Concepcion: An Immigrant Family's Fortunes - Hardcover

Samaha, Albert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593086082 ISBN 13: 9780593086087

Verlag: Riverhead Books, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

“Absolutely extraordinary...A landmark in the contemporary literature of the diaspora.” —Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror

“If Concepcion were only about Samaha’s 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 journalist's powerful and incisive account 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 Spanky—a rising pop star back in Manila, now working as a luggage handler at San Francisco airport—and 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 family’s history through the region’s 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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Albert Samaha is an investigative journalist and inequality editor at BuzzFeed News. A Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient, he is also the author of Never Ran, Never Will: Boyhood and Football in a Changing American Inner City, which was a finalist for the 2019 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. He lives in Brooklyn.

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Chapter 1

 

The Score

 

My mom almost got scammed this one time, not long ago. She'd 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. She'd 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 hadn't 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 hadn't 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 doctor's 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 mom's 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 area's 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 cafe 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 $700,000-a world of luxury just outside my mom's door, but tauntingly out of reach. The contrast was disconcerting. As the neighborhood's 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 Beach-dogs 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 it's part of God's 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 Jesus-not 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, "Don't worry, God will take care of us."

 

There was a time when I shared that certainty. Over the years I'd 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 mother's 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 don't 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, it's Christmas."

 

Maybe it was her trust in a fair and merciful greater power that kept her so relentlessly optimistic. She schemed and hustled, certain she was but a winning move away from the life to which she aspired. If she could just patch together the funds to put a down payment on an investment property, or buy her mother's old coconut farm in the Philippines, or fix up her tiny living room so she could put it up on Airbnb without her landlord knowing. But the opportunities never came close enough to snatch.

 

So I was more relieved than anything when she told me she'd been talking to this guy who apparently had a lot of money. I wasn't surprised such good fortune had come her way. My mom sparkles with energy, carries conversations with playfulness and curiosity, her eyes big and hands like fireworks when she gets on a thread you really should know about, like the ingredients in her homemade smoothies, or the benefits of a credit union, or the Illuminati. She's a former model who dresses in pink or black chic, fully accessorized, like she's got a daily meeting with Anna Wintour, and she looks-swear to God-half of her sixty-one years. I've lost count of the times some stranger assumed she was my girlfriend or my wife, to my embarrassment and my mother's flattered, still-got-it amusement. She has never been short on suitors. The surprising thing was that she'd become enamored enough to tell me about this one; most didn't last long before she dropped them, unimpressed. The last love interest I'd heard about had turned out to be a priest, news I met with a reflexive chuckle of incredulity, less at the situation's absurdity than at how it made more sense than anything I'd ever heard. Would it be wrong, she'd asked, if this man of God relinquished his sacred vocation for her? I suggested that maybe God made him a priest so that the two of them could meet, and absolutely they should go forth and live devoutly together. Alas, they discussed the possibility but never felt comfortable with it, and the priest transferred out of the parish to escape the temptation. I think I took it harder than my mom did, or at least more than she let on.

 

She'd met the international developer on LinkedIn, her preferred social media platform at the time. In photos he sported short gray hair and hip glasses with red frames. He told her he lived in Los Angeles but was frequently in the Bay Area for work. I never got a chance to meet him myself. Whenever I was in town, he happened to be out of the country. My mom kept trying to get him to talk to me on the phone, but he was always running...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Riverhead Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593086082
• ISBN 13: 9780593086087
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar