An Undocumented Life, With Recipes

New York Times

18-05-2025

There was a moment when it seemed as if every memoir came bearing meals: Childhood reminiscences coalesced around inherited cream-cheese cookies; gnarled, beloved hands kneaded dough; each chapter concluded with a cozy, edible coda.
Jill Damatac's unblinking 'Dirty Kitchen' is nothing like this. Fueled by a lifetime of disillusionment, Damatac's fierce book may include chapters named 'Spamsilog' and 'Halo-Halo,' but the author, a British Filipino filmmaker and writer, makes no effort to lull the reader into complicity.
'When you're drunk, this is exactly what you want,' she recalls Anthony Bourdain saying about the Philippine dish called 'sisig' on his TV show. 'In truth,' Damatac retorts, 'sisig is a dish of making do. Of eating what must be eaten in order to survive. … Sisig is what Filipinos eat when all the best parts are taken by occupying American forces.' Oh, and to make it, you'll need pigs' ears and pigs' cheeks, as well as calamansi juice, bird's-eye chilies and sugar cane vinegar. There are no shortcuts; Damatac and her recipes are not here for your convenience.
Born in Manila to a middle-class family, Damatac came to America with her mother and sister in 1992, when she was 9, to join her father, who had overstayed his tourist visa. Her mother, who had worked in banking, was unable to get a work visa as Filipinos were eligible 'only as health care and domestic workers.' The family plunged into the shadow world of the undocumented: 'Add pulverized dreams to water, and stir.'
They shuttled between the homes of relatives, many of whom regarded them with scorn. Damatac's once-affectionate father, embittered by the indignities of his new life — 'the mistake he made and doubled down on for 30 years' — became relentlessly, brutally abusive.
Damatac's culinary memories from these childhood years are not nostalgic. Theirs was the diet of American poverty: cut-rate groceries from the supermarket where both parents found work using doctored Social Security cards and later, when her mother managed to get a job at a bank, frozen Salisbury steak and SpaghettiOs. The recipes that intersperse the text — fragmented, narrative — serve as both escape and reminder, toggling between the ancient past of Indigenous myth, layers of colonial scarring, childhood, the present.
Damatac managed to immerse herself in schoolwork, becoming a spelling-bee champion. Occasionally, a well-meaning teacher asked about her bruises, or tried to encourage her academic potential. But, schooled by her parents in the importance of secrecy, Damatac evaded their interventions.
When she insisted on attending college, her parents were terrified and furious. When she fell into depression — and made her first suicide attempt — she lost her scholarship. An aunt's husband sexually assaulted her; Damatac became pregnant, had an abortion and, when she told her aunt, was vilified by her family.
She lived precariously in New York, taking under-the-table jobs, grappling with severe depression and loneliness. The only legal proof of her existence, a Social Security card, was used by her father to take out endless credit cards.
And yet, she persevered. She observed and studied from her vantage point between worlds. Eventually, she taught herself to cook her birth country's food. But Damatac's eventual emergence from this purgatory — the gradual accretion of friends, unconditional love, education — is not presented as any sort of inevitability or happy ending. Damatac chafes at becoming a part of 'the same imperial machinery' that has dominated her life; she feels shame at her security.
This is not an easy memoir, nor should it be. Damatac writes, she says, 'to document myself into existence.' And, as she says of some of her recipes, it will serve many.