ISSUE VI

blood, drink, & peppercorns

“Blood may be thicker than water, but … [i]n the context of this contract dispute, Son’s blood was not weightier than a peppercorn.” —Kim v. Son (CA Ct. of Appeals, 2009)

“For Koreans, drinking is an important part of social and work life … The drawing of blood … may be understood as a way to show sincerity rather than evidence of extreme intoxication.” —Nancy Kim, “Reasonable Expectations in Socio-Cultural Context,” 45 Wake Forest L. Rev 641 (2010)

The court concludes: even if written in blood with your finger, a contract has no weight unless you receive something in return, even something as small as a peppercorn. The situation isn’t too hard to imagine: two Korean businessmen saying hyung, forgive me, downing glass after glass over a failed investment. With each drink, the lights growing brighter, the floor spinning towards your face. Waving at the waiter at the sushi bar, asking for a safety pin to write out your penance in pricked flesh. In a culture where war remains quiet & love struggles to find its way to your mouth, truth is elusive unless shared over drink. A promise made over the rim of a glass, a word as solid as writing. As a paralegal in Korea, I heard stories of lawyers who would go down on their knees to their clients, gulp liquor and plead, Hyung-nim, take me under your wing! Over strips of whale meat I couldn’t eat, I watched clients clink glasses, turn away, and swallow hard before business began. The first party after my high school classmates came of age, I watched them open crate after crate full of bottles, turn florid, open-faced, shining. Girls keeled over on the sofa with laughter. A boy sprinted to the bathroom, stark naked and unashamed. Soberness is a lonely game: I kept wiping the counter and tying up trash, feeling something like sadness, or a homeless affection. Sometimes I wish I drank, too, so I could make promises I cannot keep, unravel to threads of untethered truth. I would lay my head on your shoulder, laughter bleeding out of my mouth. I would tell you without fear or shame: you are worth more to me than many peppercorns. When I am with you, the world grows a little brighter. Blurrier. More beautiful. Sometimes, the floor spins at your gaze.

Reasonable Person Standard

In tort law, the reasonable person standard is the standard of care that an ordinary prudent person would observe under the given set of circumstances. An individual who shows this level of care may avoid liability for negligence.

I get it. We need standards. Prudence and predictability. Still, I find it hard to believe: someone who always looks before he leaps. Who plans carefully and cries appropriately. Who never stumbles into potholes while staring at stars, or feels an aching too huge to be held. As if we have never felt boiling-hot water explode the thin wineglass of our minds, felt cracks etch across our nets of bright ice. As if mothers are not also children, forced often to mother themselves. As if we walked through a world of rice paddies, all well-cropped and square, neatly ordered. What does reason mean to a woman in famine, when her neighbor’s child looks like a dog? What does reason mean to a man hiding wracked tears behind sunglasses, unable to tell his parents goodbye?

Sometimes, reason fails me, like an old dog that crawls behind the door, too stiff-limbed to run, whimpering feebly. Sometimes I am neither a good Christian nor the demure eldest daughter of my Korean family, but a cowering animal of fear and buried grief, begging for something beyond the white bones in my teeth. Time and time again I stretch myself onto the train tracks, flattening my body beneath the roaring lights of custom, of craving, of greed. What I mean to say is: if reason be corral, be conclusion, from whence springs this hunger, this need? Lord, may love be my portion, though reason my guide. Clear eyes and a care that is kind. Pass over me, I prayed, looking up at the mute, eggshell-blue sky. And somehow, you saved me, and you did.

Esther Ra alternates between California and Seoul, South Korea. She is the author of A Glossary of Light and Shadow (Diode Editions, 2023) and book of untranslatable things (Grayson Books, 2018). Her work has been published in American Literary Review, Boulevard, The Florida Review, The Rumpus, PBQ, and Korea Times, among others. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Pushcart Prize, Indiana Review Creative Nonfiction Prize, and 49th Parallel Award for Poetry. Esther is currently a J.D. candidate at Stanford Law School. (estherra.com)