Abstract
The perception of Asian American origin stories often matches the perception of Asian Americans as a population: homogeneous. In addition to the fallacious categorization of white-collar Asian immigrants and their children as the model minority, the stereotype does great injustice to refugees from Southeast Asian regions, who arrive in North America under vastly different circumstances and face a different set of challenges, often as rudimentary as survival. In I Love Yous 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. While emphasis on the personal is often viewed as impractical for evaluative social analysis, Su’s decision to utilize the former builds intimacy with the reader, emboldening us with the initiative to create a more hospitable America.
Su begins his narrative with the account of his family’s frantic escape from Vietnam via fishing boat amid a hail of gunfire. This will not be Su’s last brush with death as he scuffles through gang-infested neighborhoods in Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard, and East Los Angeles. One of the most prominent themes of I Love Yous Are for White People is Su’s search for home, in every sense of the word. The family was driven out of their native country; they struggle through significant obstacles because of the language barrier, the difficulty of earning sufficient income, and legal barriers to create an abode in America. In his personal realm, Su navigates schoolyards, local business, and unsavory streets in search of a social haven. Beyond this, the author recounts his long-lasting discomfort within his own family, primarily due to the frantically protective yet hostile dominion of his industrious father. Su recalls when his father beat him mercilessly and stripped him of his clothes before throwing him out of the house for stealing money from his mother. The title of the book is derived from an episode when, as a teenager, Su admires a Caucasian friend’s affectionate family and attempts to create a similar relationship with his father by saying “I love you.” His father returns the gesture with adamant scorn that drives Su to tears: “Don’t you ever say those weak words to me ever again, your hear me?”
Wesley Yang (2011) describes the identity crisis of the modern Asian American as “not just people ‘who are good at math’ and play the violin, but a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally.” By contrast, Su’s memoir provides an emotional glimpse into the lives of Asian immigrants for whom such self-actualization is far from priority. Against the hardships of an unwelcoming country and a violent father, Su is driven toward elements atypical to the model minority fable, but familiar to many stories of low-income, minority youth: alcohol abuse, gang membership, larceny, and altercations with rivals. Although the book does not dispel any stereotypes, Su’s narrative serves as a reminder that assumptions about Asian American youth (e.g., that they are raised in home cultures that prioritize academic pursuits or that they receive generous support from their parents) do not override their need to feel a sense of safety and belonging within their neighborhoods and homes. As members of a poorly understood, largely ignored, and unassimilated minority group, Su and his peers were vulnerable to gang initiation as a means to create their own family: a unit that offered the loyalty and protection they craved.
Su maintains a personal tone and spends little time tying his narrative to the broader Asian American immigrant experience. This works to the book’s advantage and disadvantage in several ways. Su does not impose a specific worldview or moralistic creed upon the reader, rather allowing his experiences to connect readers on an emotional level. For example, after gang leader Dragon Head declares Su part of the family after a turf skirmish with a rival gang over graffiti murals, Su does not reflect on the implications of their actions, but instead focuses on how he felt in the moment: “His words melt away my pain and replace it with pride. I’ve never felt so content, so certain of where I belong. I feel alive” (p. 165). Furthermore, he does not condemn the violent predilections of his father. He writes very explicitly of their manifestations as well as his psychological responses in order to present the conflict he experiences while looking back at his upbringing: “In a sense, I had to grow into the wisdom that my father bestowed upon me so bluntly at such an early age . . . Somewhere deep inside the pain will always remain” (p. 246). Su rationalizes that his father’s harshness and heavy-handedness arose from a feeling of necessity to prepare him, the eldest son, for the difficulties of life in a foreign and often apathetic country. Whether this practice was excessive or cruel is a judgment left to the reader. Although his experiences have the potential to serve as a springboard into a deeper conversation about the prevalence of violence in Asian American households, from recent immigrants to generations removed from immigrant roots, Su declines from using his childhood for this discussion.
The book does not extrapolate the circumstances of its author’s childhood to the overarching issues and challenges of Asian acculturation, nor does Su issue any policy prescriptions for public assistance for families in situations similar to his own. Ultimately, the memoir’s strongest aspect is in presenting its primary character, his struggles, and his innermost desires as relatable. Every reader will approach the book from his or her own perspective, but Su’s stories build intimacy and empathy to the universal experience of childhood vulnerability to hostile surroundings. Asian American readers of different socioeconomic and immigrant statuses can relate to the pressures Su’s parents exerted upon him and empathize with the shame of failing even the most unrealistic expectations. Readers who have switched schools at any point in their K-12 careers can relate to Su’s experience of constantly seeking friendship, a task magnified in difficulty by speaking a different language or being a different skin color. Readers like Su who grew up in urban poverty can relate to the allure of crime in both acquiring possessions as well as respect, and the often tremendous temptation of following peers down that path. I Love Yous Are for White People will inspire all readers to reflect upon the hardships faced by refugees in community creation, assimilation, and basic survival.