It seemed intuitive to me that as outsiders we had to pay an entry fee, prove ourselves worthy additions to the empire, deserving the comforts it boasted.” Samaha, a former defensive back at the University of San Diego raised by a Filipino mother, makes his offensive posture clear early on: “For generations, my ancestors navigated the wakes of distant empires, adapting to distant whims, imprinted with the knowledge that their homeland served the needs of distant people, stuck on the wrong side of the colonized world until America invited us in.
imperial history and its role in shaping Filipino and American identity - and never lets us off. “Concepcion” puts us forcefully and unapologetically on the hook of U.S. Last year, in her prizewinning essay collection “ Minor Feelings,” Cathy Park Hong decried this gap in literature, noting, for example, how Asian American family stories too often “set trauma in a distant mother country or within an insular Asian family to ensure that their pain is not a reproof against American imperial geopolitics or domestic racism.” The “outlying forces that cause their pain,” Park wrote, “are remote enough to allow everyone, including the reader, off the hook.” Different factors - the profitable tropicalization of our experiences by the media, the daunting challenges of tying imperial forces to personal history, the fear and shame that self-censor us into silence about difficult truths in our families - prevent many a diasporic writer from telling these urgently needed stories. Though we shared Spanish words and working-class roots, André and I had no clue how our family stories echoed the ebb and tide of empires, ancient and modern. Like a Pinoy Prospero shipwrecked on San Francisco shores by the violent undulations of global history, André taught me to curse like Caliban, combining “putang,” a variation on the Spanish word for prostitute, with “ina mo,” a Tagalog phrase for “your mother” that jingled in my adolescent ears like the English “eenie meenie miney mo.” André was a short, dark, pugnacious kid who, after breaking my nose on a basketball court, introduced me to the martial art of Filipino cussing.
CONCEPCION An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes By Albert SamahaĪlbert Samaha’s memoir, “Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes,” stirred middle school memories of my immigrant friend André.