Jill Damatac isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything in her stunning debut memoir, Dirty Kitchen (One Signal/Atria, May 6).

Although the book features recipes and lengthy, poignant discussions of Filipino dishes that impacted her life, she doesn’t care if Filipino cuisine finally breaks into the American mainstream the way Thai and Korean restaurants have. (Of course, she definitely thinks it should. As did Anthony Bourdain.)

Dirty Kitchen centers on her life as an undocumented immigrant in the United States for 22 years and her eventual move to the United Kingdom, where she received her master’s degree in creative writing at Cambridge University. But Damatac isn’t trying to make a broader point about the hot-button issue of immigration, either.

“To be an undocumented immigrant is to be made invisible and silent,” she writes in her author’s note. “This book is my proof of existence. One that needs no country’s permission. One that can never be revoked.”

From her home in San Francisco, where she lives with her husband, Steve, and is working on a historical novel, Damatac talked with us over Zoom about food and how it evokes memories. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Where did you get the idea to link food with memoir?

Honestly, it was all very spontaneous and organic in terms of how it came about. I was still in the middle of my creative writing master’s degree. We were given a workshop assignment to write about shoes—a memory. So the first thing I remembered was my grandfather, my Lolo Pedring, and his pristine white sneakers that he used to military-clean every other day. And he wore these sneakers to visit us in Pennsylvania in our first year from the Philippines. He brought sampaloc—the sticky, sweet tamarind—and the memory was of the two of us walking around this suburban Pennsylvania neighborhood spitting the seeds into people’s rose bushes. It’s like my first year here, and I’m just thinking, This is so weird. Where am I? So that was what that essay was. And I ended up thinking, I kind of like this. I wrote another piece about sisig [a fried, minced pork dish], and then it just kind of blossomed from there. When I found out that food memoir is a thing, that it exists as a subgenre, I [decided] I might just play with that and see what happens. Dirty Kitchen became my dissertation for that degree.

I love that all this started from homework.

Exactly. We had one night to do it, and we had to read our pieces the next day.

For the book, did you start with the food you wanted to write about? Or did your memories dictate particular dishes?

It was a mix. Some chapters just instantly made sense to me. Some chapters I really had to think about. And some chapters I had to cut. There’s like five moving parts in any of these chapters. There’s the food itself. There’s my personal narrative that I’m linking with it. There’s the mythology. There’s the history and then the food history, at times. So the very first criterion for me was to use only dishes I actually liked. They had to be dishes that I had actually eaten, that I had actually made and remade and liked. But pairing them up with the memories and the history was the trick—and making sure that the sum was greater than the parts, that there was something more metaphorical that arose from the combinations.

It’s such a great idea—seeing the shaved-ice dessert halo-halo as hope, that it carries with it the possibility of joy.

Yes, it’s a bit of that. It’s like a numbing device. It’s a bit of joy that I think we deserve rightly as Filipinos. I think what really broke it open for me with halo-halo was going back to the Philippines 10 years ago for the first time after a long time. My aunt took me to this place in the mall called Razon’s. I wrote about this in Dirty Kitchen. It was like the most minimal halo-halo I’d ever seen. I was flabbergasted. It’s ice, milk, and a slice of leche flan on top and maybe some langka, jackfruit. And I just thought, Really? And she’s like, “Oh, this is the best—just have it.” I finished the whole thing in like two minutes and it just kind of blew my mind. It was so different from the street halo-halo I had the day before. I realized there’s not just one right way to do it. I think we’re slowly beginning to understand that as well, especially as the idea of Filipino American cuisine is starting to take shape.

Yes! It’s been wonderful to see Filipino food being taken more seriously now, that it can be great street food as well as high-end. Have you been to Naks in New York’s East Village?

I haven’t, but I definitely know the name. We’re probably a good 10 years into this blossoming. There’s a Michelin-starred place in Chicago, Kasama. And here in San Francisco, there’s Abacá—I love that place. LA has Kuya Lord. And there’s such a great scene in London. It’s lovely to see, and not a single one of these chefs is doing the same thing. But the textures are there, the flavors are there, and that sort of Proustian spark is there when you have their dishes.

As you said, we’re about 10 years into this new interest in Filipino cuisine, but the industry still questions whether it can ever be as popular as Thai or Korean food. You address that in your book.

I always open discussions like these with saying that Filipino Americans are the third-largest Asian American population in the United States. Until 10 years ago, we were the second largest. I think it’s a special feature of living in white supremacy to make us feel like it’s a zero-sum game. I think we all, as different Asian American cultures, should have a kind of prominence. [Asian Americans] are not a monolith. [We are] all very different. Why shouldn’t Filipino food be just as prominent as Korean? Although to be fair, it took Korean cuisine and culture a long time as well.

Right. I do feel some things are changing. Like this year, two Filipino American actors [Darren Criss and Nicole Scherzinger] won Tony Awards. Maybe in another 10 years, things will be different. But I think part of it is that, as a culture, we Filipinos don’t take ourselves seriously enough, so then nobody else does.

Exactly. With this book, primarily what I wanted was to not write it toward the white gaze and to not write it in an elementary primer kind of way. I’m going to throw you in the deep end—deal with it. And it’s been heartening to see it be received in mainstream publications. I was thrilled to have a Kirkus review. It was lovely to have the New York Times review. But I think that the more of us there are that write this way—in a way that isn’t pandering to white ignorance—the better.

Do you feel like you accomplished what you set out to do?

Time will tell. I think the book is a slow burner in terms of its presence out there. I hope it’s the kind of book that we read as a diaspora and that will encourage us to feel more pride—to put ourselves out there more and to look at our culture as something special to be valued.

Glenn Gamboa is a freelance writer in Cleveland, Ohio.