Next comes the commercial film Strange Days, from which this book clearly derives its title. This film was prompted by the Rodney King beating (which left him with a shattered eye-socket, a fractured cheek-bone and a broken leg). It controversially contains a scene in which a serial-killer rapes a victim who has been wired up so that she experiences her rapist's emotions rather than her own during the assault.
The author also considers Twilight: Los Angeles, a one-women play written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith. Smith interviewed over 200 people involved in the 1992 riots and progressively incorporated material thus garnered into her play in successive performances, culminating in a series at New York's Public Theater in 1994. She herself acted the roles of all her selected interviewees.
Although Strange Future is an academic work, it suffers less than most others in its category from a self-referring, jargon-laden style. It's clearly written, and openly considers the author's own position as a Korean-American as part of the overall analysis. This accessibility is all the more important considering the author's claim that the academic critical approach should be defended against a populism that decries all written products that "anyone" cannot understand.
The book has to have some over-riding themes nonetheless. The main one is the idea of decline -- that the US is no longer the happy place it was even a generation ago. As for the Los Angeles locations where the 1992 violence took place, they are today still only half-alive, characterized by "burned-out empty lots enclosed by metal fences ... hardly anyone walking outside ... no shade because the trees have been chopped down ... grass ... where the buildings once stood."
At one point Song Min-hyoung states what could be his position -- though he calls it "one strategy" -- in a passage of startling directness.
"Do we have an ethical responsibility to address the wrongs we find in our adopted workplaces?" he asks. Korean Americans are in this analysis "... racial scapegoats, innocents who have come from elsewhere and have, through no fault of our own, found ourselves caught between age-old rivalries." (Here he refers to Korean immigrants as substitute whites in a black-white antagonism). "We position ourselves as claimants to an American dream that promises upward mobility through hard work, the proper enthusiasm, and a high regard for the law ... But when a crisis strikes, as it did in 1992, we find that the state upon which we have pegged our claims ... is not interested in coming to our aid."
Living in hard-working Taiwan, it's hard not to sympathize with that.
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