This book may have been written for a young adult audience but we all could benefit from reading it. Long listed for the National Book Award, it is centered on four generations of Filipino Americans grappling with identity, past trauma, and its long reach into the future.

As with all well researched historical fiction, I became aware of a history I didn’t know much about—the Filipino migration to America, their involvement in the farm labor movement of the sixties as well as the horrors of the Marco regime. It depicts intergenerational trauma between fathers and sons that is common to us all.

Told from multiple points of view, we witness how the perspective and experience of one generation impacts the next and the next.

The novel opens in 1929. Sixteen year old Francisco immigrates to California with a head full of ideas of the prosperity he will find there. He soon realizes the America he’s heard about is a dream that will never exist for him. The reality is that he barely ekes out a living as a farmworker and finds himself in a bind.  He can’t live on what he makes and he can’t afford the transport back home to his family. Francisco escapes the drudgery and disappointment of his days at dance halls and with the fellowship of his fellow workers at night but nowhere feels safe because of increasing racial violence.

By the 1960s, Francisco has devoted his life to labor organizing workers in and around Stockton, California. He is well known and admired but because of his dedication to the movement, he has just about deserted his family. His son, Emil, feeling abandoned, excels in school and vows to become a successful American. He wants no part of his father’s activism, thinks his way to a better life is with education and he becomes an engineer.

This, of course, comes at a price. Emil is a tightly wrapped, stern father who wants his own son, Chris, to succeed as he has. He is controlling and he refuses to discuss his edicts. Emil refuses to allow Chris to play football and demands all his efforts focus on his studies. One day,  Chris is in the library and meets a student who has come to this country to escape Marco’s regime.  Chris knows nothing about this or any other Filipino history and takes a deep dive into the history of his people both in the home country and here. That knowledge changes the trajectory of his life.

The fourth son, Enzo, is a sensitive teen who suffers from anxiety and depression. The pandemic has shut down most of his world. Despite their troubled relationship, Chris, Enzo’s father is afraid to leave Emil in a nursing home for fear he will contract Covid. It is here in the quarantined house that Enzo helps break open years of misunderstanding.

This could be the story of any immigrant family trying to survive under the worst possible conditions. In the voices of these four characters, the reader comes to better understanding themselves of the push and pull of assimilation, what it costs, and how to weave a tapestry that enriches an entire family’s experience. 

Given the highly charged attitudes toward immigration today, it is timely. Reading a story of the challenges of this one family, fictional or not, might be illuminating.

Highly recommend.