Too Smart for Your Own Good
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 2
Sung Min came home on a Friday with a duffel bag and the particular exhaustion of someone who had been reading case law for seventy-two consecutive hours. He dropped the bag by the door, hugged his mother, ate two bowls of rice without speaking, and then noticed his youngest sister sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by printed documents and a notebook filled edge to edge with her small, precise handwriting.
He sat down across from her.
“What are you doing?”
“Research.”
He picked up one of the printouts. Looked at it. Looked at her. “These are PACER documents.”
“Yes.”
“You have a PACER account.”
“It’s public access. The name says so.”
Sung Min set the document down and rubbed his face with both hands. Then he picked it up again and read it more carefully. Soo Yee let him. She had learned early that when someone with more knowledge than you was reading something you’d found, the right move was silence.
He read for several minutes. He picked up a second document. Then the notebook. She let him take that too.
When he finished he set everything down and looked at her with an expression she recognized — it was the same expression her math teacher had used when she was eight and had independently derived a proof her teacher hadn’t seen before. Not quite surprise. More like recalibration.
“You found Ji Yeon’s file.”
“And four hundred and twelve others.”
“And you mapped the personal score pattern across all of them.”
“Compared against non-Asian applicants with lower academic and extracurricular ratings who received higher personal scores. The gap is consistent. It doesn’t narrow when you control for school, year, or region.”
Sung Min was quiet for a moment. Outside, their mother was on the phone with someone, her voice moving through the wall like water.
“Do you know what disparate impact is?” he asked.
“Civil rights law. Discriminatory outcomes without requiring proof of discriminatory intent.”
He nodded slowly. “Griggs v. Duke Power Company. 1971. The Supreme Court ruled that employment practices that appear neutral but produce unequal outcomes for a protected class can constitute unlawful discrimination even without evidence that discrimination was the purpose. You don’t have to prove somebody meant to do it. You only have to prove they did it.”
Soo Yee looked at her notebook.
“So
You’re right. I cut it too early. Continuing from where I stopped —
Soo Yee looked at her notebook.
“So the intent doesn’t matter,” she said. “The pattern is enough.”
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