In her third guest book review, Kathleen, my wife and assistant professor of computer science at California State University, Chico, breaks down Dirty Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family
During the month of March, I was glued to Dirty Kitchen by Jill Damatac. I found this gem on the new books shelf in my university library while I killed some time between meetings. The stark contrast of the red font against the yellow background immediately drew my attention to the spine. After reading the title, I was pulling the book from its place, thinking “what does that mean?”.
The endearing photo of Damatac as a child that adorns the cover and the subtitle’s promise of “a memoir of food and family” were the next green flags I saw. By the time I read in the front cover that Damatac was a Filipino immigrant, I was completely won over. I have not yet read an Asian diaspora food memoir that I did not enjoy, with Dirty Kitchen being my third after Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner and Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir by Eddie Huang.
Dirty Kitchen tells the story of Damatac’s adolescence and early adulthood, beginning with background into the lives of her parents in the Philippines. Damatac beautifully weaves into each chapter a Filipino recipe that helps her show what it means to her to be Filipino– and leaves you hungry for the delicious-sounding dishes.
In the author’s note, Damatac warns us that her story includes a great deal of violence, abuse, and pain, but she tells these stories because “this is what happens to real people, to real families, like ours” at the hands of the United States immigration system.
After immigrating to the U.S. as a child, Damatac becomes undocumented when her visitor’s visa expires. Her childhood is extremely difficult, as her father takes out the stress of his undocumented life on his daughter, and her mother does not intervene. Like so many others, her parents moved their family to the U.S. in the hopes of better opportunities.
Back in the Philippines, they had a relatively stable life, but the propaganda of the American dream left her father feeling unsatisfied. Once in America, they were faced with an inability to find work, money and time wasted on lying immigration attorneys, and ultimately feelings of failure that manifested as abuse towards Damatac, their oldest daughter.
One thing I admired about Dirty Kitchen is that Damatac does not shy away from wrestling with all the messiness of colonialism, culture, and family. She doesn’t paint her relationship with either of her parents as black and white, grappling with the memories of her feelings as a child alongside her new reflections as an adult.
I think this is a feeling many of us understand as we get older– that things are perhaps more complicated than we thought they were as children. We might begin to understand and empathize with what our parents were experiencing, as Damatac certainly does.
As an adult, Damatac reflects on what it must have been like for her parents to make the decision to immigrate to the United States in the early 1990s. Of course, before the internet, they didn’t have much information to go off of: hearsay from friends and family, depictions of the U.S. in movies and television shows they had seen, and what they assumed from the remaining scars of U.S. colonialism.
I found myself pondering this at length– just how insane it would be to move to another country with such limited knowledge. Of course, people have been migrating around the world for as long as we know, without getting to check it out on Google Maps beforehand. I’m not sure I could do it, but maybe modern life has just made me soft.
Damatac’s depiction of Filipino history is another aspect that made this book truly phenomenal. She expertly weaves a basic introduction to the country’s history for the uninitiated, explaining it in a way that clearly connects the country’s past to the reality of today. She gives us a window into how U.S. colonialism still taints everyday life in the Philippines, as well as how her people continue to resist that domination. While Damatac thankfully gets a happily ever after ending, she reminds us that the fight is far from over for the many still living without legal status in the U.S.
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