I Love Yous Are for White People: A Memoir (P.S.)

As a young child, Lac Su made a harrowing escape from the Communists in Vietnam. With a price on his father's head, Lac, with his family, was forced to immigrate in 1979 to seedy West Los Angeles where squalid living conditions and a cultural fabric that refused to thread them in effectively squashed their American Dream. Lac's search for love and acceptance amid poverty—not to mention the psychological turmoil created by a harsh and unrelenting father—turned his young life into a comedy of errors and led him to a dangerous gang experience that threatened to tear his life apart. Heart-wrenching, irreverent, and ultimately uplifting, I Love Yous Are for White People is memoir at its most affecting, depicting the struggles that countless individuals have faced in their quest to belong and that even more have endured in pursuit of a father's fleeting affection. "In I Love You Are for White People , author Lac Su offers a face--his face--as a window into the experiences of impoverished Asian refugees. Su recounts the formative events of his childhood and adolescence, all of which bear the theme of searching for love and community within the confines of racial identity and socioeconomic status. From an academic perspective, many facets of Su's memoir are pregnant with social commentary but Su maintains focus on the humanistic aspects of his family's stories . . . emboldening us with the initiative to create a more hospitable America." - Leung, Chung (2014) "Book Review: I Love Yous Are for White People," Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences: Vol. 36, Article 2.Stanford University, CA, USA Traces the author's experiences as an Asian-American immigrant as well as his efforts to understand his identity and transcend the dangers of gang life in Los Angeles, in a personal account that describes his early life in Vietnam, his devastation at thecontrast between real life and his impressions about the American dream, and his educational pursuits Heart-wrenching and ultimately uplifting, this stirring memoir chronicles one Asian-American immigrant's struggle to find himself--and to transcend the dangers of gang life in Los Angeles