Chapter 69: Minji’s CSAT
Cho Minji took the CSAT on a Thursday in November 2015, and the entire Cho family mobilized as if the fate of the nation depended on a nineteen-year-old girl with braids and a mechanical pencil.
Daniel’s mother began preparations three weeks in advance. Miyeokguk stock was sourced from a specific vendor in Jagalchi Market (“The seaweed from Bupyeong isn’t the same quality—Jagalchi seaweed has more minerals”). The household schedule was reorganized around Minji’s study times—no television after 9 PM, no cooking that generated strong smells during study hours, no conversations above a whisper within a ten-meter radius of Minji’s room.
“Mom, I can study with noise,” Minji protested. “I’ve been studying with noise my entire life. Our old apartment had walls made of paper.”
“The Songdo house has real walls. We should use them.” Her mother lowered her voice to demonstrate. “Like this. Whisper volume.”
“You’re whispering like a spy in a drama. It’s more distracting than normal talking.”
“Just study, Minji.”
Daniel’s father contributed to the preparation by doing exactly what he’d done when Daniel took the CSAT seven years earlier: existing in the house with a specific aura of contained concern that manifested as extra-careful newspaper-folding, unnecessarily precise jade-tree-watering, and the occasional sentence of advice delivered with the timing and force of a proverb.
“Trust your preparation,” he told Minji on the morning of the exam. The same words he’d said to Daniel. The same white-shirt, factory-worker gravitas. The Cho family CSAT blessing, passed from father to children like an inheritance.
“Thanks, Dad.” Minji hugged him. Minji, unlike Daniel, hugged freely and often—she had inherited her mother’s physical expressiveness along with her father’s intellectual stubbornness, creating a personality that was equal parts warmth and steel.
Daniel’s contribution was more specific: he’d been tutoring Minji for five years, since the night she’d failed her math exam at twelve and demanded he teach her. The tutoring had evolved from “help me understand quadratic equations” to “help me understand everything, including why the education system is designed to reward compliance over creativity, which is a conversation we’re having whether you want to or not.”
“You’re overthinking the Korean Literature section,” Daniel told her during their final review session, three days before the exam. They were at the Songdo house’s kitchen table—the same table where he’d eaten his mother’s jjigae on the first night of his second life, which seemed fitting for a conversation about beginnings.
“I’m not overthinking. I’m analyzing.”
“You’re analyzing with the intensity of someone trying to decode the meaning of life from a poem about autumn leaves.”
“The poem about autumn leaves IS about the meaning of life. That’s the point of poetry.”
“The point of the CSAT’s poetry section is to identify the correct answer from four options. The meaning of life is not one of the options.”
“It should be.”
“Take that up with the College Board after you’ve passed.” He pointed at the practice exam. “Question 12. The poet’s use of enjambment in the second stanza suggests what?”
“That the poet was too lazy to punctuate properly.”
“Minji.”
“Fine. It suggests ‘the continuation of thought beyond conventional boundaries, reflecting the poet’s desire for freedom from structural constraints.'” She recited from memory. “Answer C.”
“Correct.”
“I knew it was correct. I’ve known it was correct for three months. The problem isn’t that I don’t know the answers. The problem is that I know the answers AND I know they’re oversimplified, and the oversimplification makes me want to scream.”
“Scream after the exam. For now, comply.”
“You sound like Soyeon unni.”
“Soyeon taught me that. She also got a 99th percentile score, so maybe compliance has value.”
“Compliance has strategic value. It doesn’t have moral value.” Minji closed the practice book. “Oppa, I’m going to get into SNU. Not because of the tutoring or the practice tests or the system. Because I’m good enough.”
“I know you are.”
“Not ‘I know’ with the confidence of a regressor who’s seen the future. ‘I know’ with the confidence of a brother who’s watched me study for five years.”
Daniel smiled. Since the debrief, Minji had been using the word “regressor” with the casual familiarity of someone who had accepted an extraordinary fact and immediately begun incorporating it into her vocabulary, her worldview, and her arsenal of sibling teasing materials.
“I know because I’ve watched you study for five years,” he said. “The regression has nothing to do with it.”
“Good. Because I want to earn this myself. No future knowledge. No statistical advantages. Just me.”
“Just you is more than enough.”
The exam day was identical to Daniel’s, seven years earlier, in the specific ways that Korean CSAT days are always identical: the reorganized traffic, the police escorts, the rerouted flights, the entire country holding its breath for nine hours while 600,000 teenagers decided their futures with number-two pencils.
Daniel drove Minji to the testing center. Not his father—Daniel. Because his father’s hands, though steady enough for fishing and jade-tree-watering, shook slightly on exam mornings, and Cho Byungsoo’s pride would not allow his daughter to see his hands shake.
“You’re driving slowly,” Minji observed from the passenger seat. She was wearing her school uniform—pressed, precise, the tie actually tied for once—and carrying a clear plastic bag of pencils, erasers, and the kind of organized readiness that would have made Soyeon proud.
“I’m driving the speed limit.”
“You’re driving ten under the speed limit. The speed limit is already slow. You’re driving at grandmother speed.”
“I’m driving at safe-delivery-of-precious-cargo speed.”
“Don’t be sentimental. It’s distracting.”
“I’m your brother. I get to be sentimental.”
“You get to be on time. Which, at grandmother speed, is questionable.”
They arrived early. The testing center was Minji’s high school—a different school from Daniel’s, in Songdo rather than Bupyeong, because the family had moved. But the atmosphere was the same: nervous students, anxious parents, the specific electricity of a day that mattered more than it should.
Daniel walked Minji to the gate. She stopped at the entrance and turned to face him. Nineteen years old. Taller than their mother. Sharper than their father. The girl who had failed a math exam at twelve and had spent the next seven years making sure she would never fail again.
“Oppa.”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For the tutoring. For the math. For explaining compound interest when I was twelve and it changed how I thought about everything.” She paused. “For being weird and mysterious and a time traveler and still, somehow, the best brother I could have.”
“Minji—”
“Don’t cry. You’ll ruin my pre-exam emotional calibration.” She punched his arm—the same gesture from childhood, harder now because she was stronger. “I’ll see you at 6 PM. Bring tteokbokki.”
“From the cart in Bupyeong?”
“From anywhere. I’ll be hungry enough to eat the cart itself.”
She walked into the school. Daniel watched her go—straight-backed, steady, the Cho posture that their father had modeled for thirty-one years at the factory and that both his children had inherited without being taught.
He drove to the Nexus office. Worked for nine hours. Didn’t check his phone once, because checking wouldn’t change anything and because trust meant letting people face their own tests without hovering.
At 6 PM, he picked her up. She climbed into the car, dropped her plastic bag of pencils on the floor, and said, “I nailed it.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I knew every answer. Not guessed—knew. The Literature section was about autumn leaves and freedom from structural constraints, and I almost wrote a sidebar about the philosophical limitations of standardized testing, but I restrained myself because you told me to comply.”
“I’m proud of you.”
“Save the pride for the score release. Where’s the tteokbokki?”
“In the back seat. From the cart in Bupyeong.”
“You drove to Bupyeong? That’s forty minutes each way.”
“The grandmother asked about you. She says you used to come with Minho oppa and eat three cups. She remembered.”
Minji reached into the back seat, grabbed the tteokbokki, and ate it with the velocity of a nineteen-year-old who had just survived nine hours of testing and hadn’t eaten since the miyeokguk at 5 AM. The rice cakes were still warm. The spice was still ferocious. Some things didn’t change, even when everything else did.
“Oppa?” Minji said, mouth full, spice-tears in her eyes.
“Yeah?”
“SNU. Law. Like Soyeon unni. That’s where I’m going.”
“I know.”
“Not ‘I know’ from the future. ‘I know’ from you knowing me.”
“I know from knowing you.”
“Good.”
She ate the rest of the tteokbokki. He drove home. Their mother was waiting with galbi. Their father was in his chair with a beer and the expression of a man who had spent nine hours not checking his phone through sheer force of will.
“How was it?” their father asked.
“She nailed it,” Daniel said.
“I nailed it,” Minji confirmed.
“Hmm.” The assessment noise. But this time, it was accompanied by the almost-smile. The Cho seal of approval. “Good.”
They ate galbi. The jade tree grew outside. The evening settled into the specific warmth of a family that had just survived another test and was stronger for it.
Minji’s CSAT score, released in December, was 98th percentile. Higher than Daniel’s. She would mention this at every family dinner for the rest of her life.