Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Dirty Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family

Dirty Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family

Damatac, Jill

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralImmigration & RefugeesSoutheast Asian Cooking

Publisher Price: $28.99

ISBN10: 1668084635
ISBN13: 9781668084632
Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers
Published: May 6 2025
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.90
Height: 1.20 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Searing...Jill Damatac tells the story of a fight for survival and culture in America. --The New York Times
A fiercely honest, eye-opening view of one undocumented family's experiences trying to start over in a new world. --The San Francisco Chronicle

In the style of Crying in H Mart and Minor Feelings, filmmaker Jill Damatac blends memoir, food writing, and colonial history as she cooks her way through recipes from her native-born Philippines and shares stories of her undocumented family in America.

Jill Damatac left the United States in 2015 after living there as an undocumented immigrant with her family for twenty-two years. America was the only home she knew, where invisibility had become her identity and where poverty, domestic violence, ill health, and xenophobia were everyday experiences.

First traveling to her native Philippines, Damatac eventually settled in London, England, where she was free to pursue an education at the University of Cambridge, fully investigate her roots, and process what happened to her and her family. After nine years, she was granted British citizenship, and returned to the United States, for the first time without fear of deportation or retribution.

Damatac weaves together forgotten colonial history and long-buried Indigenous tradition, taking us through her time in America, and cooking her way through Filipino recipes in her kitchen as she searches for a sense of self and renewed possibility. With emotional intelligence, clarity, and grace, Dirty Kitchen explores fractured memories to ask questions of identity, colonialism, immigration, and belonging, and to find ways in which the ritual, tradition, and comfort of food can answer them.

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