Dirty Kitchen is out May 6. | Photo illustration by Lille Allen; see below for additional credits
In Jill Damatac’s new book, fragmented recipes tell the story of an undocumented life
In the Philippines, the “dirty kitchen” is a standard part of the household. The kitchen inside the home is presentable. Yes, there might be a stove. But often, the most essential and visceral parts of cooking — the frying, the plucking of chicken feathers, the tasks that emit the strongest smells — happen in this second, partially outdoor space, tucked away. The dichotomy emerges of clean versus dirty; what the world sees and what it doesn’t.
This language may also speak to the lingering influence of American colonialism: As René Alexander D. Orquiza writes in his 2020 book Taste of Control, the “dirtiness” and “barbarity” of Filipino cuisine helped justify American reform efforts in the colony.
Accordingly, the dirty kitchen felt like fitting symbolism for “the ways that coloniality has shaped my identity as a Filipino and as a Filipino American and has heavily influenced why my family and I ended up in the United States in the first place,” says Jill Damatac, author of the new book Dirty Kitchen, out May 6 from One Signal.
In 1992, at the age of nine, Damatac and her family left the Philippines for the U.S., where she then lived, undocumented, until she chose to self-deport by voluntarily leaving the states for the United Kingdom in 2015. For Damatac, the dirty kitchen offered a framework for questioning why her family became undocumented in the first place. Like this essential yet obscured space, “being undocumented renders a person into hiding,” she says.
Dirty Kitchen, which grew out of a 2020 essay of the same name, is a masterful blend of memoir, precolonial mythology, and recipes. Each chapter is structured around one Filipino dish, through which Damatac interrogates the legacy of colonialism — which has long promised Filipinos outside the country’s highest echelons that success and stability can only be found via migrating elsewhere — and the resulting precarity of her family’s undocumented life in the U.S. For Damatac, this included physical abuse, sexual violence, and stolen wages, at the hands of her family.
I spoke with Damatac about excavating her personal history through recipes, telling Filipino American stories, and releasing a memoir about being undocumented during this contentious political moment.
Eater: You reference Jose Antonio Vargas’s 2011 New York Times piece about being an undocumented Filipino as a landmark moment for you. How did you think about your book adding to the genre of both undocumented memoirs and Filipino American memoirs?
Jill Damatac: I don’t think I ever saw myself as separate from any of those Filipino American migration experiences and stories, like Carlos Bulosan’s. But to me, being undocumented as a Filipino felt like an exaggerated or radical extension of what it meant to be marginalized as a Filipino, where a lot of the consequences of our marginalization stems from Americans’ and American history’s refusal to acknowledge what they did. To me, writing this undocumented memoir was very purposely pointing to the source: This is what’s happened and this is why this is wrong.
Many culinary memoirs are rooted in the idea that our parents are always cooking heritage foods, but that’s not quite your experience. I’m wondering if you can talk about your culinary inheritance, and how that led to you needing to discover Filipino food later.
My dad, for most of his life, and my mom, in her later adult years in the Philippines, had help at home. They didn’t cook. When they came to the U.S., it wasn’t their first instinct to cook Filipino food and that was compounded by the fact that we were in survival mode. It wasn’t until much later, when my mom started to do better in her career, that we were able to buy the ingredients and to learn how to cook these things. My association with Filipino food was that it’s something you do when you have the time and energy.
Eventually, my mom went to the Filipino store and asked how stuff was made. Even then, I was very aware of that Proustian effect. She made goat kaldereta in New Jersey, and it was like, oh my God, I’ve eaten this. The shared learning experience was that these are dishes that we missed and that were always a part of us.
I started to think that I had the time and the energy to cook Filipino food after moving to England after self-deporting and finally having a sense of freedom, for the first time, in my 30s. Then it became much deeper than that, in terms of using each recipe as a historical exercise. Learning to cook Filipino food was a slow, accumulative process. When I began properly cooking chicken adobo, it was exciting to learn that it’s not something I can just take for granted.
I’m curious about your choice to include the recipes in each chapter. Why did it feel important for you to weave the steps into the narrative itself, as opposed to just doing the recipe at the start or end of the chapter?
I wanted to make the statement that as a Filipino immigrant, this process of remembering, re-remembering, and making new memories as you cook is part of cooking. I wanted it to have the feeling of being in a kitchen and having someone telling you a story. But I also wanted to complicate the text that way — simply because I didn’t want the recipe itself to feel like a commodity that the reader could flip to and just simply consume without having to engage with the complexity of our history and our story.
You frame your family’s leaving the Philippines as a fundamental trauma. Because of it, you lose the parents that you know, and immigration cleaves who you are in this really confusing way. How did writing this book change your understanding of your parents and their decision to come to the U.S. without papers?
Younger me carried a lot of resentment: resentment at not being asked, at being plucked out of what I felt was quite a nice life in Manila. But my parents had other ideas, and they never really explained it to me; they still haven’t. I understand that now, as someone who has migrated from a place that wasn’t desirable to live in for me, which was the U.S., to someplace that was better, which was the U.K. at the time, and now as someone who’s moved back [to the U.S.]. They wanted to have that right to see if a place would be better for them.
You started this book project in 2020. The tenor around immigration right now is much more hostile. I’m wondering how you’re feeling about the weight of this book and how what you wanted it to do in the world has changed over time.
I think with folks who are determined to be anti-immigration, there’s really nothing you can say. If images of children in cages and families being torn apart and young women being accosted on the street by plainclothes ICE officers isn’t enough to change your mind, nothing you read will change your mind. But for those folks who might be in a position to have their hearts and minds changed by the reading of this book, then, great, I’m glad it’s there for them.
It also feels like a double-edged sword. I have to speak up, but I’m aware that this isn’t the safest thing for me to do, and at the same time I feel some guilt that I have someplace safe to go should I need to leave [the country]. Not all immigrants have that. Still, I feel very lucky to be in the position I’m in.
How has your relationship to cooking Filipino food changed since you started working on this book?
It’s now become so much more a part of me. Recently, I was making basic clam linguine, but I added some patis [fish sauce] to it. I now have an understanding of the flavors and how to use the ingredients, even if it’s not in a Filipino dish. There’s still that anthropological interest, but in terms of identity, it feels so much more integrated now in who I am and how I cook.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Additional photo illustration credits: cover courtesy Atria Books; Jill Damatac portrait courtesy of author
