Chapter 13: The Waiting Game
February was the longest month of Daniel Cho’s two lives.
Not because anything dramatic happened—it didn’t. February 2009 was a month of slow, grinding decline. The KOSPI drifted between 1,050 and 1,100, occasionally dropping to 1,020 on particularly bad days, then recovering just enough to make people think the worst was over before dropping again. It was like watching a boxer get hit, stand up, get hit, stand up, get hit.
Daniel watched the numbers every day. In the library, on the school’s ancient computer lab machines, on his phone during lunch when he thought no one was looking. He tracked the S&P 500 at night, converting time zones in his head, calculating how the American close would affect the Korean open.
He knew the bottom was coming. March 9th. He knew this with the bone-deep certainty of a man who had already lived through it. But knowing and waiting were different things, and the waiting was excruciating.
“You’re going to wear a hole in that phone screen,” Soyeon said during one of their Tuesday sessions. She’d caught him checking the market under the table for the third time in twenty minutes. “The numbers aren’t going to change faster because you stare at them.”
“I know.”
“Then put it away.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Both.” Daniel pocketed the phone with visible reluctance. “It’s like knowing exactly when a train is going to arrive but having to stand on the platform for two months.”
“Most people don’t know when the train arrives. Most people just hope it does.”
“That’s the difference between most people and me.”
Soyeon’s pen paused. “That’s the most arrogant thing you’ve ever said.”
“It’s not arrogance. It’s—” Daniel stopped. It’s time travel. It’s literally knowing the future because I’ve already seen it. But I can’t say that, so it sounds like arrogance. “It’s confidence based on research.”
“Confidence based on research looks like a spreadsheet. Confidence based on certainty looks like something else.” She tapped her pen three times. “You’re sure. Not ‘I think this will happen’ sure. You’re ‘I know this will happen’ sure. And that scares me.”
“Why?”
“Because nobody should be that certain about the future. The future is probabilistic, not deterministic. Even the best models have confidence intervals.”
Except when you’ve already lived through it.
“Okay,” Daniel said. “You’re right. I’m ninety-five percent confident. Five percent uncertainty. Happy?”
“Three percent would be more realistic.”
“Ninety-seven percent confident, then.”
“That’s—that’s not how confidence intervals—” Soyeon closed her eyes. “You’re impossible.”
“So I’ve been told.”
While Daniel waited for March, life continued.
His tutoring business had expanded to ten students—the maximum he could handle while maintaining his grades (B+ average, per the deal with his father) and his sanity (debatable). Word had spread through the Bupyeong parent network that there was a high school student who taught better than the hagwons at half the price, and Daniel had started turning away new clients.
“You should raise your prices,” Minho said. They were at the PC bang—Daniel’s weekly concession to normalcy, two hours of StarCraft every Saturday afternoon. “Supply and demand. If you have more clients than you can handle, the price goes up.”
“I’m not going to charge more when families are struggling.” Daniel’s Terran marines were advancing across the map, which was approximately seventy percent of his attention. The other thirty percent was having this conversation. “The whole point of charging less than hagwon is to be accessible.”
“The whole point of a business is to make money.”
“The whole point of my business is to make money and not be an asshole about it.”
Minho’s Zerg rush crashed into Daniel’s defense line. On the screen, tiny digital soldiers died in satisfying pixelated explosions. In the real world, Minho was frowning at Daniel with the expression of someone who’d just been told something that didn’t compute.
“You know,” Minho said slowly, “most people who are good at making money don’t have moral qualms about it.”
“Most people who are good at making money end up alone in a corner office wondering where their friends went.”
The words came out sharper than Daniel intended. For a moment, the PC bang noise—clicking keyboards, shouted insults, the hum of sixty overworked computers—seemed to recede. Minho looked at him with an expression that Daniel couldn’t quite read.
“That’s oddly specific,” Minho said.
“Is it?”
“It sounds like you’re talking about a real person.”
I am. I’m talking about me. The first version of me. The one who sat in that corner office and drank whiskey from a bottle you gave me while my company died.
“It’s a hypothetical,” Daniel said. “Are we playing or are we talking?”
“We can do both. I’m multitalented.” Minho’s Zerg overwhelmed Daniel’s left flank. “But fine. Keep your prices low. Be the ethical capitalist. Just don’t complain when you’re sixty and still living in Bupyeong.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Bupyeong.”
“There’s nothing exciting about Bupyeong. There’s a difference.”
Daniel’s base fell. GG. He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. The PC bang was giving him a headache—or maybe it was the conversation. Or maybe it was the thirty days remaining until March 9th, ticking down like a bomb that only he could hear.
“Rematch?” Minho asked.
“Rematch.”
They played. Minho won three out of five, which was unusual—Daniel was typically the better player, or at least had been in their first life. But his mind kept drifting to numbers. KOSPI at 1,063 as of Friday close. S&P 500 at 735. Both falling. Both approaching the point where he would need to act.
“You’re distracted,” Minho said after the fifth game.
“Yeah.”
“The market?”
“The market.”
“Daniel.” Minho shut down his computer and turned to face him. “Can I tell you something? As your friend?”
“Go ahead.”
“You’ve become obsessed. Not in a fun way—in the way that makes people around you worried. You don’t eat unless someone reminds you. You check your phone during conversations. Your eyes get this faraway look, like you’re doing math in your head while someone is talking to you.”
“I don’t—”
“You’re doing it right now.”
Daniel realized, with a start, that he had been calculating the percentage decline needed for the KOSPI to reach his target buy price. While Minho was talking to him. About being obsessed.
“Shit,” Daniel said.
“Yeah. Shit.” Minho’s voice was gentle, which was worse than if he’d been angry. “Look, I’m with you on the investment thing. I believe you. But you’re seventeen years old, man. You’ve got one shot at being seventeen, and you’re spending it staring at stock tickers.”
I’ve already had my shot at being seventeen. I wasted it on StarCraft and girls and not paying attention in class, and twenty-five years later I died alone. So forgive me if I’m not interested in doing it the normal way.
But Minho didn’t know that. Minho saw a friend who was losing himself in numbers, and he was doing what good friends do: pulling him back.
“You’re right,” Daniel said. And meant it. “I’ll ease up.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’ll try to ease up.”
“Better. Slightly.” Minho stood and stretched. “Come on. Let’s get tteokbokki. My treat. And you’re not allowed to calculate the profit margin of the tteokbokki cart.”
“Approximately 340 percent.”
“I literally just said—”
“Sorry. Reflex.”
They left the PC bang and walked to the tteokbokki cart near Bupyeong Station—the one run by a grandmother who’d been there since before either of them was born, whose recipe was a state secret and whose rice cakes were so spicy they required a liability waiver.
They ate standing up, sharing a paper cup of tteokbokki so hot it made their eyes water, while the February evening darkened around them and the streetlights came on one by one.
“Minho,” Daniel said.
“Hmm?”
“Thanks for telling me.”
“Telling you what?”
“That I’m being obsessive. Other people would just let me spiral.”
Minho shrugged. “Other people aren’t your best friend. It’s literally my job to tell you when you’re being an idiot. It’s in the contract.”
“We don’t have a contract.”
“It’s an implied contract. Section 3, paragraph 7: ‘Minho reserves the right to call Daniel an idiot when warranted.'”
“That’s a very specific paragraph.”
“I’m a very specific person.”
They finished the tteokbokki. The grandmother refilled their cup without being asked, because some vendors operated not on profit margins but on the principle that two skinny boys in the cold needed more food.
“Twenty-eight days,” Daniel said, staring at the dark sky.
“Until the bottom?”
“Until the bottom.”
“And then?”
“And then we find out if I’m right.”
“You’re right.” Minho said it simply, without fanfare, the way you’d state a fact. “I don’t know how or why, but you’re right. You’ve been right about everything so far.”
“That doesn’t scare you?”
“Honestly?” Minho tossed his empty cup into the trash can from six feet away. It went in clean. “Yeah. A little. But being scared of the future is just being alive, right? The question is what you do with it.”
What you do with it.
They walked home in opposite directions at the Bupyeong intersection—Minho toward the nicer apartments on the hill, Daniel toward the concrete blocks near the station. Before they split, Minho turned back.
“Hey, Daniel?”
“Yeah?”
“When this is over—when you’ve made your investment and the world hasn’t ended—let’s go on a trip. Somewhere. Anywhere. Just us and Soyeon and whoever else. A normal trip. Like normal teenagers.”
“I’d like that.”
“Cool.” Minho gave a two-finger salute—his signature goodbye. “See you Monday, Mr. Stock Market.”
“See you Monday, Mr. Three Hundred Percent Profit Margin.”
“I said DON’T calculate it!”
Daniel walked home, smiling. The cold didn’t bother him. The weight didn’t feel as heavy. And for a few minutes, the numbers in his head were quiet, replaced by the taste of tteokbokki and the sound of a friend’s laugh echoing down a darkened street.
Twenty-eight days.
He was ready. Or as ready as anyone could be to bet everything on a future that only he could see.