Abstract

The lengthy 1990 boycott of the Family Red Apple Grocery in New York City and the 1992 Los Angeles riots have come to exemplify the so-called Black–Korean conflict of the late 1980s and early 1990s in the United States. The numerous accounts of antagonistic relations between black customers and Korean American merchants in inner-city neighbourhoods that circulated during and after these events evinced a recurrent interest in the role that the daily conduct of store owners and employees may have played in aggravating the communities in which they ran their businesses. Focusing on ostensibly trivial behaviours such as making eye contact and giving change, media depictions of these tensions tended to assume and perpetuate notions of a fundamental "culture clash" between African Americans and recent Korean immigrants. Offering a pointed rejoinder to mainstream media accounts of the 1990 boycott, Elizabeth Wong's play Kimchee and Chitlins tests, instead, the possibilities of cross-racial performance for representing and reconciling, and thus doubly "mediating," these disputes. Exploring the implications of assuming the gestures, mannerisms, and speech of those positioned as other, the play grapples with the risks and limitations of such re-enactments, even as it imagines that traversing racial boundaries and mixing theatrical and journalistic conventions might elucidate the complex entanglements of habitual behaviours and habituated perceptions that inform both interracial tensions and their public narration.

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