May 1, 2021
Using the skills he's honed as a Whiting-honored investigative reporter at BuzzFeed News, Samaha examines his family's decision to leave the Philippines and come to America in 1965 after immigration quotas were relaxed; his mother was close to the age he is now when she made the journey. Samaha traverses both past and present, considering how Spanish colonialism, Japanese occupation, and American intervention shaped the Philippines, then recounting his family's sometimes difficult immigrant experience and asking whether it was worth it to have left behind their middle-class existence for a new country.
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Starred review from August 30, 2021
In this extraordinary memoir from BuzzFeed News editor Samaha (Never Ran, Never Will), the history of his Filipino forebears serves as an evocative window into global issues of immigration and American imperialism. The Concepcion family’s three-decade effort—starting in the late 1940s—to bring relatives from the Philippines to San Francisco as part of the United States’ “fourth largest diaspora” meant abandoning lives of privilege and even fame to live “eleven people packed into... five rooms.” Their motivations are revealed through family anecdotes, extensive reportage, and historical records, skillfully mined by Samaha, of the subjugation of the islands, first under Spanish rule, and later as an American territory. “To be conquered is to shrink from existence,” Samaha states, yet larger-than-life characters emerge from the narrative—including his great aunt Caridad, a WWII veteran; Uncle Spanky, a rock star turned SFO airport baggage handler; and great uncle Tomas, whose appearance in Fellini films launched an art career. As Samaha explores “the cost of my comfort,” he reckons with a legacy that’s both benefited and burdened him and other first-generation immigrants, who’ve been tasked to navigate structures of “American injustice” while ensuring their parents’ “sacrifice isn’t wasted.” The result renders an extraordinary look at the freedoms and perils of making a new life in America. Agent: David Patterson, Stuart Krichevsky Literary.
October 1, 2021
Samaha, an investigative journalist and inequality editor at Buzzfeed, weaves a story of his family, himself, and the histories of the Philippines and the U.S. into a captivating, thoughtful, classification-defying read. After the U.S. relaxed immigration quotas in 1965, Samaha's mother migrated to California, where some of her extended family already lived and where more would join her in the coming years. Their family had led a comfortable middle-class existence in the Philippines, yet America exerted its pull, promising a better future. Samaha tells the generational story of his family in both places, as well as the complicated and oppressive history of the Philippines, and of racist, anti-democratic U.S. policies both covert and overt. He manages to add a short history of football, the origins of policing and prison, and his mother's descent into conspiracy theories, including QAnon. While the threads don't always tie together seamlessly, it's a small complaint for the insightful, fresh perspective that Samaha applies to immigration, history, and what it means to be American, all so fascinating and engagingly shared.
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Starred review from August 15, 2021
An investigative journalist uncovers his family's story. Samaha, a reporter and inequality editor at BuzzFeed News, offers an expansive view of Filipino history and the experiences of Filipinx immigrants, who, with their American-born descendants, comprise the fourth-largest diaspora in the U.S. For his maternal grandparents, Manuel and Rizalina Concepcion, America was the land of opportunity. Although the family was prosperous (maids, private schools), beginning in 1965, when the U.S. dropped its immigration quotas, various relatives began leaving, and others followed as economic and political conditions deteriorated under the military rule of Ferdinand Marcos. Samaha and his mother came in 1995; his Lebanese father stayed behind, and his parents divorced a few years later. Drawing on more than 100 interviews as well as oral histories, court cases, and immigration records, Samaha creates a vivid sense of the reality immigrants encountered in a country they believed would offer "dreams and stability." Even with evidence of dysfunction and decline, they never lost their faith in American greatness. The author interweaves stories of family and friends with a wide-ranging history of exploitation, oppression, and violence that shaped Filipino society and culture as Spain, Japan, and the U.S. took over the islands. "The colonizers," he writes, "trained us with single-minded rigor to devote ourselves to their well-being." Even after the U.S. granted the Philippines independence in 1946, the CIA "kept a guiding hand on the country's leaders," including Marcos. Samaha's identity as Filipinx was in flux throughout his childhood and adulthood as he moved between the White world his mother venerated and his self-identification as "a kid who wanted to be Black." He came to realize that Filipinx immigrants "weren't merely new arrivals to a nation, but to a longstanding system of racial oppression, suspended somewhere between those who conquered the land by blood and those whose blood built the empire." An edifying, well-written narrative that provides an intimate perspective on the legacy of colonialism.
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August 1, 2021
Journalist Samaha (Never Ran, Never Will) presents a wide-angle view of immigration, particularly showing how its history, economics, and culture have shaped the lives of his Filipino American family in the United States. Samaha was raised mainly in the States, where he witnessed the struggles of his mother and other relatives. In this memoir, he wonders "what to do with the knowledge that [his] comfort has come at the expense of [his] elders." He tries to understand why his family chose to immigrate and focuses with loving detail on the stories of several family members. He also explores the larger history of human migration and presents a moderately detailed history of the Philippines as far back as the Age of Exploration. In this broad view of immigration, Samaha's narrative jumps in time and between family members; at times, it's disorienting, but it serves well his greater storytelling purposes. The narrative shines when Samaha details the life of his grandmother, who stayed with various relatives at different points in time, redefining the meaning of home. VERDICT Samaha's memoir of his family's experience is a clear, moving, and powerful rumination on what it means to be an immigrant. Recommended for biography readers or for those wanting to read about the experiences of one immigrant family.--Anitra Gates, Erie Cty. P.L., PA
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.