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Albert Samaha - Concepcion: An Immigrant Familys Fortunes

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Albert Samaha Concepcion: An Immigrant Familys Fortunes
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Concepcion: An Immigrant Familys Fortunes: summary, description and annotation

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Absolutely extraordinary...A landmark in the contemporary literature of the diaspora. Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror
If Concepcion were only about Samahas mother, it would already be wholly worthwhile. But she was one of eight children in the Concepcion family, whose ancestry Samaha traces in this. . . powerful book. The New York Times
A journalists powerful and incisive account of the forces steering the fate of his sprawling Filipino American family reframes how we comprehend the immigrant experience

Nearing the age at which his mother had migrated to the US, part of the wave of non-Europeans who arrived after immigration quotas were relaxed in 1965, Albert Samaha began to question the ironclad belief in a better future that had inspired her family to uproot themselves from their birthplace. As she, her brother Spankya rising pop star back in Manila, now working as a luggage handler at San Francisco airportand others of their generation struggled with setbacks amid mounting instability that seemed to keep prosperity ever out of reach, he wondered whether their decision to abandon a middle-class existence in the Philippines had been worth the cost.
Tracing his familys history through the regions unique geopolitical roots in Spanish colonialism, American intervention, and Japanese occupation, Samaha fits their arc into the wider story of global migration as determined by chess moves among superpowers. Ambitious, intimate, and incisive, Concepcion explores what it might mean to reckon with the unjust legacy of imperialism, to live with contradiction and hope, to fight for the unrealized ideals of an inherited homeland.

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RIVERHEAD BOOKS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhousecom - photo 1
RIVERHEAD BOOKS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhousecom - photo 2

RIVERHEAD BOOKS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhousecom - photo 3

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

penguinrandomhouse.com

Copyright 2021 by Albert Samaha Penguin supports copyright Copyright fuels - photo 4

Copyright 2021 by Albert Samaha

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Riverhead and the R colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Samaha, Albert, author.

Title: Concepcion : an immigrant familys fortunes / Albert Samaha.

Other titles: Immigrant familys fortunes

Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021013641 (print) | LCCN 2021013642 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593086087 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593086100 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Concepcion family. | Samaha, AlbertFamily. | Filipino AmericansCaliforniaSan FranciscoBiography. | Filipino AmericansCaliforniaSan FranciscoHistory20th century. | ImmigrantsCaliforniaSan FranciscoBiography. | San Francisco (Calif.)Biography. | Mindanao Island (Philippines)Biography. | Mindanao Island (Philippines)Politics and government.

Classification: LCC F869.S39 F436 2021 (print) | LCC F869.S39 (ebook) | DDC 929.20973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013641

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013642

International edition ISBN: 9780593421222

Cover design: Lauren Peters-Collaer

Cover images: (face) Pictures from History / Bridgeman Images; (tree) Purix Verlag Volker Christen / Bridgeman Images; (family photograph) Courtesy of the author

Book design by Lucia Bernard, adapted for ebook by Maggie Hunt

pid_prh_5.8.0_c0_r0

For Tia, Chlo, Bella, and Maa

Without willing it I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being - photo 5

Without willing it, I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant, to being aware of being aware. And the worst part of my awareness was that I didnt know what I was aware of.

Maya Angelou , I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Why was America so kind and yet so cruel?

Carlos Bulosan , America Is in the Heart

Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side of the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.

George Orwell , England Your England

You who are to see the dawn, welcome it, and do not forget those who fell during the night.

Jos Rizal , Noli Me Tngere

Contents Chapter 1 The Score My mom almost got scammed this one time not long - photo 6

Contents
Chapter 1
The Score

My mom almost got scammed this one time, not long ago. Shed met a guy who seemed promising, a white dude who prayed with her over the phone and talked about business deals he was making all over the world. She had been struggling for a while. Shed bounced across a half-dozen cities over the past decade, started and ended a bunch of jobs, sometimes grinding two or three gigs at a time to keep the rent paid and the lights on, and life was only getting harder. By the end of 2018, she hadnt broke even in months. Her credit card debt rose to sums she would only whisper to me, even when nobody else was around. The temp agency she was working for hadnt given her an assignment in weeks. On the last, filing papers for a property management company at a Section 8 apartment complex, a tenant had threatened to shoot up the place after learning he was getting evicted. My mom was so scared that her boss let her go home early. OMG, what a stress, she had texted me, punctuating the message with an emoji of a frowning face with a bead of sweat dripping from its forehead.

She was living in San Francisco now, in the cramped ground-floor unit of a creaky two-story duplex that had been in our family for decades. Her landlord, her cousin-in-law, kept the rent at a family discount. The space had once been a doctors office, and it was drafty and narrow. When I visited from New York, as I did once or twice a year, I slept on the couch bundled in a hoodie, nodding off to the Gregorian chants coming from the boom box in my moms bedroom.

The neighborhood used to be known as the Fillmore District, or the Western Addition, but newcomers call it NoPa, for north of the Panhandle, because the developers buying up the housing stock and the brokers writing the listings want to distance their increasingly valuable buildings from the areas reputation as a historically Black community. In recent years the area began sprouting the amenities you might expect from a place with a name like NoPa: a caf serving seven-dollar toast, a bar decorated with surrealist art available for purchase, a three-floor entertainment center featuring vintage arcade games, one-bedroom condos going for $700,000a world of luxury just outside my moms door, but tauntingly out of reach. The contrast was disconcerting. As the neighborhoods prospects brightened, hers only dimmed.

She always assured me she was doing fine. She described her days to me as simple and peaceful, and as evidence sent me photos from her early morning walks on Ocean Beachdogs splashing in the tide, jellyfish washed ashore, messages she wrote in the sand, like Happy Birthday, Jesus! with a heart dotting the exclamation point. She collected shells, stones, and sand dollars, some for their unusual colors, some for their smooth, perfect form, some because they bore marks in which she saw the face of Christ. My mother saw miracles everywhere.

When she was a kid back in the Philippines, her own mother would wake her and her brothers and sisters at three a.m. on each of the nine days leading up to Christmas, to walk thirty minutes in the dark to a packed church where they would pray the novenas; by the fourth or fifth day, my mom was the only one of the children who could be gotten out of bed. Anytime something good happens, my mom says, Praise the Lord! and anytime something bad happens, she says its part of Gods plan. She goes to church six days a week, and on Good Friday she hibernates in prayer from noon to three, the hours Christ hung on the cross. Every time she moves, she has a priest bless her new home with holy water, and when she drives, she listens to a Catholic AM radio station or Christian rock CDs. The background on her cell phone is a portrait of Jesusnot a Renaissance classic or an image of suffering, but a handsome, square-jawed, smiling white Jesus with romance-novel hair. Whenever I express concern or apprehension about anything big or small, her response is, Dont worry, God will take care of us.

There was a time when I shared that certainty. Over the years Id come to doubt that tribulations have greater purpose, that justice awaits the righteous, that misfortune is the product of anything but human malevolence or sheer chance. But I kept this to myself. Why undermine my mothers hope if I had no alternative to offer? Instead, I concentrated on solutions. More and more, our phone calls and texts focused on ways to address her money problems. More and more, I worried about her. Sometimes, shamefully and selfishly, I took out my frustration on her, hardening my voice as if I were the parent and she were a wayward child. Why had she quit a job that seemed stable, even if the boss was an asshole? Why had she left her purse in the backseat of her car, for someone to steal? One Christmas morning when I was back visiting her in California, I saw her put a fifty-dollar bill in the collection plate at church. I shot her a harsh look. Dang, Mom! You dont gotta give em all that! She countered my show of disapproval with an icy glare of true parental force, the one that says, Boy, you better check yourself, although all she said was, Albert, its Christmas.

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