In 1992, at nine years old, six years after the end of the Marcos dictatorship, Jill Damatac—author of the just-published Dirty Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family—left her home in the Philippines for America with her mom and three-year-old sister, following her father, who was forced to go two years earlier.
In 2015, Jill left the US after living there as an undocumented immigrant with her family for 22 years. America was the only home she knew, where invisibility had become her identity, and where poverty, domestic violence, poor health, and xenophobia were everyday experiences. She’s now settled in London, where she was free to pursue an education at Cambridge, while investigating her roots and beginning to process what happened to her and her family.
We’re so happy to welcome Jill onto the podcast, and are grateful to her for telling her story. Read an excerpt from Dirty Kitchen, and get the recipe for Jill’s Sisig na Baboy, here.
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