Fortune’s Call: Albert Samaha’s Family Saga
/Book Review: Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortune by Albert Samaha (Riverhead Books, 2021)
"No," I said. I have been reading a slew of memoirs by white authors with trauma/redemption themes in preparation for the biannual writing workshop I host in San Francisco. Not one of those, I thought.
"But OK", I said and proceeded to download a sample from Kindle. Albert Samaha did not figure in my usual constellation of Filipino/American authors. My expectations were low. How wrong I was.
I "cracked" open the Kindle book and scanned the text. I recognized familiar names -- Scout Reyes, "Little Baguio," Spanky. A chapter started with the history of the Santo Niño and Magellan. Intrigued, I pressed the Purchase-This-Book button to download Concepcion: An Immigrant Family's Fortune.
The beauty of memoir is not so much in the author's revelation of universal emotions and sentiments, but in the locality of instances with which the reader can associate his own memories. For us Filipinos in the Diaspora, these memories are part of a cultural archive. Names and places are particularly relevant and carry a lot of weight. The archive is a tool box for survival in foreign lands. I was relieved that Concepcion is neither a make-me-feel-good memoir or a self-promotion of a prominent family. Samaha maintains a tone of humility, positivity, possibilities, and wonderment even though in the immigration game, a bad hand had been dealt to his family, and by extension, the Filipino people.
It is one of the best retelling of Filipino immigration stories that I have read (either for leisure or as a Philippine historian), not a tome chock-heavy with footnotes and turgid prose -- there are plenty of those elsewhere. Instead, Concepcion, a title so appropriate for an origin story. It also "reads" like the author is in a lengthy conversation with you, perhaps while sipping coffee in one of the chic coffee shops on Timog Avenue. Along this stretch of the road, corner streets are named after Boy Scouts who perished in a plane crash. Scout Reyes Street is where the Concepcions stages their conquest of America. Forty years ago, it was a sleepy enclave of upper-middle-class families. During Christmas, I used to visit there for an obligatory pamamasko (Christmas visit) to my Ninang (godmother) Marion whose children went to the same elementary school as I did. Samaha’s references to "Little Baguio" brought back memories of college day joy rides with buddies cramped in a tiny Citroen on the narrow winding streets of chilly San Juan hills. Its claim to the title "Little Baguio" mimics the tree-lined streets of the famous Mountain Province city.
What really drew me closer to the book was when I spotted a familiar name -- Spanky. Could that be one of the Rigor kids from high school? I vaguely remember whether Mrs. Rigor was my brother's ninang, or was it the other way around, my mom being ninang to one of the Rigor boys? The boys were well known in school. As Albert Samaha explains, Spanky was the "S" of VST (VicSpankyTito) & Co. of the “Manila Sound” craze. They were the hottest band in the ‘70s disco circuit. Spanky is one of Samaha’s favorite uncles.
Spanky Rigor performing in Stanford University, 2018 (Photo by Gemma Nemenzo)
Spanky has been a mystery to our high school chat groups, where we trade the latest tsismis and news of recent deaths. In 2018, after a long absence from the public eye, Spanky resurfaced. Spanky and his Young Once band came to Stanford University's Bing Concert Hall to bring the "Manila Sound," much to the delight of his classmates and former fans. They played their favorite tunes, without Vic and Tito now. Like the good old days, the audience spilled onto the stage floor to groove with the music. The evening was like a big school reunion.
Samaha sets out questioning his mother's alarming turn towards far-right views and QAnon conspiracies. As a second-generation immigrant and investigative journalist, he is perplexed by his mother's shifting attitudes. She had voted for Obama then swung to Trump after learning that Obamacare supported the abortion option, while still she holding on to notions of equal opportunity in the face of Trump’s misogyny and racist pronouncements. She blames the “liberal press” and prays that her own son would see her way. Philippine history provides Samaha a better framework for understanding her beliefs. He decides to do more interviews with his relatives. He sees in their stories a concerted effort to make a "settlement" in America, to start their own barangay.
By his own telling, his mother’s ancestral line reflects the long span of Philippine history, since Magellan dropped anchor in the Visayas in 1521. Samaha’s immigrant story begins in Mindanao, in Dansalan, later renamed Marawi. For centuries after Magellan’s voyage, Spain tried to colonize the Moro region, until Spain finally won a foothold on the shores of Lake Lanao. Samaha’s great grandmother, Emilia, of the Bato-bato Maranao clan, cut off her Moro lineage to marry a Spanish soldier, Juan Fernandez. They tended a plantation and had a daughter, Luisa, one of eight children. Luisa married Jose Concepcion, a scion of the Concepcions of Tarlac, a wealthy municipality on the shore of the Pampanga River. Albert's mom, Lucy, one of Luisa and Jose’s seven children, could very well have ended up a comfortable matrona, living a life of privilege in their Scout Reyes compound. Instead, she took a non-traditional path as a stewardess, determined to see the world. On assignment in Saudi Arabia, she meets Albert’s future father, a Lebanese businessman. They marry, she gives birth to Albert in San Francisco and maintains a long-distance marriage – he in Paris, she between San Francisco and Manila. Albert grows up in a Filipino household full of uncles, aunts, and grandparents whose lives he, as a journalist, later retraces, as they ride "the tides of history."
Samaha, who writes for Buzzfeed, has written about his family before this book, especially about his uncles Spanky and Tomas, who inspired his journalistic career. Their vignettes reappear in his book.
Albert Samaha
Samaha begins his story:
"In the immigrant stories I'd grown up with, the two motivations were always intertwined: The ambition was to fulfill the obligation, the sacrifice for family and future. My aunties, my uncles, my mother had left middle-class comfort in the Philippines to start from scratch in the boiler room of working-class America, in the hopes of gifting their children the luxuries of an American life. Their generation had fulfilled their obligations, and I wondered if the obligation of my generation was to fulfill their ambitions. To make their sacrifice worthwhile. But what did that mean?"
Life outside of Mindanao beckoned Samaha’s Moro-turned-Catholic-mestizo grandmother from a settler-landlord family in Maranao. He attributes this to the multiple colonialisms that the Philippines experienced. At each stage, the yearning to be un-colonized, not to be servants, to be colonists themselves was motivating. America was, of course, the ultimate place of settlement. Four decades of direct American rule over the Filipinos implanted the core myths of American Democracy and the American Dream of individual opportunity and possibilities. It's a familiar myth to peoples touched by the American Dream, from Mayflower colonists to Afghan refugees.
Samaha's journalistic insights about this obsession focus on detail; he cites statistics and the United States’ immigration history. Why is it that despite well-known American tendency to turn inhospitable to foreigners, the country continues to attract dreamers wanting to stake their fortunes in it.
To make sense of these contradictions, Samaha melds the narrative technique of memoir and travel writing. As he chronicles the rise and fall of his family's immigration project, he weaves their stories within the complicated tapestry of Philippine history. His depiction is epic. He time-travels through history with his family. His narrative style, tongue-in-cheek, is interspersed with ironic insights of how things might have been, the what-ifs in history.
Samaha compares Magellan's arduous voyage to the Philippines with today’s modern air travel, highlighting the marvels of baggage handling at SFO, which gives him the opportunity to segue to his uncle Spanky’s descent from a previous life of band stardom to anonymity as part of the crew of SFO baggage handlers. With another favorite uncle, the mom's younger brother Tomas, Samaha time-travels to the fateful Marcos-Aquino political duel. Sometimes the associations seem stretched and forced. Historical events are glossed over for thematic consistency, tripping over important details: the June 12 declaration of Philippine independence was held in Kawit, Cavite, not Malolos, Bulacan; Aguinaldo moved the revolutionary capital to Malolos to install a constitutional republic in part to impress the Americans that Filipinos too understood the American Dream.
Samaha fast-forwards to several presidents, until Marcos whose dictatorship spawns resistance even in the emerging Diaspora. Samaha’s uncle Tomas, who has settled in Italy as a sculptor, becomes the center of anti-Marcos activism in Rome. After Marcos is deposed, Uncle Tomas reluctantly serves as a minister in Cory Aquino's government. He also casts in bronze a depiction of Ninoy's death at the tarmac of the airport that now bears the latter’s name.
“Why is it that despite well-known American tendency to turn inhospitable to foreigners, the country continues to attract dreamers wanting to stake their fortunes in it. ”
Samaha's rendition of his family's journey is non-linear. He manages to weave his family’s story within the grand narratives of Philippine history. There is the angst of leaving a privileged and comfortable life in the Philippines (his mother first went to elite Maryknoll College, then St. Theresa’s) and the uncertainty of a newcomer's life in San Francisco. Samaha chronicles the family's boom times and hard times paralleled with San Francisco's changing demographics during the Fillmore district’s urban redevelopment and Vallejo's gentrification. The family shuffles between Vallejo and Visitacion Valley, in long commutes for low-paying jobs. When his mom finally reaches the real possibility of building wealth, the 2008 financial meltdown comes. The pandemic has not helped either, and Samaha wonders where the resilience comes from.
Unspoken through all the ups and downs of the Concepcion family, is the notion of bahala na (come-what-may). This notion is an embedded mindset in Filipino culture. Western educated sociologists condemn this fatalism and risk aversion as detrimental to Philippine progress. But the notion also has a more positive, opportunity-seeking flipside. Immigration, chasing the American Dream, is high-risk behavior, as shown in Samaha’s family chronicle, which is propelled by deliberate actions and the sheer faith that things will be better. Samaha implies that his mom and his two uncles are proof that the popular worship of the Santo Niño shows faith in the spirit of good fortune.
Concepcion is a well-told story of the Filipino Diaspora laden with ironic turns-of-phrase. Yet, it is non-judgmental. In the end, Samaha still cannot decipher his mom's convoluted, yet optimistic mindset, even as the pandemic turned dreams into dim possibilities. Towards the end, he comes to terms with his father's second family and teenage half-sisters. The chaotic turn of events in Beirut, where his Lebanese father built a successful business, have pushed them to settle in America. Albert's sisters will be in American colleges. They want to know more about America, about their brother's life. Even in distant Beirut, the American myth had held sway, buttressed by You Tube and TikTok capitalism. Meeting his new family, Samaha suggests a sense of déjà vu; at the end of his book, he can only say, "Now I begin my story."
As I prepare to launch the memoir writing workshop in the coming weeks, I must tell our participants about the book Concepcion. Not only is it well-written, it also reminds the reader that our immigrant experience is not unique. Each wave of immigrants cuts a swath for the others to follow.
Dr. Michael Gonzalez is Director/Founder of the NVM & Narita Gonzalez Writers’ Workshop. He is also The Hinabi Project Executive Director and Adjunct Faculty at City College of San Francisco’s Philippine Studies Department.
More articles from Michael Gonzalez
