Welcome to food. I'm Kate Bittman. I hope you're enjoying being here with us, and if that's the case,

you might want to find us online at bitmanproject.com, where we've got more than 1,500 recipes,

cooking how-toes, essays about how food affects us, Mark's opinions, our recommendations for things to eat and cookware

and books, and a lot more. It's a burgeoning community, and if you care about food, I'm fairly

certain you'll enjoy our site. Bitmanproject.com. I lost my real father in 1990 at the Departures Gate at Ninoi Akino,

International. The Papa that exists now, the dark shadow self I call Dad, no longer plays the piano, which now sits, covered in dust, behind towers of hoarded boxes in the living room. He now lives only to convince himself that he did the right thing in bringing us to America.

That, despite 33 years of evidence to the contrary, the United States might still give us

amnesty, a path to citizenship. That, even if such a blessing from the gods, never happens.

A half-life of secrets and hiding in America is

still better than a full life of belonging and selfhood in the Philippines. That was a passage

from Jill Damatak's new book, Dirty Kitchen, a memoir of food and family. In 1992, at nine

years old, six years after the end of the Marcos dictatorship, Jill

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 U.S. 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.

Hi, Jill. Nice to meet you. Yes, thank you for having me. This is actually

really exciting. So the book is called Dirty Kitchen. And it's a good way to encapsulate what it's

...