On the first day of Property class, we each filled out a survey describing our most valuable piece of property. Some write, My law degree. Others, My brain. This was not surprising, given that this was Stanford Law School. Property is ownership; ownership, power. But to what extent do I have ownership over anything, even myself?

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One can measure property in subjective or objective terms, and the two often overlap. This is a house, which love makes a home. Growing up, I never fully felt as if we had either. We were too poor to own the former, and my parents were too deeply entrenched in their private war to create the latter. In its stead, I grew up in my parents’ church, which was both ours and not ours. Mother would boil doenjang soup on a portable butane gas stove for dinner, and my sisters would take naps after school on the church pews. The church was not made to be habitable; it was icy cold in the winter, sweltering in the summer. I killed many a scuttling cockroach on its pale brown floor, and we shared the bathroom on the second floor with a hagwon academy, whose middle school students emptied leftover ramen and food into the toilet bowls and often left them speckled with red pepper. When we left for the night, we were always encouraged to sweep the floor and clear the tables carefully. 

“This is a communal space,” Mother would remind us, “not our home.”

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Legal scholars often conceptualize property as a “bundle of sticks”: that is, a variety of rights characterizing ownership, such as the right to bequeath, the right to destroy, the right to use, and so on. Among these, courts frequently emphasize the right to exclude as core to the nature of property, as it implies the other rights that property protects.

Consider William Blackstone’s traditional definition of property: “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims.” Or that famous case most law students learn, Jacque v. Steenberg Homes. The Jacques refused to allow a company to deliver a mobile home by crossing their property, even though it would be far costlier and more inconvenient to take an alternative path. When the company boldly crossed their property anyway, the jury awarded the Jacques $100,000 in punitive damages, even though the property itself had been unharmed. The message was clear: as an owner, your right to exclude is so fundamental that the State itself will raise its iron fist.

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We spent most of the day at church and went home only to sleep. Even then, there was not much of a right to exclude. I slept in a room with my mother and two sisters, everything a hot and messy jumble of love without borders or boundaries. Church members deep in debt would also move into our house and stay for months, sometimes years.

They were all men. My sisters, warm and affectionate by nature, easily struck up a friendship with our guests, but I smiled at them with a strained politeness, like a wine glass filled with hot water. At twelve, I was quiet and did not cause trouble, so it was easy to be invisible in my dislike. 

And my dislike was both deep and quiet: I saw the way they looked at my mother, the way they spoke of my father, the way they would sometimes grab or tickle me, to try to make me break into laughter. Don’t touch me, I thought, shrinking into my body. What began as a gesture of generosity from my parents felt increasingly like the intrusion of strangers. In those days, I made my mind a shelter and escaped into it whenever I felt trapped.

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In his 2012 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Wendell Berry laments how divorced we have become from any tangible knowledge of our surroundings. Industrialism, he argues, has made us agree to the “substitution of statistical knowledge for personal knowledge.” Restlessly in pursuit of profit and success, our understanding of property is remote from actual experience, and we participate in an “absentee economy, which makes us effectively absent even from our own dwelling places.” He calls for a return to the bounds of neighborhood, back to the “effective reach of imagination, sympathy, affection.” For humans to have “a responsible relationship to the world, they must be able to imagine their place in it”: that is, to have such affection for a place that they want to preserve it, to remain in it.

His words moved me deeply, not just because of his beautifully described vision of a “neighborly, kind, and conserving economy” rather than one that plunders resources without restraint, but also because this is how I often imagine heaven to look like: a clean, quiet neighborhood, where everyone I love has a home they feel safe in, within walking distance from my own.

I would build a life with my loved ones like a moss-covered wall, each memory a cool slab of stone atop another. I would pick berries and chamomile flowers from my garden for them to eat. I would knock on their doors every day, arms heavy with the weight of sweetness.

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In Tioga Coal Co. v. Supermarkets Gen. Corp., the court quotes Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Man, like a tree in the cleft of a rock, gradually shapes his roots to his surroundings, and when the roots have grown to a certain size, cannot be displaced without cutting at his life.”

I have never stayed long enough in one place to put down strong roots, nor develop the kind of tangible and imaginative affection that moves through Wendell Berry’s essay. In a more abstract, blood-deep way, I love Korea, the country that named me, that anointed me with blood and history. I love America, the strange and expansive country that gave me a new language to write in. But for an actual, physical space, I only have snatches of jewel-bright memories from places I briefly inhabited.

There was the splendid orange tree in the front yard of our tiny house in Pasadena, which we rented cheaply because several families had died in its confines before we arrived, and a rumor spread that the premises were cursed. I still remember how the sprinklers threw chips of rainbow light that shimmered on its leaves, how I would put my arms around the wet bark of that sweet tree and bury my face in its fragrant darkness. It was the first tree I fell in love with, the first tree I could briefly call mine. Or the nest full of baby hummingbirds underneath the stairwell in the apartment we moved to, where my father doubled over sneezing from the illegally kept cats.

In Seoul, even in the ugly old church where rats scurried in the parking lot gutters—where we lit delicate soy wax candles, put up Christmas lights, and watched its tiny space fill up on the last night of the year with face after lonely face—even this sparse space became a blessing.

One of our church members had grown up in extremely challenging circumstances: abandoned by her mother, unable to go to college because her family didn’t believe in education for women, and the survivor of three suicide attempts, she was astonished to find a loving family in our congregation—a spiritual kinship her own blood had not been able to provide. When we finally saved up enough money after ten years to move our church to a clean, modern building with our own bathroom, everyone rejoiced at the long-awaited change, but she made an observation that stayed with me afterwards.

“My life completely changed through this church,” she said. “I went from a living hell to heaven. But you know what? I don’t think I could have joined this church if it had been in a clean, pretty building from the beginning. It’s precisely because this church was so small, poor, and dingy that I felt comfortable crossing its threshold.” She paused. “It didn’t feel like a place for rich people. It felt like a place I could fit in. So I am grateful to this place we are leaving. I am grateful this was where I belonged.”

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From all the places I have lived in, I remember that little one-room studio I rented on Bomun Street, Seoul with special fondness—the first place I lived apart from my family that was not a dormitory. When I entered that room, it was as if my whole body had been a fist that suddenly unclenched. I could barely walk five steps in that space, and some frowned upon the choice to move out: What an extravagance, to rent your own room in Seoul! A little self-sacrifice could go a long way in giving your family more financial support… 

And yet, the first time I lay down in my own bed, surrounded by secondhand furniture I had chosen, music that I enjoyed, tears almost rose to my eyes. Soft lights, uninterrupted quiet, privacy—if these were luxuries, they were ones that had the effect of necessities. In the first room of my own, I experienced a strange feeling: the opposite of fear.

There were, of course, sacrifices required to keep this space. In order to continue supporting my family financially while paying rent, I switched to a corporate job that paid far more than my previous nonprofit work—and demanded far more. There were days I hated my job so deeply, with such intensity, that tears would break from my eyes and pour down my face the moment I stepped out of the office—the moment I hung up from another call listening to shouts like What’s the matter, you on your period? or You call this dog shit your best work? But when my friends urged me to quit, I shook my head, smiling tightly: I need to hold onto my home. They laughed in bewilderment: Your home is important, but what about the mental health of its inhabitant?

What I couldn’t quite explain was how closely the one was tied to the other. How even living on borrowed property made me feel as if I claimed more ownership of myself. Since moving into a room of my own, a sickness I had struggled with for months vanished without a trace. I fell in love again, became the protagonist of my own undramatic story. I found enough wealth in my heart to reach out to others, invite them to my table, and build relationships over food I had cooked with my own hands. A creed I had forgotten became mine once again: a hunger for personal happiness.

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The line between love and ownership is blurry, and the two are often confused. In Lee Won-ha’s I’m Not My Flower, He Is, a book of Korean essays based on her experience of unrequited love, the speaker describes hiding a single hair from the person she loves in her sleeve:

“When I came home alone,” she says, “I put the hair in my mouth without hesitation and swallowed it. I once read in a book that if you want to make someone yours, you have to eat that person’s hair. So I swallowed without hesitation. I usually feel fearful about trying new food for the first time, but this time, I was in such a hurry I didn’t even have time to feel fear. It was the first time someone had entered my body, so I touched my lower belly lightly. I wonder if I’ll die like this. Although it was time for the moths to come out, I couldn’t close my eyes because of such complicated thoughts.”¹

My breath caught in my throat at these lines, because although I have never swallowed a legally cognizable fragment of another person’s body, I knew what it felt like to betray your own sense of self-preservation to cling to someone you love. To cease to recognize yourself as a flower, because all fragrance and beauty seems to be concentrated in a single source.

To yearn this desperately for someone to be mine suggests that I am still not entirely comfortable being myself. In high school, one of my friends was a clever, warm-hearted girl with a singular force of character and capacity for passion that the brittle classifications of our small social hierarchy could hardly satisfy. She had little confidence that her looks or manner could ever inspire admiration in men, but her desire for love was so great that she once said to me, casually and without a trace of sarcasm, “Esther, I really do think that if I loved someone, I would let him lock me up in the house and control me, as long as he wanted me.”

I shook my head, distressed to hear someone I cared about defining love in this way. And yet the temptation to relinquish ownership of oneself and the crushing burden that comes with it—to reduce oneself to another’s property—is one that I know all too well.

In the second season of Fleabag, a British television series, the eponymous heroine kneels at the confessional before a priest with whom she is in love. In a rare moment of raw, unironic vulnerability, she blurts out her deepest desires: “I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like, what to hate, what to rage about. What to joke about, what to not joke about.” Her voice rises, grows rapid, urgent with agitation. “I want someone to tell me what to believe in. Who to vote for and who to love and how to tell them. I think I just want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father! Because so far I think I’ve been getting it wrong.”

And haven’t I been that woman? Wouldn’t I be willing to lose much to gain just a little love? I wonder how many people enter relationships, not as a way to experience abundance, but in a desperate attempt to escape themselves. I wonder how many find their independent existence too weighty a gift to bear and would gladly exchange their freedom for relational connection—even at the price of becoming object, powerless, possessed.

So seldom have I felt worthy simply by grace of existing. So often have I felt that I deserve to live only if someone deems me as having something worthy to give. In our generation, to love is to have is to consume. To be loved is to turn into something worthy of consumption.

In her poem Manuscript Found by Natasha Rostova During the Fire of Moscow, Polina Barskova writes:

“I will try to live on earth without you.

I will try to live on earth without you.

I will become any object,

I don’t care what—”

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When I speak of the struggle to reimagine ourselves as something other than another’s property, I do not mean for this metaphor to trivialize or gloss over the literal horror of slavery. It is a stark, brutally explicit failure to see another as a human being, and I see its terrible consequences reverberating through America today. I grieve at its rampant and continued existence, like the stories North Korean women told me of being sold as sex slaves to father-son duos in the Chinese countryside. It is a wound I cannot touch without having stories well up like blood, stories that remind me of how our understanding of property can both protect and slaughter.

Davis v. Evans, a case in 1853, exemplifies the tragedy of classifying human beings as property. Margaret Davis, a free Black woman, sought to wrest legal control of her still-enslaved daughter from her owner by arguing that she had adversely possessed her own daughter by “owning” her for over ten years. In property law, adverse possession is a legal doctrine that allows someone to claim ownership of property if they’ve occupied it for a statutory period of time, even if they didn’t have a formal legal claim at the beginning.

In order to live with her daughter, Davis argued she lawfully owned her, strategically manipulating the very laws that had been used to dismantle her life to attempt to reclaim it again. Davis brought a creative and well-prepared case: witnesses even supported her “possession” by affirming they had paid Davis the wages her daughter earned while working for them. Unsurprisingly, the argument fell on ears of stone. The court held that Davis had no claim on her daughter through adverse possession, because it would be unfair for the master’s “humanity” in allowing the daughter to live with her mother to be “tortured into an abandonment of his claim.”

Although she was unsuccessful, I found Davis’ complex attempt at legal resistance as moving as it was horrifying. It astonished me to think of the courage of this Black mother, using the language of her oppressors to fight for her child’s freedom. The impossible odds she had risen up against. Hurling eggs against the monolithic boulder of property law. Trying so desperately to find, in a system so structurally unjust, some small chink through which hope could seep through.

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I am pained to think of my mother’s life, which has so long been one of privation: struggling to survive through a violent childhood and adolescence, then working her whole life to support a man whom she married without understanding love. And the poverty, tangible as the stench of an outhouse: all her life, Mother had lived in bug-infested, uncomfortable spaces that rekindled vivid memories of her traumatic early years.

Her clench-jawed efforts largely shielded us from re-experiencing the trauma of an uninhabitable living space, because she made every place we lived in as sparkling clean as she possibly could, yet when—for all her mopping and sweeping—another cockroach scuttled out from behind a cupboard, she would tremble and weep like a little girl.

“Don’t worry, Mamma!” I would say brightly, stomping down on the cockroach with more conviction than I really felt, while my sisters squealed with terror. “See? It’s dead now! I’ll toss this one in the toilet, too.”

We would then comfort my mother with dreams of a better space in the future, a home where she could live undisturbed. “It’ll be a modern apartment, because they’re safer and have all the passkeys to keep robbers out,” we assured her. “It’ll be so clean, you won’t see a single bug, even in the summertime! We’ll have soft-colored wood on all the walls, and we girls will live on one floor each, and you’ll live on the top floor. And in the living room, we’ll have a crystal grand piano for you to play music to your heart’s content.” For Mother was a pianist, and never seemed so fully herself as when her fingers coaxed melody out of the instrument in a few fluid, graceful gestures.

Perhaps these childhood dreams continued to marinate in my sister Lydia’s mind when she married a family friend who had grown up in our church. He came from a background as poor as ours but had gotten into the most coveted company in Korea and was both frugal and financially smart. Borrowing and amassing all his savings from the past ten years, he bought a house to live together with our parents. “It’s a win-win for everyone,” he explained, with his usual forceful energy. “Your parents will finally have someplace safe and comfortable to live without worrying about rent, and they can use the money they’d used for their house deposit to loan to Esther the amount her law school financial aid doesn’t cover!” It was a convenient plan, everyone agreed, and when Mother walked into her new home, she glowed like a child who had just been told that the war was finally over.

It was a spacious, neat apartment in beige and white, with a floor she scrubbed vigorously each day until it flashed like the pate of a balding man. Mother bought pot after pot of plants, which she hung all over the house, watering them tenderly each morning. The kitchen was her kitchen, and she filled it with well-washed, sparkling dishes, ornamental spice jars, and a little mortar and pestle she used to crush sesame seeds at every meal. I had seldom seen her so happy.

So when Lydia and her husband’s marriage began falling apart, so did Mother’s long-awaited dreams of living in a clean, pleasant, permanent home. Property became a central anxiety when discussing the consequences of a potential divorce. It was the first thing on my sister’s mind as she ran through the question of her relationship over and over again with me on the phone.

“I know that what I’m doing to Mamma is cruel,” she said sadly. “I gave her everything she longed for, including the clean, pretty apartment she had always dreamed of. And now, I’m taking it all away again.”

Lydia’s fracturing marriage distressed Mother in a variety of ways, but losing the house was certainly one. When I went to visit her in Korea, she would walk around the lovely living room she had so carefully decorated and touch each beloved plant, glance over each meticulous color choice with eyes that were already mourning. “I knew it,” she said to me once, tears rolling down her large, doe-like eyes and splashing onto my lap. She buried her head in my shoulder, her soft body shaking with distress. “I knew I didn’t deserve a house so clean and pretty. Sometimes I wonder if I just forgot my place in society. And now, I’m just going back to where I belong.”

“Mamma, Mamma!” I implored, stroking her hair. Tears filled my own eyes, too. If she were to be in the place that I thought she belonged, my mother would be living in a palace. It hurt me to think that such a modest desire—a warm, clean place to call her own, without worrying about rising rent or cockroaches—had remained an impossibility to her for so long. “If you think it’s too difficult for me to continue law school…”

“Don’t say that,” she said, sitting straight up, her eyes flashing. “Even if the sky shattered in two, I’m going to see you graduate law school. That’s not even a question.”

I wrapped my arms gently around her. “Okay, Mamma. Just wait a little longer. Once I get out of law school and begin working in big law, I can pay you and Daddy back, and then I’ll support you.” I stressed the words to belie the heaviness of my heart. “You’ll have your own room, you’ll have your plants. We’ll live right next to each other.”

She looked up at me, face shining with tears, and nodded.

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Every day, I walk under the pastel-colored stone arches of Stanford Law School, bask in sunlight splashing from the rumpled tree leaves, and retire to a dormitory larger than any room I’ve lived in. I have received so, so much, and I tremble lest I should ever commit the monstrosity of taking these gifts for granted.

And yet I maintain a complicated relationship with property: as a framework for thinking about the people I love most in my life, as a convenient way to shrink myself, as a goal to strive towards to protect my family, as the resources I need to safeguard my own happiness and health. There is still a small, unhealed part of me that seizes up in loneliness and cries, “I would rather be someone’s object than my own person, I would rather be claimed by the cruelty of humans than throw myself upon the mercy of God.” There is still the squeamish high school girl who stomped on cockroaches to see her mother smile, who understands that property is privacy, is power, is peace.

In those moments, I turn to the long-familiar words of Jesus, when he bade his disciples farewell before his death: “No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, because all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.” At the moment of greatest loneliness, in the throes of despair, Jesus redefined their relationship from one of ownership to one of intimacy and trust. He called his disciples into a community of shared imagination and sympathy: he saw them as more than property. In those quiet words, I find hope.

The Korean poet Ku Sang expresses the beauty of looking at our surroundings with this kind of affectionate attention. He redefines wealth, using the terms of ownership to express instead an exuberant, openhearted gratitude—a love that seeks not to take, but to recognize worth that had hitherto been invisible. “I will look at everything in the world with the heart of a prodigal son just returned to his father’s arms,” he declares.

“… My swaggering grandchild

strutting through the living room

My wife, wearing her magnifying glasses

stitching embroidery onto the pillow

The neighbors, each coming and going in their own ways

How lovely, how beautiful, how precious

O incomparable to the wealth of storehouses,

This divine and infinite possession!

Truly, the things from my Father in heaven—

Everything, all things are mine.”

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This, then, Lord, is my prayer: to hold all things loosely, as steward of everything given to me. And yet to call all things mine, if only to claim the world around me as beautiful, even divine. To find wealth in the place it most matters. To stay within the reach of imaginative affection, to call myself and others brother and sister, neighbor and friend. To love deeply, with open hands, and a heart that someone can call home.

1. 이원하 (Lee Won-ha), 내가 아니라 그가 나의 꽃 (I’m Not My Flower, He Is), p. 12 (author’s translation).