I Love Yous Are for White People

"A testament to the resilience of the human spirit"*, this memoir chronicles an immigrant's experiences of making a home in America. 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. "A breathtaking journey about beauty and love." —* New York Times –bestselling author Dave Pelzer "This is a powerful book about immigrants finding the harsh realities of East L.A. instead of the American dream, and redoubling their efforts and getting it in the end." — Vanity Fair "Haunting, brutal . . . From molestation and abuse to gang banging and armed robbery, [Su] spares no detail in his memoir—and he doesn't regret sharing any of it." — San Diego Union-Tribune