Remembering a Father’s Cooking and Search for Home
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Book Review: Returning to My Father’s Kitchen by Monica Macansantos (Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books, May 2025)
In examining the past, Macansantos poses questions and tries to understand her surroundings. She has inherited her father’s search for truth and beauty in a world that is cruel, fragile, and yet full of hope. She also shares her father’s search for a place to call home.
Macansantos is understandably unmoored when she returns home to Baguio City in the Philippines for her father’s funeral and to be with her mother; but this sense of dislocation has followed her throughout her nomadic life–from the Philippines to the U.S., where she spent her formative childhood years while her mother completed her PhD in mathematics. She went back to Baguio City, then on to the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Metro Manila. Her next sojourn was in Austin, Texas, where she earned her MFA in Creative Writing as a James A. Michener Fellow. It was in Wellington, New Zealand where she earned her PhD program in creative writing. She is currently completing her 2024-2025 Shearing Fellowship at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas.
In her opening title piece, a tender and lyrical essay, Macansantos pays painstaking and loving attention to recreating her father’s recipes not only to remember him, but also to metaphorically bring him back to life through the ritual of cooking.
Author Monica Macasantos
“Cooking became my way of defying the fact of my father’s absence, of keeping him alive in our bellies,” she writes. Her father was adamant about specific ingredients, which made his dishes exceptional; but in the U.S. and New Zealand, Macansantos substitutes ingredients that are unavailable a world away. “In his absence, I am making do,” she writes, of being forced to alter her father’s recipes, but it’s also a signal of her state of mind, stumbling and standing up in the face of grief.
One of the most fascinating and endearing threads of the collection is her poet father’s influence over her development as a writer. In the title essay, she writes, “As a writer himself, he knew how little opportunity our own country had to offer me. As a former expatriate, he also knew the losses I’d endure to accept the gifts other countries would offer to me.” Little did she know that one of those losses would be being in another country when he passed away, and yet, she knows he would still stand by her decision to keep writing no matter the cost. He gave her freedom and courage to pursue her passion wherever and whenever a door opened.
In “Becoming a Writer: The Silences We Write Against,” Macansantos reveals her father’s and her parallel lives as writers in the Philippines and in America. Her father had won two Palanca Awards, “’the highest award a writer can win in the Philippines,’” which he revealed to her when they were in America. (When they returned to the Philippines, he won three more.) Both father and daughter are talented and dedicated to their craft, but Francis endured alienation from his writer friends over a difference of opinion and was shut out of the local literary circle.
Macansantos found herself in a similar situation as a university student while attending the National Writer’s Workshops in Dumaguete and Iligan, where the workshops were led by professors from Manila universities. Her writing was harshly criticized in workshops, and she was shunned by classmates seeking acceptance from the gate-keeping professors, who themselves imposed a rigid social and economic hierarchy. Macansantos isn’t embittered by the experience. Rather, she leans into her father’s optimism and propensity to persist and tries to understand why this behavior continues to exist (see the Philippines’ political history of the last 60-plus years).
When Macansantos travels to Wellington to begin her PhD program, she finds friendly people and clean, orderly neighborhoods. But she soon experiences– her essays, “I Do Not Know How It Is In Your Country” and “To Resist Being Unseen”–overt and cloaked individual, community, and institutional racism. At first caught off-guard, Macansantos triumphs: She develops friendships, stands up to bigoted comments, has an intense though doomed relationship, enjoys the country’s natural beauty, and earns her degree.
Every essay is a gem, and I could easily write about each piece. By the time readers get to the closing piece, they will feel as if they have gotten to know Francis–his dreams for his daughter and for his writing, his love for his wife and daughter, his passion for cooking and nature, his belief in truth and justice.
They will also reach the same understanding and wonderment that his daughter has come to realize; since her loss, time and the world have continued to march on. Changes, both good and bad, happen. There must be reflection of all that has come and gone before, but there must also be a desire to remain as hopeful as our parents have taught us to be if we are so lucky as to have parents like Macansantos.’
She has inherited her father’s search for truth and beauty in a world that is cruel, fragile, and yet full of hope.
In her closing essay, “Disappearing Houses,” Macansantos and her mother try to adjust to the new reality of their lives in Baguio, where they were both born and raised. While it was her father’s adopted hometown, he grew to love Baguio, known as the City of Pines. When she returned home, she and her mother took walks in the city, only to see its forests being leveled and its historical American colonial houses torn down as developers rush to build commercial and residential buildings, overpopulating the once-charming city. Deforestation is the physical manifestation of their hometown changing for the worse. Despite her and her mother’s alarm, Macansantos seeks to reclaim her father’s delight in Baguio’s natural surroundings.
“I don’t know when all of this natural beauty will disappear, but perhaps I can claim the future my father once saw for himself as he watched a strange bird perching beside his guava sapling. I am his echo, communing with the echoes of everything he once saw,” she writes, beautifully merging the past, present, and future to a satisfying, hopeful close.
You can order Returning to My Father’s Kitchen from Northwestern University Press, Bookshop, your favorite independent bookstore, or wherever books are sold.
Patty Enrado's debut novel about the Filipino farm worker's contributions to the U.S. farm workers' movement, A Village in the Fields (Eastwind Books of Berkeley, 2015), was short-listed for the 2016 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing in Fiction by Stanford University Libraries. Born in Los Angeles and residing in the San Francisco Bay Area, she is at work on her second novel.
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