Family Stress In I Love Yous Are For White People By Lac Su

Family In Crisis
Stress is inevitable. As “a state of tension [resulting] from the need to respond to change” (Lamanna, 332), all living things must experience stress in response to an ever-changing universe. The species that have survived to present times have done so because of their adaptability to stressors. With higher brain functioning, it is assumed that humans, with a greater capacity for mental and emotional experience, have the potential for much more turmoil than animals with primarily environmental stressors. In the context of a family, the stress of an individual often affects more than just themselves. Family stress can, for a variety of reasons, lead to family crisis. In his powerful memoir, “I Love Yous Are For White People”,
psychologist Lac Su details some of the stressors and crises of his childhood. He touches on many difficult subjects ranging from child abuse to family grieving in a way that has and will resonate with people who have survived struggles from all kinds of backgrounds.
Having personally been raised in a white, nurturing middle-class family, many of the author’s struggles are impossible for me to relate to first-hand. While I have close friends who have been through more similar struggles with poverty, abuse, forced immigration, and authoritarian parenting styles and I have learned much through my empathy and support for them, it is still not an experience that I have shared. The memoir and this course has helped further broaden my perspective of the immense variance of family life. Whether a result of my upbringing or deviant in nature, I personally have never felt a need to show significant legitimate respect to those with malicious intentions or harmful actions towards me or my loved ones, regardless of age, status, or relation. If this is a result of my culture, it would seem that I am in a minority on this issue. Respect for family and elders, deserved or not, has been displayed to me as being a cornerstone for many cultures, including the author’s Vietnamese/Chinese background and the Mexican background of some of my close friends with similar experiences. Expectations and traditions of respect ideally heighten the levels of family cohesion, but excessive fear and control often have negative effects. The textbook notes that both Asian-American and Hispanic families are more prone to authoritarian parenting styles than non-Hispanics (Lamanna 239-240). This is evidenced throughout the memoir with the harsh treatment of the author by his father. The father’s cold, impersonal, and fear-inducing mannerisms left Lac Su to feel that he had very limited options in his life. The alienation he felt from his family and his culture helped push him to let people like Javi take advantage of his generosity and push him to disrespect and steal from his family, and to join the Kingsley Street Gang and later the Street Ratz in his desperacy for a sense of supportive family and belonging (Su 155). However, the fear and respect for his father’s discipline is portrayed as part of the reason that his downward spiral was cut short at alcoholism and initial gang violence, instead of the cocaine-ridden road that was narrowly avoided, and not so easily escaped.
In authoritarian parenting, fear is often a powerful motivator.
Lac Su’s memoir shows many instances of psychological control as defined by the textbook, such as withdrawal of affection as a form of punishment. While using fear as a parenting tool can be effective, it has been shown to have negative effects on the child, such as a “decreased sense of personal effectiveness” (Lamanna 231). In Lac’s case and many like it, having an emotionally neglectful or abusive environment can leave a child vulnerable to further trauma. Fearful of the rash actions of the father, the family is forced into silence in regards to the sexual abuse Lac experiences from their cousin Crazy. Instead of addressing the problem or offering support, Lac’s mother insists that the entire issue be ignored and swept under the rug, lest the father fly into a rage and murder the cousin. Because of this, it is unlikely that the author ever felt safe and secure for as long as he lived in the same home as either his father or his cousin. Other than the obvious physical neglect of healthcare in favor of less reliable traditional medicine and the withholding of food as punishment, emotional neglect and withdrawal drive the author away from his own culture and into risky and troublesome behavior to fulfill his emotional needs and attain feelings of security. The sense of community that was taken from him upon sudden immigration and the hostile environment of his living situation throughout his childhood, coupled with racial tensions in the area at the time, led the author to settle for several friendships that could be considered toxic. While the knowledge that he might be reprimanded for his actions and choice of friends by his father served to help delay Lac from several poor decisions regarding drugs, violence, and public defacement, a distinct lack of positive reinforcement for good behavior and healthy friendships likely helped guide him towards the dangerous path he would end up following. When his
expressions of gratitude and love for his father, mirrored from the positive relationship his friend Art has with his family, are met not only with resistance but open disdain and emotional abuse (Su 150), Lac is further alienated from the prospect of a healthy, nurturing family life.
From relating my own experiences to those of the author’s and other authoritarian families I’ve interacted with, the differences in handling crisis between authoritative and authoritarian families can be immense, even if the viewpoint is similar. The author expresses feelings of familial mourning at two points in the memoir. While the death of his newborn baby brother, Zeal, would be the ideal comparison to the death of my own brother, the author shares little of the event and less still of the effect it has on the family (Su 74). While still dodging how it affected their family, the author does offer slightly more detail into his emotions regarding the accidental death of his “best friend and make-believe older brother” from Vietnam, Vu, who suffered a fatal fall while they were playing as children prior to their immigration (Su 9). When handling shared grief, it is common for family members to feel they need to be the strong one, to take care of the rest of the family in hard times. In expressly patriarchal cultures, this burden weighs most heavily on the men of the family, expected to be resilient and care for the women without acknowledging their own pain. Judging by how the family reacts to other crises with expectations of strength and maturity well beyond what would be reasonable to expect from a child, it can be assumed that Lac Su’s parents would have reacted similarly to any expressions of grief he dared to share, while an authoritative family like my own is more likely to respond with empathy, support, and guidance. From the feminist perspective, the author was set up from a young age not to have proper emotional outlets or support networks for trauma and grief because of the harsh expectations of emotional stoicism for men. In the memoir, Lac’s younger sister Quy is disciplined less harshly and less is expected of her than of her brother. Authoritarian Hispanic families that I have interacted with, representative of another highly patriarchal culture, hold similar gender-based disciplinary patterns.
Although set up to fail from most if not all the theoretical perspectives outlined in the textbook, Lac Su was able to adapt to his poor situation and elude a much more tragic fate that countless others from similar backgrounds have fallen prey to. His strength and resilience helped him build a healthy future for himself and the family he made. Some might argue that the harshities of his childhood and parenting are in part the reason for the tenacity that supported his journey to a better lifestyle, but it could be just as easily argued that he might not have had to face such an extensive selection of traumatic hardships if he had been raised by a more nurturing family. Nature versus nurture debate aside, I believe that the author’s admirable strength of character as an individual was the most important factor in his survival and attainment of a secure future.