Chapter 11: New Year
Cho Byungsoo cried on New Year’s Eve, and Daniel was the only one who saw it.
It happened at 11:47 PM, thirteen minutes before midnight, in the narrow balcony of apartment 302. Daniel had gone out to get some air—the apartment was stuffy with the heat of four people, two pots of tteokguk simmering on the stove, and the television blaring a year-end music show that Minji was watching with the intensity usually reserved for national emergencies.
His father was already there. Standing at the railing, hands wrapped around a can of beer, staring out at the Bupyeong skyline. From five stories up, the neighborhood looked almost beautiful—strings of lights from the convenience stores, the distant glow of the Incheon Bridge, the occasional crack-pop of early fireworks from kids who couldn’t wait until midnight.
Daniel was about to go back inside when he heard it. A sound so small it was almost nothing—a catch in his father’s breathing. A wet, struggling inhale. The sound of a man who had spent his entire life not crying, trying very hard not to cry now.
He froze in the doorway.
His father’s shoulders were shaking. Just barely—a tremor that could have been mistaken for the cold if Daniel didn’t know better. One hand was pressed against his face. The beer can sat forgotten on the railing, condensation dripping like tears of its own.
Oh, Dad.
Daniel knew why. He knew it without asking, the way you know the weather by looking at the sky. The factory had announced more cuts last week. Three-day weeks were becoming two-day weeks for some shifts. The union negotiations had stalled. His father’s coworker—Kim Taecheol, the man who’d worked the press next to him for eighteen years—had been offered an early retirement package that was really just a polite way of saying please leave.
Cho Byungsoo was forty-five years old. He had a wife, two children, a mortgage that was still six years from being paid off, and a job that was slowly dissolving beneath his feet like sugar in water. He had never asked anyone for help. He had never complained. He had gone to work and come home and put money in the bank and told his family that everything was fine, because that was what fathers did.
And now, at 11:47 PM on New Year’s Eve, with his family warm and alive on the other side of a thin wall, he was crying alone on a balcony because there was nowhere else to do it.
Daniel had two choices. Go back inside and pretend he hadn’t seen. Or stay.
He stayed.
He walked to the railing and stood next to his father. Not touching. Not speaking. Just there.
His father stiffened. The crying stopped—or rather, was shoved back inside with the brute force of a man who considered visible emotion a structural failure. He wiped his face with the back of his hand, a rough, angry gesture.
“Go inside, Daniel.”
“No.”
“I said go inside.”
“And I said no.”
They stood side by side at the railing. Below them, a group of teenagers ran past, laughing, carrying sparklers that drew bright lines in the dark. From a neighboring apartment, someone was singing “Arirang” badly and with great enthusiasm.
“I’m fine,” his father said.
“I know.”
“It’s just the cold.”
“I know, Dad.”
“The cold makes your eyes water.”
“Yeah. It does that.”
More silence. But different now—not the silence of avoidance, but the silence of two people standing in the same dark place together.
“They offered Taecheol the package,” his father said. His voice was steady now, controlled, but thin at the edges. Like a sheet of ice that looks solid until you step on it. “Thirty years. Thirty years at that factory and they’re offering him nine months’ severance and a handshake.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Fair.” His father laughed—a short, bitter sound. “Fair is for children and courtrooms. The factory doesn’t care about fair. It cares about numbers. And right now, the numbers say Taecheol costs more than he produces.”
“Are they going to offer you the package?”
The question hung in the air. Daniel already knew the answer. In his first life, his father had been offered early retirement in 2010—not 2009—after the crisis was technically over but the aftershocks were still rolling. He’d refused, worked another nine years, and died of a heart attack at his station on a Tuesday morning in April 2019.
But this was a different timeline. The crisis might hit differently. The factory might make different decisions.
“I don’t know,” his father said. “My seniority should protect me. But seniority means I’m also more expensive.”
“If they do offer it… what would you do?”
“What would I do?” His father stared at the skyline as if the answer might be written in the lights. “I’d take it. Not because I want to. Because a man who waits to be pushed falls harder than a man who jumps.”
Daniel turned to face his father. In the dim light of the balcony, Cho Byungsoo looked both older and younger than his forty-five years—the lines on his face were deeper, but there was something in his eyes that Daniel recognized from his own mirror. Fear. Not of poverty or unemployment, but of failing the people who depended on him.
“Dad. I have three point two million won saved.”
“I know.”
“In March, I’m going to invest it. All of it. And by the end of the year, if the market recovers the way I believe it will, it could be ten million. Maybe more.”
“Daniel—”
“I’m not asking you to believe in the stock market. I’m asking you to believe in me.” He paused. “I know I’m seventeen. I know this shouldn’t make sense. But you wrote down my predictions. You checked them. I’ve been right every time.”
His father was quiet. A firework exploded somewhere over the harbor—a premature burst of gold and red, followed by cheers from the teenagers below.
“You’re asking a man who’s losing his grip to trust a boy who shouldn’t know what he knows,” his father said.
“Yes.”
“That’s a lot to ask.”
“I know.”
His father picked up the forgotten beer can. It had gone warm. He drank it anyway.
“Your grandfather,” he said, “trusted a smiling man with a good pitch. And lost everything.”
“I’m not a smiling man with a pitch. I’m your son.”
“That’s why it scares me more.”
The clock inside was counting down. Daniel could hear Minji shouting “Ten! Nine! Eight!” along with the television. His mother’s voice joined in at “Five!” The apartment vibrated with the countdown of a family that didn’t know it was standing at the edge of something.
“Happy New Year,” his father said, not at midnight, but a few seconds before—quietly, privately, to the son standing next to him in the dark.
“Happy New Year, Dad.”
Fireworks erupted across Bupyeong. Cascading gold and silver over the rooftops, car horns honking, dogs barking, the entire neighborhood erupting in noise. Through the balcony door, Daniel could see his mother hugging Minji. The tteokguk was steaming on the table. The television was showing celebrations in Seoul.
“I’ll open the account,” his father said, so quietly that Daniel almost missed it under the fireworks. “Monday. We’ll go to the bank together.”
Daniel didn’t hug his father. The Cho men didn’t hug. They stood side by side and watched the fireworks and said nothing, and the nothing they said contained everything that mattered.
“Thank you,” Daniel whispered.
“Don’t thank me. Show me. That’s all I ask.”
“I will.”
His mother appeared in the doorway. “Are you two going to stand out there all night? The tteokguk is ready and Minji already ate half of it.”
“I did NOT!” Minji’s voice from inside.
“You did too! I counted the rice cakes!”
Daniel’s father took one last look at the fireworks—the trails of light dissolving into smoke, one year ending and another beginning—and turned toward the warm kitchen.
“Coming,” he said.
They went inside. They ate tteokguk—the traditional New Year’s soup, with its sliced rice cakes that meant you were now one year older. Minji complained that the rice cakes were too soft. Their mother said they were perfect. Their father ate three bowls and said nothing, which was his way of agreeing with their mother.
It was the first New Year’s Eve that Daniel had spent with his family in twenty years. In his first life, he’d spent the last ten at corporate parties or alone in his office, watching the fireworks from forty-two floors up, a glass of champagne in one hand and a phone full of unread messages in the other.
This was better. Incomparably, immeasurably better.
At 1 AM, Minji fell asleep on the couch. Their father carried her to her room—an act of physical tenderness that he performed with the careful awkwardness of a man who expressed love through actions because he didn’t trust words. Their mother cleaned the kitchen, humming the same trot song she always hummed.
Daniel sat in his room and opened his notebook.
January 1, 2009.
Savings: 3,200,000 won
Account opening: Monday, January 5
Market bottom: approximately March 9
Days remaining: 67
Dad said yes.
He stared at those three words. Then he added one more line:
Dad cried on the balcony tonight. I don’t think he’s cried in twenty years. I’m going to make sure he never has to cry about money again.
He closed the notebook, turned off the light, and lay in the dark. Through the thin walls, he could hear his parents talking in their room—low, murmured voices, the words indistinct but the tone clear. Planning. Worrying. Hoping.
Sixty-seven days.
Outside, the last fireworks faded to smoke, and the new year began.