Ricardo Garibay Mr. moon Kim English 02 November 2017 I love yous are for white people I love your are for white people is a book with many meanings. One of the biggest meanings of this book is trauma. Trauma is a deeply depressing or disturbing experience, which lac experiences throughout the book. Trauma affects people in different ways and can leave dramatic mental and physical scars. Trauma also affects the way lac has relationships with others, he keeps a small circle of people he trusts , like the street ratz. Lac has suffered from this trauma all his childhood and he sees how it affects him as he gets older. Trauma has affected lac in the short term by angering him and also confusing him about why pa would do this to him. In …show more content…
Some of the small things that lac cherishes is spending time with his dad, bonding with him, and getting to know him better. “The small doses of nurturing I’ve learned to wait for and cherish are no more”. Now that lac has joined the street ratz he has spent less time with his family. He has lost all bonding time with his father due to both being always mad at each other. Pa has his reasons for everything he does and lac may sometimes not understand why pa does these thing, but later on lac realizes everything pa does is for a reason. The stuff that lac thinks is just hurting him or bringing him down is actually helping him for later in life. Pa just wants lac to grow up like he did. The reason for pa wanting for lac to experience this as a child is because he wants him to be prepared for anything later in life. I know what pa is doing for lac is good because when lac has kids he will learn from his childhood about how he grew up. Lac will change the way he acted as a child and make his children not suffer anything like how lac did. Pa was betrayed by his brother in Vietnam and now he doesn't know how it felt to get betrayed so he is reacting to this by inflicting trauma on his close loved ones.by lac going through this early, he will learn greatly from any mistakes that he made in his childhood. The trauma that pa gave to lac will affect lac in a bad way in the the short term but as time goes on and lac gets older, he will have a different perspective on life and know exactly why pa did what he did. In other words the trauma will be good for him in the long run. Pa is sacrificing his son's childhood happiness for him to have a better lifetime and pass on his message to future generations of the su