For this weeks online assignment in 300 words or more: Explore your reactions to one?of the readings based on your critical thin

STAND UP

SNOW FELL, SHAGGING THE TREES white and draping the streets with soft noiseless drifts until the whole city seemed erased. The industrial heater in our loft roared like a jet engine so that my husband and I could barely hear each other. During that year when I was depressed, I barely talked anyway. I spent most of my days crumpled in bed or on the couch. I was a blip on a cardiogram. I barely slept, barely ate, let alone wrote. Takeout collected in the fridge, molding into pastures of black sea urchins. Sometimes I checked email. I clicked onto Paperless Post. The envelope opened itself; the card presented itself; I closed my laptop.

My husband suggested we watch Richard Pryor’s Live in Concert, which I’d never seen before. Since we didn’t have a TV, he projected the movie against the blank wall facing our couch. Pryor appeared in our home, seven feet tall, larger than life, lancing our darkened room with light. Over the course of his eighty- minute act, sweat blooms under his armpits and drenches his red silk shirt as he impersonates a man having a heart attack or his tiny pet monkey scrambling over his head to fuck his ear. I only sweat when I’m nervous, and when I’m nervous no antiperspirant will protect me, so I avoid wearing light colors when I have to teach or perform in some way. But Pryor dares to wear silk, which is so unbreathable it exposes his sweat like ink on blotting paper.

But before his antic performances, Pryor strides onstage. He watches all the white people settle into their seats like he’s watching zoo animals. He says, “This is the fun part when white people come back and find out that black people stole their seats.” In a nasally “white” voice, he asks, “Weren’t we sitting here? We were sitting right here!” Switching to a “black” voice, he answers: “Well, you ain’t sitting here now, motherfucker.”

—

In his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud divides jokes into two categories: non-tendentious and tendentious. The non-tendentious joke is benign and innocuous, like riddles told to children. The tendentious joke is aggressive or obscene or both, rooting out what we repress in our subconscious. When African American entertainers in the forties told tall tales for laughs backstage, they called these backstage jokes lies. Lies were tendentious, told on street corners, in pool halls and barbershops, away from the prim company of whites. Pryor told lies—by spinning stories, ranting, boasting, and impersonating everything from a bowling pin to an orgasming hillbilly. And by telling lies, Pryor was more honest about race than most poems and novels I was reading at the time.

—

Pryor blowtorched the beige from my eyes. I didn’t know he was not just a comedian but also an artist and a revolutionary. He got rid of the punchline to prove that stand-up could be anything, which is what geniuses do: they blow up mothballed conventions in their chosen genre and show you how a song, or a poem, or a sculpture, can take any form.

After my depression eventually lifted, I became obsessed with transcribing all of Pryor’s audio and filmed performances. I realized that Pryor on the page is not exactly funny. Without the hilarity of his delivery, Pryor’s words hit hard and blunt, as if the solvent of his humor has evaporated and left only the salt of his anger. Part of that effect is due to his constant use of expletives, such as his notorious use of the n-word, which punctuates every sentence. On the page, his monologues are stark, sobering; a scathing confessional that innocence, for instance, is a privilege black people don’t get to experience: “I was a kid until I was eight. Then I became a Negro.”

As critics noted, Pryor’s brilliance lies not only in his clever phrasing but in how he embodies his monologues. He is an ensemble of one, incandescent in his talent for channeling anyone and tapping into the wild range of human emotions. I am most mesmerized by his face. If Pryor’s words wound, his face reveals his woundedness. Pryor tells a story about how his sex-crazed monkeys died and he is grieving in his backyard, when the neighbor’s German shepherd jumps over the fence to console him. Mind you, Pryor is impersonating a dog, but Pryor conjures all the pain of humanity through his inconsolable eyes.

—

Like most writers and artists, Richard Pryor began his career trying to be someone else. He wanted to be Bill Cosby and went on shows like Ed Sullivan, telling clean, wholesome jokes that appealed to a white audience. He felt like a fraud. Pryor was invited to Vegas to perform at the famous Aladdin Hotel. He came onstage and there, in the spotlight, gazing out into a packed audience of white celebrities like Dean Martin, he had an epiphany: his “mama,” who was his grandmother, wouldn’t be welcome in this room. Pryor was raised by his paternal grandmother, Marie Carter, the formidable madam of three brothels in his hometown of Peoria, Illinois. His mother, Gertrude Thomas, was a sex worker in his grandmother’s brothel before she left Pryor in his grandmother’s care. In his stand-up, Pryor speaks frankly about his lonely childhood in the brothel: “I remember tricks would go through our neighborhood and that’s how I met white people. They’d come and say, ‘Hello, is your mother home? I’d like a blowjob.’�”

His biographers David and Joe Henry write that that night in Vegas would forever mark “the B.C.–A.D. divide” in Pryor’s life, when Pryor killed the Cosby in his act and began to find his own way in comedy. Pryor faced his audience in Vegas and leaned into the mike and said, “What the fuck am I doing here?” He walked offstage.

—

Watching Pryor, I had a similar revelation: What the fuck am I doing here? Who am I writing for?

—

Poets treat the question of audience at best ambivalently but more often with scorn. Robert Graves said, “Never use the word ‘audience.’ The very idea of a public, unless a poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me.” Or poets treat the question of audience speculatively, musing that they are writing to an audience in the future. It is a noble answer, one I have given myself to insinuate that I am trying to write beyond contemporary trends and biases. We praise the slowness of poetry, the way it can gradually soak in to our minds as opposed to today’s numbing onslaught of information.

We say we don’t care about audience, but it is a lie. Poets can be obsessed

with status and are some of the most ingratiating people I know. It may baffle outsiders why poets would be so ingratiating, since there is no audience to ingratiate us to. That is because the poet’s audience is the institution. We rely on the higher jurisdiction of academia, prize jury panels, and fellowships to gain social capital. A poet’s precious avenue for mainstream success is through an award system dependent on the painstaking compromise of a jury panel, which can often guarantee that the anointed book will be free of aesthetic or political risk.

Watching Pryor, I realized that I was still writing to that institution. It’s a hard habit to kick. I’ve been raised and educated to please white people and this desire to please has become ingrained into my consciousness. Even to declare that I’m writing for myself would still mean I’m writing to a part of me that wants to please white people.

I didn’t know how to escape it.

—

When I was fifteen, writing a poem was as mysterious to me as writing in Cyrillic, so I was ready to be impressed by my classmates’ poetry when I flipped through my high school literary journal. But I was disappointed to find that, as is typical for most adolescent poems, there was no there there in their pretentious musings. Their amateurish efforts emboldened me to write one myself. That doesn’t look so hard, I thought. I bet I can do that. And then I wrote one. I felt giddy, like I’d discovered a new magic trick.

At the time, my family lived in a new development in L.A., so we were surrounded by half-constructed homes. Herds of deer still roamed the scrubby flattened hilltops of the neighborhood, grazing on thistles and sagebrush. One night when the moon was full, I saw a stag with little antler thumbs poking out of its head bend its hind legs and shit in our backyard before leaping away. I thought my house was haunted. I woke up a few times at night with my bedstead rattling. Another time, I was startled awake by an invisible phantom trying to lift my body off my mattress. I gripped my sheets so I wouldn’t float away.

I was deeply lonely and never felt quite present then. I only came into focus when I was making art and later when I began writing poetry, which I found freeing because my body was dematerialized, my identity shed, and I could imagine myself into other lives. Everything I read affirmed this freedom. John

Keats said a poet “has no identity—he is continually in for, and filling, some other body.” Roland Barthes said, “Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.”

But when I became a published poet, I couldn’t suspend my Asian female identity no matter what I wrote. Even in the absence of my body, my spectral authorial identity hampered the magnitude and range in which my voice reached readers. How naïve to think that my invisibility meant I could play God! If Whitman’s I contained multitudes, my I contained 5.6 percent of this country. Readers, teachers, and editors told me in so many words that I should write whatever felt true to my heart but that since I was Asian, I might as well stick to the subject of Asians, even though no one cared about Asians, but what choice did I have since if I wrote about, say, nature, no one would care because I was an Asian person writing about nature?

I suspected that if a reader read my poem and then saw my name, the fuse of the poem would blow out, leading the reader to think, I thought I liked the poem but on second thought, I can’t relate to it. But what proof did I have of this? How did I know it wasn’t simply because I had no talent? The problem was that I didn’t know. Either way, I couldn’t shake off this stuckness. I always thought my physical identity was the problem, but writing made me realize that even without myself present, I still couldn’t rise above myself, which pitched me into a kind of despair.

—

I started watching more and more stand-up. There was a transparency to comedy that I wasn’t finding in poetry. Comedians can’t pretend they don’t have identities. They’re up there, onstage, with their bodies against a brick wall like they’re facing a firing squad. There’s nowhere to hide, so they have no choice but to acknowledge their identities (“So you might have noticed I’m black”) before they move on or drill down.

It’s also harder to bullshit one’s way through comedy, because the audience cannot be convinced into laughter. Real laughter is an involuntary contraction that bursts out of you like an orgasm. You laugh from surprise but you’re only surprised once, which is why comedy ruthlessly lives in the present. Nothing gets dated faster than a joke.

Comedians not only need an audience, they are desperate for an audience. Even when they were bad at it, I was fascinated by how comedians reeled their audience in to their act, drawing on the audience’s responses and discomfort for material. In the beginning of Live in Concert, Pryor not only confronts the racial makeup of his audience but turns his white audience members into a spectacle, making them self-conscious for even returning to their seats: “Jesus Christ! Look at the white people rushing back!”

—

The literary scene has since diversified, but when I was younger, whether the reading was held at a bar, bookstore, or university, I read mostly to a white audience. The white room was such the norm that often I barely even noticed it. But when I did, I began to feel the whiteness in the room. If a neutral background color, say white, turned traffic-cone orange everywhere you went, you’d become chronically stressed and your mind would curdle like a slug in salt. That’s how I felt. Only I had to pretend that I wasn’t seeing traffic-cone orange everywhere.

Poetry readings served no function except to remind me I was dangerously losing faith in poetry. Maybe once, readings were a vital form of commons, but now readings felt terribly vestigial with all their canned ecclesiastical rituals: the scripted banter, the breathy “poet’s voice,” the mechanical titters, the lone mmm of approval. While I sagely nodded along to a poet praising the healing powers of poetry, inside I was going into diabetic shock from their saccharine sentiments. The worst was that I was lying to myself. I was that poet who dismissed the thought of audience because it would corrupt my artistic integrity. But at readings, there was no denying it. I was performing for a roomful of bored white people and I desperately wanted their approval.

—

I never directly addressed my audience except to thank them and reassure them I only had two poems left to read, an embarrassed gesture most poets make to concede that they know their reading is a tedious burden. It never occurred to me to directly address the whiteness of the audience the way a stand-up comedian would. It never occurred to me to belt out a question like “Any Latinos in the crowd?” and allow the silence to linger a beat too long before I belted out, “Any black people in the crowd?”

I always pretended like I wasn’t the only Asian woman in the room, which, for me at least, freighted the air with tension as if my body were the setup to a joke that never became defused by a punchline. But why not defuse it? If there was this expectation that I should write about my Asian identity, why not say out loud that I was the only Asian in the room?

I began to do stand-up instead of reciting my poems at readings. I just couldn’t bear to do another poetry reading, since the humiliation of it stayed in my skin for a few days like radioactive material. I thought by doing stand-up I could at least humiliate myself deliberately, which seemed less toxic somehow. At first, I recited jokes by other comedians, which violates a cardinal rule in comedy, but I convinced myself I was pulling a conceptual stunt rather than actually doing stand-up. But then I began to slip in my own jokes, until I used only my own jokes, material for which I drew from my personal life. I was never an autobiographical poet. The fact that I now wrote about my life as jokes probably exposes my deep-seated masochism. If people didn’t find my jokes funny, I wanted to bomb spectacularly while telling jokes about my life. I wanted to fall on my face doing it.

—

I never felt comfortable writing about personal racial trauma, because I wasn’t satisfied with the conventional forms in which racial trauma is framed. The confessional lyric didn’t seem right because my pain felt singled out, exceptional, operatic, when my life is more banal than that. I also couldn’t write traditional realist narrative fiction because I didn’t care to injection-mold my thoughts into an anthropological experience where the reader, after reading my novel, would think, The life of Koreans is so heartbreaking!

But after watching Pryor—and transcribing all of his visual and audio stand- up—I thought I could find a way into writing frankly about being Asian. My stand-up routine at readings, however, was short-lived. When I first performed, everyone laughed uproariously, which thrilled me, but normally people were confused. The event coordinators were baffled by my subterfuge and the audience didn’t know what to do but laugh uncertainly or look at me as if I had wet my pants. In Williamsburg, there was a bar called Kokie’s that actually sold cocaine by the jukebox for twenty dollars. I went there with friends in my twenties a few times. I bought a bag and sniffed it using my house key ridged with inscrutable grot in a curtained-off area with other random customers. One

night, two big Dominican guys stared at me, astonished, until one of them said, “I never saw an Asian girl do blow before.”

I made a joke about that story. Another time, a Southern white journalist asked me what the real difference was between Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese people. I made a joke about my response to her question. My jokes were terrible and my delivery was awkward at best. I was experimenting, searching for a structure that pierced through the respectability politics that fogged the literary community at the time. Writers of color had to behave better in their poetry and in person; they had to always act gracious and grateful so that white people would be comfortable enough to sympathize with their racialized experiences. I never forgot hearing one award-winning poet of color say during a Q&A, “If you want to write about race, you have to do it politely, because then, people will listen.”

—

Literature supposedly bridges cultural divides, an axiom that rang false once I understood the inequities of the publishing industry. Publishers treated the ethnic story as the “single story,” which Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie defines as follows: “Create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” As the writer Matthew Salesses elaborated in a 2015 essay in Lit Hub, the industry instituted the single story in two ways: (1) the publisher had a quota that allowed them to publish only one Chinese American writer, and (2) even if there were multiple writers of Chinese descent, they had to replicate the same market-tested story about the Chinese American experience.

This is changing as I write this book. Poetry is having a renaissance in which many of the most exciting—and rightly celebrated—poets are people of color. It’s happening for fiction too, but I’m more doubtful about that genre, since the industry is still 86 percent white and fiction is more susceptible to the fickle tastes of the market. As the poet Prageeta Sharma said, Americans have an expiration date on race the way they do for grief. At some point, they expect you to get over it. But as suspicious as I am, I also hope that we can seize this opportunity and change American literature completely. Overhaul the tired ethnic narratives that have automated our identities; that have made our lives palatable to a white audience but removed them from our own lived realities—and stop spelling ourselves out in the alphabet given to us.

—

For the last twenty years, until recently, Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories were the template of ethnic fiction that supports the fantasy of Asian American immigrants as compliant strivers. The fault lies not in Lahiri herself, who I think is an absorbing storyteller, but in the publishing industry that used to position her books as the “single story” on immigrant life. Using just enough comforting ethnic props to satisfy the white reader’s taste for cultural difference, Lahiri writes in a flat, restrained prose, where her characters never think or feel but just do: “I…opened a bank account, rented a post office box, and bought a plastic bowl and a spoon at Woolworth’s.” Her characters are always understated and avoid any interiority, which, as Jane Hu writes in The New Yorker, has become a fairly typical literary affect that signals Asianness (in fact, more East Asianness than South Asianness) to readers.

In Lahiri’s story “The Third and Final Continent,” the protagonist migrates from Calcutta to Boston and lives with an elderly white landlady who condescends to him as if he were a little boy. Unruffled by her quaint racism, he grows fond of her and they reach an implicit cultural understanding. Later, his wife joins him in Boston, and they assimilate with remarkable ease—“We are American citizens now”—and his son grows up to attend Harvard.

Much of Lahiri’s fiction complies with the MFA orthodoxy of show, don’t tell, which allows the reader to step into the character’s pain without having to, as Susan Sontag writes, locate their own privilege “on the same map” as the character’s suffering. Because the character’s inner thoughts are evacuated, the reader can get behind the cockpit of the character’s consciousness and cinematically see what the character sees without being disturbed by incessant editorializing.

—

The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain. Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain? I don’t think, therefore I am—I hurt, therefore I am. Therefore, my books are graded on a pain scale. If it’s 2, maybe it’s not worth telling my story. If it’s 10, maybe my book will be a bestseller.

Of course, writers of color must tell their stories of racial trauma, but for too long our stories have been shaped by the white imagination. Publishers expect authors to privatize their trauma: an exceptional family or historic tragedy tests the character before they arrive at a revelation of self-affirmation. In many Asian American novels, writers set trauma in a distant mother country or within an insular Asian family to ensure that their pain is not a reproof against American imperial geopolitics or domestic racism; the outlying forces that cause their pain —Asian Patriarchal Fathers, White People Back Then—are remote enough to allow everyone, including the reader, off the hook.

At the start of his career, the poet and novelist Ocean Vuong was the living embodiment of human resilience. Reviewers never missed an opportunity to recite his biography: Vuong was born to a family of rice farmers in Vietnam who immigrated to Connecticut as refugees after the Vietnam War; his mother renamed Vuong “Ocean” to give him a new start in the United States; Vuong couldn’t read until age eleven, which makes it all the more miraculous that he became a prodigy and award-winning poet.

I love his debut collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, and teach it in my poetry workshops. Much of his collection is about how his queer desire is rooted in the paternal violence he endured as a child. In a poem about the speaker’s father, Vuong writes:

…No use. I turn him over. To face it. The cathedral

in his sea-black eyes. The face not mine—but one I will wear

to kiss all my lovers good-night.

In his father’s lifeless eyes, the speaker sees the patrilineal ruins of colonialism and war. The speaker forms an erotic identification with his father and the violence of his nation’s past and tries to recover it repeatedly through brutal sexual encounters with strangers.

The public reception to his latest novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, has been sensitive to the intersectional complexities of his identity, a response that shows signs of change. But even as recently as 2016, much of the media ignored

Vuong’s queer identity because it didn’t fit into their image of the tragic Vietnamese refugee. In multiple interviews, Vuong is asked to rehearse his shattering experiences of refugee impoverishment and the salvation he found in poetry. He reassures the public that he has not only sung but lived through his libretto of hurt so that his poetry and biography have become welded into a single American myth of individual triumph.

—

Richard Pryor frames his trauma fully aware that Americans have long been entertained by the black body in pain. In his New Yorker profile on Richard Pryor, Hilton Als remarks on the phenomenon of the single story that exalts black experience:

The subject of blackness has taken a strange and unsatisfying journey through American thought: first, because blackness has almost always had to explain itself to a largely white audience in order to be heard, and, second, because it has generally been assumed to have only one story to tell—a story of oppression that plays on liberal guilt.

But when Pryor confesses to his own personal traumas—the beatings he received as a child, a play-by-play account of when he almost died from a heart attack—what aporetic reaction does he ignite in his audience, who expects to laugh? His stories are devastating and I’m laughing until I’m in tears. In Live in Concert, Pryor personifies his own heart. “Don’t breathe!” his heart commands in a stern bullying voice. “You’re thinking about dying now….You didn’t think about it when you was eating all that pork!” As his heart taunts him, Pryor drops to his knees, then he is down on his back, writhing around the stage, while his heart—acting as Pryor’s inner cop—beats him down to submission, beats him down until he is dying. We helplessly laugh.

—

Pryor joked that comedy was actually invented on the slave ship. One slave turned to the other and said, “You thought your day was bad? Yesterday I was king!” Scholar Glenda Carpio said that Pryor “outed black humor…which began as a wrested freedom to laugh at that which was unjust and cruel.”

Humor was a form of survival, since it created necessary psychic distance from slavery. It was also a secret code to an underground world where the master was not only outside it, but the object of ridicule. In his essay “An Extravagance of Laughter,” Ralph Ellison writes that when whites heard black laughter, they were left with “the baffled general feeling that they had been lampooned without quite knowing how.”

In one small town, white Southerners were so menaced by black laughter, they set up barrels in the town square. When black people had an urge to laugh, they had to stick their heads inside those barrels to stifle their mirth. While this story, recounted by Ellison in his essay, may sound apocryphal, in 2015, eleven women, ten of them black and one white, traveled as a book club on an antique train tour through the Northern Californian wineries. They were having a wonderful time until the train stopped at a station where police officers rushed in and forced them out of the train because of complaints that they were laughing too loudly.

This incident inspired the hashtag #laughingwhileblack.

—

Carpio argues that Pryor was the first comedian to expose private black humor to a white audience. Many African Americans echo her observation, remarking on the “shock of recognition” when they first heard Pryor. They probably felt that shock of recognition because he’s nobody’s spokesman. Onstage, Pryor is fearful, belligerent, hysterical, and boasts about his self-destruction. Not only that, Pryor pries open the deep historical taboos of miscegenation by flaunting his desire for white women. In his comparisons between white female lovers and black female lovers, for instance, Pryor toes the line between enabling and destabilizing stereotypes:

There really is a difference between white women and black women. I’ve dated both….Black women, you be suckin’ on their pussy and they be like, “Wait, nigger, shit. A little more to the left, motherfucker. You gonna suck the motherfucker, get down.” You can fuck white women and if they don’t come they say, “It’s all right, I’ll just lay here and use a vibrator.”

—

Where do I, as a Korean American woman, situate myself when Pryor sets up these black/white binaries? One minute I’m laughing at white people, and feeling the rage of black oppression as if it’s my own, until the next bit, when I realize I’m allied with white people. I become more uncomfortable when Pryor goes deep into the sexual differences between white women and black women. Did I laugh because I am neither black nor white, thereby escaping the sting of being caricatured and objectified? Should I be offended on behalf of white women or black women?

Pryor’s monologue perpetuates the sexist stereotypes that black women are aggressive and manly as opposed to white women, who are passive and ultra- feminine. Meanwhile, Pryor sets himself up as the prized virile black male. And yet, this trope also belies a dynamic that’s a bit more complicated, in that Pryor reserves a secret admiration for black women because they don’t put up with his bullshit, while tacitly acknowledging that the passivity of white women is …