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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Police Brutality, Corruption, and Systemic Racism
Healing, Progress, and Collective Consciousness
Justice, Perspective, and Ambiguity
Individuals vs. Institutions
Action vs. Symbolic Gesture
Summary
Analysis
Smith interviews Richard Kim, an appliance store owner. Kim is a Korean American man in his 30s. He and Smith sit in a room at the back of his electronics store, which is filled with expensive electronics. Kim recalls how his father and their neighbor arrived to tell him what happened and then returned to the store. There were no police officers in sight. Kim, his father, and his neighbor called hospitals and police stations to see if anyone checked in who fit his mother’s description, but nobody could give them any information.
Kim’s anxious quest to find his mother builds tension and compels the audience to empathize with his experience of fear and chaos. Like Chung Lee, whose monologue opened Act Three: War Zone, Richard Kim is a Korean business owner whose store was targeted by rioters. However, Kim presents a slightly different perspective, as he seems far more attached to his possessions and concerned for other people than Lee was.
Themes
Meanwhile, Kim recalls, another neighbor called to tell them that people were looting Kim’s family’s store. Kim, his father, and their neighbor piled into a van and drove to the store. He knew people were carrying guns, and he knew his mother had been shot on the street corner. By the time the men arrived, hundreds of people were in the store. Their neighbor, who owned a car dealership, was trying to secure his property. People were carrying guns and shooting at each other.
Kim’s monologue places the audience directly in the action of the riots. The scene almost brings to life the hyperviolent, machismo impulse Cornell West described earlier in “A Bloodstained Banner.” But rather than the violence being cathartic, Kim, his father, and the neighbor seem afraid.
Themes
Kim drove the van to the front of their store. A man was firing at Kim. Kim emerged from the van, thinking he could use it as a shield, and then cried out for people to stop shooting. For a moment, they did. Then, three people across the street aimed their guns at Kim, who ducked just before they shot at him. Kim hurriedly returned to the van and loaded a rifle. He tells Smith that he never intended to hurt anyone—he only wanted to disperse the crowd—when he fired into the general direction of gunfire. He recalls how the people did disperse, all of them going “pa-chew.”
Kim’s recollection of the riots serves a different purpose than many of the other accounts Smith presents, which frame the riots within a historical or a more academic context to condemn or justify them. Instead, Kim presents an unfiltered account of the violence and chaos the riots wrought on residents and business owners of South-Central.
Themes
