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.

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    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.

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    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.

* * *

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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.”

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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?