to hold it anyway, tightly, with both hands.
In my first life, I never took them anywhere. Not once. I sent money. I bought my mother a washing machine. I bought my father a house. But I never sat on a train with them, never watched them sleep, never heard my father laugh on a water ride.
You can’t buy back time with money. But you can buy a day at Lotte World. And sometimes, that’s enough.
He leaned his head against the window. The city lights streamed past—Seoul dissolving into suburbs, suburbs into Incheon, Incheon into Bupyeong. The familiar landscape of his childhood, seen from a train window, moving backward the way memory does: too fast to hold, too beautiful to forget.
His phone buzzed. A text from Minho.
“How was Lotte World?“
“My dad rode a water ride three times and laughed.“
“Your dad? Cho Byungsoo? The man who considers smiling a form of exercise?“
“That’s the one.“
“I need photographic evidence.“
“Mom took photos. They’re blurry but real.“
“Best day ever?“
Daniel looked at his sleeping family—his father’s slack face, his mother’s arm around Minji, the cheap camera on the seat between them.
“Best day ever.“
The train pulled into Bupyeong Station at 10:47 PM. Daniel woke his family—gently, one at a time—and they walked home through the cold December night, Minji half-asleep on their father’s back, their mother humming a trot song, the lights of the apartment building growing closer with each step.
Home. The word had never meant more.