“I Love Yous are for White People” : The Making of a Memoir is a short documentary based on the HarperCollins published memoir of Lac Su, a young Vietnamese refugee at the time who struggled to find himself on the mean streets of West Los Angeles. 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.

Directed by film producers Steve Nguyen and Brian L. Tan, the documentary takes you through a journey of Lac’s past revisited after 15 years. Heart-wrenching, irreverent, and ultimately uplifting, “I Love Yous Are for White People” is a 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.

This reminds us of the Vietnamese American Oral Histories Project. There’s a potential collabo here.

“I Love Yous are for White People” : The Making of a Memoir