Review Of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, By Anna Deavere Smith

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 tells the stories of a variety of people from L.A. and how the 1992 L.A. riots affected their lives. Anna Deavere Smith, the author, uses interviews to capture the experiences and tell her story. Smith chooses a variety of people to interview. People who actively took part in the riots, bystanders caught up in the events, news reporters capturing the story, and even police officers. Smith uses the introduction of the book to express her reasons for telling this story and even points out her own bias involving the events. She explains how she keeps the story accurate despite her bias. However, she also mentions that she conducted about two-hundred interviews and that she only used twenty-five in her play, and there

Walter Park is a Korean store owner who was shot in the head. Reverend Tom Choi is the reverend of a Presbyterian church in the area. While Walter Park speaks of going home to Korea and speaks fondly of his wife, his step-son tells the story about how he had a bifrontal partial lobotomy due to being shot execution-style after being pulled from his car in the riots by an “Afro-American” man (1994). His wife expresses how sad she is and her confusion about why he was shot (1994).

Reverend Choi is a Chinese American man, and he shares his memories of going to do clean-up work after the riots. Smith does describe him as a pastor of a church with an affluent congregation, alluding to the fact that he is not from the South-Central area (1994). In his interview, Reverend Choi says he purposefully wore his clerical collar to go out and do clean-up work so that he was not mistaken for being a Korean shop owner (1994). While he later mentions he stopped wearing the collar, his fear highlights the tension between Korean shop owners and the black community at that

He tells his story of where he was when the verdicts came in. News sources say he was at a fundraiser for a group who were in opposition to Proposition F (Los Angeles Staff, 2017), which would make policing community-based and hold the police chief accountable (Barude, 1997). Gates contradicts the news sources in his interview saying he does not think it was a fundraiser (1994). While it may be that news sources were wrong, this might also just be Gates remembering falsely or intentionally avoiding admitting he was at a fundraiser to benefit himself when the verdict was made. Regardless, Smith allows him space to express his emotions about him becoming the poster child for police oppression of black communities in