The Holdout by Graham Moore

Author:Graham Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

JAE

SEPTEMBER 27, 2009

A lot of folks loved talking smack about rich people, but Jae Kim was not one of them. Some folks thought there was something noble about being poor. Jae figured that was because they didn’t know much about real poverty. He had spent nights, as a kid, without a roof over his head. Without food. If he had a choice between poor and rich, he’d choose rich every day of the week. The only people who didn’t want to be rich, he was sure, were people brainwashed into thinking that they never could be.

The guys at the construction site where Jae worked would see pictures of rich people in the newspapers or magazines and act like those men in dark suits or those women in flashy underwear—somehow half the rich women you saw in magazines were in their underwear—must all be a bunch of crooks just because they’d had to make some hard choices to get where they were. Maybe they were all crooks, every single one. But Jae had known plenty of poor folks who were crooks too. At least those men in the newspapers and the magazines—guys like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett—they’d built companies. Those women—Oprah and Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie and Donna Karan—they’d built themselves into brands. Being rich was a mind-set. There was no better sign that a person didn’t have money and was never gonna have money than if he thought it was a big joke to make fun of a person who did.

That was the real motherfucker about being poor. It pickled your brain. It made you think your situation was everybody’s fault but your own. And everyone around you thought the same way. Some poor folks stewed in those thoughts, marinated in them for a lifetime and then passed them on, generation to generation.

Now, Jae thought, if you took a look at the kids of rich people, why did they always end up even richer than their parents? It was because from day one they’d been grown into the right mind-set.

If Jae had one wish for his own kids—three girls and a boy, four through fourteen—it was that they would learn to think like the people they wanted to be. Jae believed with the fervor of prophecy that his children could become like the people he read about. He’d heard people say stuff like “Oh, there are no more heroes anymore,” but that was all part of that defeatist mind-set. If you thought you didn’t need to look up to a hero, then good for you; you must not need to go up anywhere. Jae didn’t think like that and neither would his kids.

When was the last time that Jae had seen a movie where the hero was a businessman? Where the guy who built something from nothing wasn’t a criminal poisoning the groundwater, but dredging wells in a once-arid stretch of desert? How come Hollywood never made those movies?

He was pretty sure he knew why.

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