‘Dirty Kitchen’ Comes Clean on Private Dilemmas in the Diaspora
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Book Review: Dirty Kitchen by Jill Damatac. (One Signal Publishers/Atria, 2025)
Jill Damatac and her Simon & Schuster public relations director preferred that I not submit the profile I had originally composed based on my interview with her before the publication of her book, Dirty Kitchen. The PR Director thought Positively Filipino wasn’t a “good fit” for promoting the book.
The promos on the book’s back cover compare it to Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart and essayist Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings. Great books in their own right. Two years ago, I stood with hundreds of fans of Crying In H Mart in a line around the block to hear Michelle discuss her book. It was obvious that Crying in H Mart had made an emotional connection with women and men who had lost a parent or could relate to the author’s struggle for independence against the tall expectations that come with an Asian birthright. Hope springs eternal that the Zauner book will be adapted into a motion picture.
Whenever I feel slighted because I’m Asian, I wish I could refute the ignorant remark by quoting the chapter in Minor Feelings that articulates the offense. Just the same… kudos to Cathy that I didn’t automatically dismiss that righteous flicker as another killjoy product of my hypersensitive disposition. Minor Feelings dissolves into your subconscious to make it an automatic reflex to place your visceral reaction to an insult under the magnifying glass of intellectual inquiry.
Dirty Kitchen is nothing like Minor Feelings or Crying in H Mart. It is a good fit for Positively Filipino because Jill Damatac provides an alternative view of the Filipino immigrant experience. Assimilation or “how to fit in” is a challenge that Positively Filipino confronts in many of its stories. Is it possible to be both Filipino in a Western way and Western in a Filipino way? That question is a forbidden luxury for undocumented immigrants. Dirty Kitchen asks: What would happen if you were sent to America without the right to assimilate?
Having said this, here’s a candid review as an alternative to my personal interview. While the review is deliberately void of the perspective Damatac originally allowed, I believe my perspective is more useful in the decision of whether the book is worth the investment of almost 30 US dollars or 40 Canadian dollars and several hours of anxiety over the safety of the little girl pictured on the cover.
The Simon & Schuster imprint of One Signal Publishers/Atria could publish Dirty Kitchen because the author is no longer undocumented and has come out from the shadows. She survived the threats that bar undocumented immigrants from public discourse. Dirty Kitchen captures the inhumanity that exploits a marginalized population and tells us what they might say if they were protected by the First Amendment.
Undocumented Filipino Immigrants Do Exist
From 1992 when her family arrived in the United States to 2014 when she finally leaped over the ubiquitous No Trespassing sign that borders the USA, author Jill Damatac knew the necessity of leaving favorite teachers and classmates with little warning and the dangers undocumented immigrants face without legal rights and protections that apply to everyone else.
A dirty kitchen is the Westerner’s perception of the cluttered, multipurpose space in a Filipino home. Out of this seediness comes adobo and halo-halo, but those happy flavors can’t overpower the suffering. The Author’s Note at the front forewarns us of the terrifying topics to come by listing the websites of organizations that support victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence.
Jill Damatac (Photo courtesy of Jill Damatac)
Frequent beatings by her father, Andy Damatac, started soon after she was reunited with him at the gate of Newark Airport. Jill was this precocious third grader toting the dinosaur novel, Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, and over a thousand pages of horror in It by Stephen King beside her mother, Ana May, and baby sister, Christienne. Growing up would mean growing tragically wise beyond her years as she lied to teachers who noticed the cuts and bruises for fear of having her family deported if a social worker intervened.
At several points in her life, the abuse she endured as a child and young woman encircled by predators left her desperate for one choice within her control. She attempted suicide multiple times with Tylenol as her ticket out of her undocumented confinement.
Survivors often have an acute awareness that gets mistaken for vulnerability because their pain is inseparable from their candor. The familiar consequences that once deterred them from revealing the truth lose their sting because nothing can be worse than what they already suffered. It’s obvious by her writing that Jill has more than once peered over the wall between life and death. When necessary, she can separate herself from people and events as an observer who’s not fully of this world. She says what she sees.
This Andy Is Nobody’s Pal
The little girl wearing an Uncle Sam hat and a smile pictured on the cover of the book puts the physical and emotional abuse into context. Whenever violence erupts on the pages, close the book and look at the cover. Under no circumstance should this innocent girl have absorbed the physical blows he meted on this her tiny body. Whether her father was reduced to pumping gas at a Shell station or stocking shelves at night, no number of career setbacks justified torture of a minor.
There’s a brief respite when her father cheered her on at spelling bees. Parental pride evaporated the moment she lost in the state finals, and a newly perceived inadequacy made Andy fume. In America, she calls him “Dad” as the local alternative to Papa, as he was called in the Philippines. He doesn’t deserve a name of honor.
Calling the police was still out of the question despite rapes and an abortion attributed to Tito Lenny while she stayed with him and Tita Christy after dropping out of college. Tita Christy is a caricature of self-delusion. Victim of an extramarital affair is her imagined fate after her husband forced himself on her defenseless niece. By her logic, the brief pregnancy was a lovechild.
As for Mommy Dearest…
The abuse Jill suffered was also financial. She didn’t have a Social Security number, but banks trusted this undocumented immigrant enough to approve high-interest credit cards that went into her father’s mailbox. On her own with dreams of college, she was dividing a 25-cent Top Ramen pack in quarters to last four days because most of her meager shadow job earnings paid down debts her derelict father compiled on her credit cards. She would never again see the college savings she transferred into a checking account kept by her mother, who was the only family member with a bank account due to the government’s mistake in issuing an undocumented immigrant a Social Security card.
Now that her father is deceased, it's baffling that Damatac still blames America for his cruelty. It’s a pattern that’s painfully familiar to Filipinos. We admire our grandparents and great grandparents for their resilience following the terrifying events they endured before and during World War 2 when the enemy subjected Filipinos to the most inhumane indignities sadistic imperialists could invent. On the surface it seemed stoic when they resisted our urgings to tell us what happened, but as we matured, we learned that burying the past is a coping mechanism that won't treat PTSD. We respected their right to let sleeping dogs lie. How is forcing them to relive the worst time of their life different from the instances when their oppressors denied them their basic rights? We should respect a person's limits particularly when they're probably wider than ours.
For a long time, the living nightmares of her youth were beyond the reach of her conscious mind. And they would have stayed there had her sister not jogged her memory of her father’s beatings.
Damatac didn’t open her soul entirely to exhort strangers to respect the human dignity of undocumented immigrants. Interspersed between the terrible events are pieces of recipes, a sprinkling of cultural symbols and a liter of history lessons from precolonial Philippines. These other topics act as safe harbors before the undertow of her painful journey pulls us under again.
Indeed, no other memoir would have been as welcoming of the Tarabûsaw, Aswang, Mangkukulam, manananggal, and other indigenous monsters that 500 years of colonization couldn’t rid from the Filipino’s dreams. Damatac shows the beauty of the culture in the myth and, as always, in the food.
Filipino food has become an entry point for mainstream America to discover Filipino culture. Recipes for familiar foods, such as adobo, pinakbet and halo-halo have become relatable cliches, but she is following in the footsteps of greats like Jo Koy’s memoir Mixed Plate. There is no arguing with someone who can sell out Kia Forum.
To call Jill’s story an unrelenting series of horrifying wrongdoings would be a disservice to her talent and complexity in plotting.
Trading ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ for ‘God Save the King’
Dirty Kitchen is a personal memoir, so it doesn’t double as the quintessential undocumented immigrant experience. It won’t have anything in common with the account Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia will eventually give of his journey as a migrant worker in Maryland to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
Damatac’s memoir isn’t an escape from USA circa 2025. It demonstrates how the American dream can become a living prison that’s inescapable for undocumented immigrants no matter how desperate they are to go back to the place from which they came.
But Damatac does succeed in leaving the USA but not for the beloved islands of her youth.
Damatac will need to rely on the generosity of feminist critics when they detect the age-old fairy tale of the helpless damsel saved by the prince from the biggest colonial empire since Rome. A mensch of a boyfriend named Steven married her and whisked her to his native United Kingdom. A man rescues a woman, but, in this case, it’s a triumph of love. Well before the denouement, Damatac had earned full access to our sympathy for any exit available. The book must end somehow.
The actual ending is delightful but not as much as the sunny cover implied on the bookshelf, but what could possibly be that cheerful after all this poor girl has endured?
Damatac went on to earn a graduate degree in Creative Writing from Cambridge without a bachelor’s degree from the States. She also attained a Master of Arts in Documentary Film from the University of the Arts London. She’s the creative force behind the short documentary film “Blood and Ink (Duo at Tinta)” about an indigenous Filipino tattoo artist Apio Whang-Od. It won Best Documentary at Ireland’s Kerry Film Festival.
All the lives in the Damatac family have moved on outside of the United States. After her father passed away, her mother self-deported back to the Philippines. Her sister is a Dutch citizen. Damatac is a British citizen but, at press time, she is reluctantly back in the States.
Recently, Steven’s employer transferred him to San Francisco. She and their dog Gus tagged along.
What’s even more ironic is had her family started out in San Francisco, she could have reported her abusers to the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) without risk of being deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Since 1989, San Francisco has been a Sanctuary City. City ordinance prohibits city employees, including those in law enforcement, from cooperating with ICE agents.
A growing disdain for immigrants has turned into nostalgia the compassionate beckoning of “The New Colossus,” the poem by Emma Lazarus etched on a plaque within the Statue of Liberty. One symbol that can’t be unscrewed from a wall is the Golden Gate Bridge. This marvel of civil engineering and American labor from the Great Depression is the first sight in the eyes and minds of Filipinos and other Asian immigrants who arrive on the West Coast. In keeping with the promise of America’s golden gateway, the largesse of San Franciscans, Angelenos, San Diegans, Seattleites, and Portlanders has always lightened their burdens. Perhaps Londoners are as kind to immigrants.
To purchase the book: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dirty-kitchen-jill-damatac/1146384413?ean=9781668084632
Anthony Maddela lives with wife Susan and daughter Charlotte and son Gregory in Los Angeles, CA. He acknowledges that immigration and welcoming migrants were major priorities of Pope Francis.
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