Monica Macansantos has seen her fair share of change, from living and writing under residency around the world, to pushing boundaries in her poetry and prose. The theme of change is woven through her forthcoming book, Returning to My Father’s Kitchen, which is inspired by her relationship with her late father, the poet Francis C. Macansantos. In 15 essays, Macansantos explores relationships — between food and memory, for instance, or culture and family history — while teasing out her father’s personal and professional legacy. Spending the 2024-25 academic year in Las Vegas as a UNLV Black Mountain Institute Shearing Fellow, Macansantos sat down with Desert Companion to talk more about her work. An edited excerpt of the conversation follows.
This is your first time in Las Vegas, and you mentioned that you have been spending a fair amount of time on the Strip. What do you think of the city?
I'm still overwhelmed whenever I go (to the Strip). I usually go there to watch shows or to meet relatives who fly into Vegas to enjoy what the Strip has to offer. I usually find myself there by accident. …
I guess it represents everything I love but feel uncomfortable with about American culture: the abundance of opportunity and also the excess and the harsh divide between winners and losers. I went to one show upon the invitation of a friend. I went to Absinthe, and I got to talk to a Chinese acrobat who said that his life changed when he came to America. He was performing for a Chinese acrobatic troupe sponsored by their government before coming here. And here he bought a home, and he also choreographs his own act. So that represents the beauty of the American dream. But it's not all winners that you find on the Strip.
Characters’ movement among different places — and your own movement, in your memoir work — is a really big part of your writing. This movement may be in the form of immigration, study abroad, vacation, even sometimes escape. What is it about travel that provides a good vehicle for your stories?
So, travel offers this opportunity for us to change our lives, but in my personal experience, it also gives me the opportunity to access parts of myself that remained hidden to me, or which I knew were there, but I guess I felt too frightened (to express).
I like writing about Filipinos, for instance, who felt completely at home in the Philippines and felt like they could be the people they were meant to be in their hometowns, among people they knew, but they felt that they wanted to improve their lives, so they immigrated to first world countries like the U.S. or New Zealand, and it's either they or their children who realize that their complete, authentic selves are not fully recognized by these people around them who belong to a different culture and sometimes don't even see them for who they are.
Immigration really occupies a prominent place in this theme of travel and pops up occasionally in your work. And you're living in the U.S. at a time when that's a fraught subject. Do you find current events intersecting with your writing about the immigrant experience?
I feel that what we're seeing now in public life is a manifestation of certain things we were already aware of, like bigotry, like the unwillingness to understand where people are coming from when they're coming from a different place, or the inability to see the world outside of America … and I think these are things that I've already written about … and these are also questions that I continue to ponder over, because writing for me is a mode of interrogation.
The flip side of that is colonization, another subject that is often the subtext of your stories. In “Playing with Dolls,” for instance, one of the stories from your book Love and Other Rituals, a character named Sarah appears to embody the contemporary soul of the colonizer. Your landlady in “I Do Not Know How It Is in Your Country,” which is from your forthcoming book of essays, Returning to My Father's Kitchen, is another example of this. Can you talk about these characters and what they represent to you?
I guess they come from this very same tendency to dominate and this assumption that the world rotates around European culture, or just this assumption that we are powerful, we are always right, and nobody else can question that. So, Sarah is, ironically, a character who comes to Baguio, my hometown, and sidles up with the wealthy in my hometown and convinces them that they have to go native, that they have abandoned their roots and forsaken their true selves to chase European culture. And it goes back to this tendency, which comes again from the West, to push back against its own tendencies of colonialism by, ironically, telling people from the Global South that what you're doing is wrong, that you can't be like us, and you can't emulate American or European culture. Which is true to an extent, but it also ignores the realities of people's situations. The Philippines was already colonized, and it's not like you can turn back time and go back to this very so-called pure way of being. … There’s no such thing as going back.
I noticed that several of your main characters seem to have a sense of inadequacy or insecurity that drives them to compete with the people around them, even when the people around them don't really want to compete with them. I wondered as I was reading if this was your way of processing something that often happens in relationship conflicts, when people are just unable to name their fear or their pain?
It's something that I've talked about with other Filipinos, especially in the diaspora, how people oftentimes feel that they need their choices to be validated. For instance, like forcing somebody to want what they want. Maybe their parents forced them to go to nursing school, so that they could eventually get a job abroad. And it's not a choice that they've made for themselves, but they want to feel better about that choice by imposing that choice on other people. … I guess it's universal that people struggle to know what they want and who they are, and people also feel that they're unseen. It's also because we all are stuck in our own bubbles, and we all are stuck with our own insecurity, so we are unable to see the insecurities and struggles of other people, and this failure to connect is something I'm fascinated with as an author.
You wrote the essay collection Returning to My Father's Kitchen following your father’s death. He was a Filipino poet, and you said that discussing his recipes and making food that he made for you and your mother helped you sort of process his loss. Can you tell us about him?
He was a poet in English as well as in his native language, Chavacano, which is a Spanish Creole that's spoken in the southern part of the Philippines. He was primarily a poet in English. He was also an intellectual. He very actively engaged with the ideas of the world by reading a lot, by also writing a lot. He's what I would call, and I don't mean this in a disparaging way, a third-world intellectual. A lot of the books that reached us in the Philippines were secondhand and books that had fallen out of fashion in the U.S. or in the UK, but he nonetheless devoured these books, and he didn't just absorb their ideas, but he also had his own opinions.
Returning to My Father's kitchen is a collection of autobiographical essays. Why memoir?
So, (when) my dad died in 2017, it was very sudden. Not that I struggled to write, like I was working on a novel at the time, but after I turned in my novel that served as my PhD thesis for that degree in creative writing, I felt that I could only keep going if my writing turned inward. So, these essays were like a means for me to contend with loss, at a time when it was inescapable, — it filled everything, it filled my entire world. It would have been much harder for me to fictionalize my grief. It would feel as if I were running away from it or approaching it obliquely. But memoir provided me an avenue back into writing and into my grief and my evolved relationship with my father, because I feel that I still have that relationship with him. It's changed, of course, because he is physically absent now, but I still want to maintain that relationship — memoir enabled me to do that.
