Jill Damatac’s ‘Dirty Kitchen’ is a memoir of food, family, and forgiveness

For two decades, Jill Damatac lived in the United States without papers, constantly navigating a landscape that told her, "You shouldn't be here." She details her experience in her debut memoir, Dirty Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, which was published earlier this month. The book emerges at a time when the American immigration system again finds itself under fire, as documented immigrants, work visa holders, and undocumented people alike are being pushed out by an increasingly hostile political climate. 

"Maybe America isn't a place you flee to anymore," Damatac, who was born in the Philippines and left her homeland with her family for the United States in 1992 at age 9, tells JoySauce. "Maybe it's a place you flee from."

Writing Dirty Kitchen forced her to confront not just personal memories, but generations of inherited pain. “It was liberating to put it down on paper and to kind of dispel the shame that my family and I partly taught ourselves to feel,” she says. “At the same time, it meant revisiting the trauma and re-remembering the trauma, which my brain had sort of forgotten on purpose to protect me.”

Finding her voice through food

The intimacy of these reflections is stitched into the very structure of Dirty Kitchen. Food becomes the thread that binds history, identity, and survival together. Each chapter centers on a dish—“Pinikpikan (Beaten Chicken in Broth),” “Dinuguan (Pork in Blood Stew),” “Spamsilog (Fried Garlic Rice, Egg, and Spam),” etc.—meals that serve not only as sustenance but as living archives. As Damatac says, “Food is how we swallow the world, physically making it a part of our bodies.”

It was only after she self-deported to London in 2015, where she was free to pursue an education at Cambridge University, investigate her roots, and begin processing what had happened to her and her family, that she consciously learned to cook Filipino cuisine. “I’m not a chef. I’m not a cook,” she says. “But learning to make Filipino food was how I physically revived that part of me.”

“Wishing to be part of the U.S., a place that never wanted me, is a bit like eating Spam. I am revolted by it, unnerved by it, have no idea what is truly in it, in its past or future. But I love it, nevertheless. Even if someday, it might kill me.”

Spam, in particular, becomes a potent symbol in the book—both a comfort food and a reminder of colonial inheritance. “Wishing to be part of the U.S., a place that never wanted me, is a bit like eating Spam,” Damatac writes in chapter six. “I am revolted by it, unnerved by it, have no idea what is truly in it, in its past or future. But I love it, nevertheless. Even if someday, it might kill me.”

Tracing colonial shadows

Damatac doesn’t just recount personal memories; she rigorously links them to broader structures of oppression. She examines how the U.S. colonization of the Philippines, from the Spanish-American War to brutal occupation, created systemic conditions that displaced families like hers. "Things don't just happen," she says. "We're all compelled by history to this moment."

Even when trying to succeed by American standards, Damatac encountered barriers that revealed the limits of assimilation. She recalls the irony of excelling at spelling bees—a quintessential American rite of passage. “I wonder what it means, that these national spelling bees are so often won by immigrant kids, immigrants’ kids, or immigrants’ grandkids,” she writes in the book. “A competition for whose tongues and minds have assimilated the most, absorbed culture into our stomach linings, our bloodstreams. Who among us has most successfully parroted the empire’s tongue in the hopes of acceptance?”

For Damatac, survival meant becoming invisible—staying quiet, excelling in school, working multiple jobs—all while enduring domestic violence at the hands of her father. In Dirty Kitchen, she names this suffocating existence for what it was: a life in hiding. “You’re a mistake. You shouldn’t be here,” she writes as her father once told her—words that echoed not only within their home, but throughout a broader American society that consistently denied her place in it.

Reclaiming space and self

Yet Dirty Kitchen is far from a story of victimhood. It is a fierce reclamation of space—starting, fittingly, with the kitchen. Once a site of obligation and exhaustion, the kitchen has become a place where Damatac reclaims joy and culture, hosting Filipino dinners and reconnecting with ancestral traditions she was once made to feel ashamed of. "It took a decade of relearning," she says, "to heal that relationship."

One of the memoir's most poignant chapters centers on dinuguan, pork blood stew, in which Damatac weaves together her experience surviving sexual assault with Filipino mythology—the figure of the viscera sucker called “manananggal,” a woman demonized for her autonomy and power. “That chapter came together through the themes of blood and inheritance, and how families can betray each other,” she says. “There was my personal narrative, the food, the food history, the mythology—it was a lot of digging around, figuring out which stories and histories spoke to each other. 

Returning with new eyes

Now a British citizen, Damatac returned to the United States in January 2024 with new eyes—eyes sharpened by distance, grief, and hard-won healing. "It's a different place," she reflects. "There's definitely a lot less unity—and a lot more...not necessarily fear, but maybe something close to that. And people are trying hard not to feel it."

Living in the United Kingdom during the Trump presidency gave her a certain clarity. “I had made the conscious choice years before to mute all of that news and step away from it,” she says. “I just wanted to focus on not being so enmeshed in the United States.” Had she written Dirty Kitchen while still living in the States, she believes the book would have carried more present-day criticism. Instead, distance allowed her to draw historical throughlines—to let memory and myth breathe.

When asked how she is nourishing herself after birthing such a demanding book, Damatac smiles. "My body is making me rest," she says—a radical act for someone who spent so much of her life just surviving.

In a recent op-ed for The New York Times reflecting on her self-deportation, Damatac writes, “I’m probably expected to feel grateful to return to America. Instead, I feel survivor’s guilt and a sense of love for the place where I grew up, the kind that recognizes its flaws and strengths, but loves anyway. There is still work I want to do now that my time is no longer spent just surviving.”

Dirty Kitchen is not simply a memoir. It’s an act of memory, a political document, and a quiet revolution. After 22 years of invisibility, Damatac doesn’t just reclaim her voice—she plates it, serves it, and invites us to sit down and listen.