Chapter 8: The Cracks
October arrived like a slow-motion car wreck.
The KOSPI dropped nine percent in the first week. Then another seven. The news anchors stopped trying to sound calm and started using words like “unprecedented” and “crisis,” which Daniel knew from experience were the financial media’s way of saying we have no idea what’s happening and neither does anyone else.
At Hana High School, the effects were subtle at first. Jeonghyun stopped buying lunch from the cafeteria and started bringing rice from home in a dented metal container. Taewoo mentioned, with studied casualness, that his family was “cutting back on extras,” which meant his art supplies budget had been eliminated. One morning, Daniel overheard two teachers in the hallway discussing whether the school’s winter heating budget would be cut.
The world was getting colder, in every sense.
“My dad’s working half-shifts now,” Minho said one afternoon. They were at their usual bench near Bupyeong Station, where Daniel had taken to doing his Gmarket accounting after school. “The accounting firm lost three clients last week. Small businesses that went under.”
“Three in one week?”
“A restaurant in Namdong-gu. A printing company. And a hagwon.” Minho’s jaw tightened. “The hagwon had forty students. Now those kids have nowhere to go.”
Daniel looked at his friend. There was something in Minho’s voice that he hadn’t heard before—not fear, exactly, but the beginning of understanding. The understanding that money wasn’t abstract. That when a business failed, it wasn’t just numbers on a spreadsheet. It was forty kids without a place to learn. It was a restaurant owner who’d spent twenty years building something that evaporated in a week.
“It’s going to get worse,” Daniel said quietly.
“I know.” Minho pulled his hoodie tighter. The afternoon was grey, the kind of Korean autumn day where the sky looks like it’s been painted with dirty water. “How much worse?”
“The KOSPI will probably drop another twenty to twenty-five percent before it bottoms out. March, maybe. The global markets will follow the same pattern.”
“You keep saying things like that. Like you’re reading from a script.”
“I’m reading from the data.”
“Nobody our age reads ‘data’ about the stock market.” Minho turned to face him. “Daniel. I’m serious. How do you know all this? And don’t say the internet. Don’t say YouTube. Give me a real answer.”
The bench was cold under Daniel’s legs. A bus pulled up to the stop, disgorged a handful of passengers, and pulled away again. An elderly woman with a shopping cart rattled past, the wheels catching on the uneven pavement.
“When I was younger,” Daniel said carefully, choosing each word like stepping stones across a river, “I went through a really bad experience. Someone I trusted took everything from me. And after that, I promised myself I would never be caught off guard again. So I started studying. Finance, economics, market patterns. Not because I’m a genius—I’m not. But because I’m scared of not knowing.”
It was the most honest lie he’d ever told. Every word was true, just rearranged in time.
Minho studied him for a long moment. “Someone took everything from you? When you were younger?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
You happened. You smiled at me across a conference table for fifteen years while you hollowed out my company like termites in a wooden house. You took my money, my trust, my ability to believe in anyone. And then you disappeared, and I was left with nothing but bankruptcy papers and a bottle of expensive whiskey.
“It was a family thing,” Daniel said. “I’d rather not get into the details.”
Minho nodded slowly. He didn’t push. That was one of Minho’s gifts—knowing when to press and when to back off. In Daniel’s first life, he’d used that instinct to manipulate people. Here, at seventeen, it just made him a good friend.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Minho said.
“It was a long time ago.”
“You’re seventeen. How long ago could it have been?”
About twenty-five years, give or take a lifetime.
“Long enough,” Daniel said. “Anyway. The point is, I study this stuff because I have to. And what I’m seeing right now is an opportunity. A once-in-a-generation opportunity. When the market hits bottom—and it will—everything is going to be on sale. Samsung. Hyundai. Every blue-chip company in Korea. At prices we’ll never see again.”
“And you want to buy.”
“I want to buy everything.”
Minho was quiet. Then he laughed—not the bright, careless laugh of a month ago, but something darker and more aware. “You know what? I believe you. I don’t understand why, and I don’t understand how, but I believe you.”
“That means a lot.”
“It means I’m either smart or stupid. We’ll find out which in March.”
Daniel’s tutoring business was booming.
The irony wasn’t lost on him. While the economy cratered, demand for his services was going up. Desperate parents, watching the news every night, were suddenly very interested in making sure their children had the academic credentials to survive whatever world was coming. And a tutor who charged half what the hagwons did? That was a bargain they couldn’t refuse.
By mid-October, Daniel had eight regular students. Eight students, two sessions each per week, at thirty thousand won per session. That was 480,000 won per week. Nearly two million won per month.
The electronics business was bringing in another 800,000 to 1,000,000 won monthly. Gmarket was flooded with people selling possessions for quick cash, which meant Daniel’s supply of underpriced electronics had actually increased since the crisis began. He was buying low and selling at fair market value—not gouging, never gouging—and the margins were healthy.
Total monthly income: approximately 2.8 million won.
For context, his father made 2.5 million won per month at the Hyundai factory. Before the shift cuts.
The money was piling up in a savings account that Daniel had opened with his mother’s help (she’d been easier to convince than his father—”If the boy wants to save money, let him save money. At least he’s not spending it on video games.”). By the end of October, his balance had crossed one million won. By November, it would hit two million. By February, if everything continued, he’d have over four million.
The problem wasn’t the money. The problem was the dinner table.
“You were out until nine o’clock,” his mother said.
It was a Thursday evening. Daniel had just come home from back-to-back tutoring sessions—Jieun at four, Donghyun at five-thirty, a new student named Chaeyoung at seven. He was tired in the bone-deep way that comes from being intensely present for other people for five straight hours while also maintaining the fiction of being a normal teenager.
“I had three sessions today,” he said, toeing off his shoes in the entryway.
“Three sessions. On a school night.”
“They’re all within walking distance of the library. I was fine.”
His mother was standing in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed, wearing the expression that Daniel privately called “the weather warning”—the calm before the mom-storm. Behind her, the TV was showing the evening news. His father was in his chair, but he wasn’t watching the screen. He was watching Daniel.
“Dinner’s cold,” his mother said.
“I’m sorry. I should have called.”
“You should have been home.”
“Mom—”
“You’re seventeen, Daniel. You’re not a businessman. You’re not an adult. You’re a high school student who should be eating dinner with his family and doing his homework, not running around Bupyeong teaching other people’s children until nine at night.”
The words landed with a precision that only mothers possess. Not angry—worse. Worried. And underneath the worry, something that Daniel recognized with a stab of guilt: loneliness. His mother had noticed that her son was slipping away, becoming someone she didn’t recognize, and she was reaching out the only way she knew how.
“Sit down,” his father said from the living room. Not a request.
Daniel sat at the kitchen table. His mother reheated the jjigae in silence—the aggressive silence of a woman who had more to say but was choosing her moment. Minji poked her head out of her room, assessed the atmospheric pressure, and retreated like a submarine detecting depth charges.
His father came to the table and sat across from him.
“How much money do you have saved?”
“One point two million won.”
His mother’s hand froze on the ladle. “One point two million?”
“From tutoring and electronics.” Daniel kept his voice steady. “Every won is accounted for. I can show you the records.”
“That’s not the point,” his mother said. “The point is you’re not sleeping. You’re not eating with us. You come home at nine o’clock smelling like the library and looking like you haven’t smiled since breakfast.”
That’s because I carry the memories of a man who lost everything, and every minute I’m not working feels like a minute I’m falling behind.
“I’m building something,” Daniel said. “I know it looks crazy from the outside. A seventeen-year-old making this much money, talking about stocks, predicting financial crises. I know how it looks. But I need you to trust me. Just for a few more months.”
“Trust you to do what?” his father asked.
“To not waste this opportunity. The market is going to hit bottom in a few months. When it does, I want to invest everything I’ve saved. And if I’m right—if the market recovers the way I think it will—that money could turn into something that changes our lives.”
His father leaned back. The chair creaked its familiar creak. “And if you’re wrong?”
“Then I lose the money I earned myself. Not your money. Not the family savings. Just mine.”
“Money you earned instead of sleeping. Instead of eating dinner. Instead of being a kid.”
The accusation was quiet but it hit like a truck. Because his father was right. Daniel was sacrificing his second chance at being seventeen for the same thing he’d sacrificed his first life for: the pursuit of financial security. The irony was so thick he could taste it.
“You’re right,” Daniel said. The admission surprised him as much as it surprised his parents. “You’re right. I’ve been working too much. I’ve been—I’ve been so focused on the plan that I forgot why I made the plan in the first place.”
His mother set the reheated jjigae on the table. Steam rose between them like a curtain.
“And why did you make the plan?” she asked softly.
“For us. For the family. So that—” His voice cracked. Not the voice crack of puberty—the crack of a forty-two-year-old man remembering his mother’s funeral, the empty house, the phone calls he’d never returned. “So that we’d be okay. No matter what happens with the economy. I wanted to make sure we’d be okay.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
His mother reached across the table and put her hand over his. Her palm was warm and rough from years of washing dishes and kneading kimchi and doing all the invisible work that held their family together.
“We’re already okay,” she said. “We have food. We have a home. We have each other. That’s okay.”
“Your mother’s right,” his father said. But his voice was different now—less stern, more uncertain. Like a man who was seeing his son clearly for the first time and wasn’t sure what to do with what he saw. “But.”
His mother looked at him. “But?”
“But the boy predicted AIG. He predicted the KOSPI drop. He’s made over a million won in two months from nothing.” His father rubbed the back of his neck—his tell, Daniel knew, for when he was about to say something that cost him. “Maybe we should listen to what he’s saying.”
Daniel’s mother stared at her husband. “Byungsoo. He’s seventeen.”
“I know how old he is. I also know that his predictions have been right every single time. I checked.”
“You checked?”
“I wrote them down.” His father pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket. On it, in his father’s precise factory-floor handwriting, were three lines:
Sept 15 – Daniel said AIG bailout within 48hrs. Happened Sept 16. CORRECT.
Sept 22 – Daniel said KOSPI drop 5%+ this week. Dropped 7.3%. CORRECT.
Oct 1 – Daniel said market rally is “dead cat bounce” and will reverse. Reversed Oct 3. CORRECT.
Daniel stared at the paper. His father had been listening. Not just listening—documenting. Testing. Running his own quiet experiment to see if his son’s impossible knowledge was real.
“Dad,” Daniel whispered.
“I still think the stock market is gambling,” his father said. “But maybe—maybe—you know something about this particular game that I don’t.”
“So…”
“So I’ll open the account. In my name, with your money. But I have conditions.”
“Anything.”
“You eat dinner with this family at least five nights a week. You keep your grades above a B average. And you stop looking like you’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.” His father unfolded the paper and placed it on the table between them. “You’re seventeen, Daniel. Whatever you’re building, it can wait until after dinner.”
Daniel looked at the paper with his father’s careful handwriting. Three predictions. Three confirmations. A bridge built from skepticism to something that wasn’t quite trust but was close enough to build on.
“Five nights a week,” Daniel said. “B average. And I’ll try to lighten up.”
“Don’t try. Do.”
“Okay. I’ll do.”
His mother served the jjigae. Minji, sensing that the atmospheric pressure had normalized, emerged from her room and slid into her chair with the practiced stealth of a family’s youngest member.
“Are we still fighting?” Minji asked.
“We weren’t fighting,” their mother said. “We were negotiating.”
“That’s what you always say when you’re fighting.”
“Eat your dinner, Minji.”
“Is there more rice?”
“There’s always more rice.”
Daniel ate his jjigae. It was perfect—or maybe it was just that everything tasted better when you ate it with people you loved, at a table you almost lost, in a life you’d been given a second chance to live.
His father’s folded paper sat next to the soy sauce, three lines of handwriting that represented something more valuable than any stock portfolio.
Trust. Imperfect, conditional, and hard-won.
But real.