Americas
![Albert Samaha - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B07D3C7LLR.jpg)
Concepcion: An Immigrant Family's Fortunes
"Absolutely extraordinary...A landmark in the contemporary literature of the diaspora." -Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror
"If Concepcion were only about Samaha's mother, it would already be wholly worthwhile. But she was one of eight children in the Concepcion family, whose ancestry Samaha traces in this. . . powerful book." –The New York Times
A journalist's powerful and incisive account of the forces steering the fate of his sprawling Filipino American family reframes how we comprehend the immigrant experience
Nearing the age at which his mother had migrated to the US, part of the wave of non-Europeans who arrived after immigration quotas were relaxed in 1965, Albert Samaha began to question the ironclad belief in a better future that had inspired her family to uproot themselves from their birthplace. As she, her brother Spanky-a rising pop star back in Manila, now working as a luggage handler at San Francisco airport-and others of their generation struggled with setbacks amid mounting instability that seemed to keep prosperity ever out of reach, he wondered whether their decision to abandon a middle-class existence in the Philippines had been worth the cost.
Tracing his family's history through the region's unique geopolitical roots in Spanish colonialism, American intervention, and Japanese occupation, Samaha fits their arc into the wider story of global migration as determined by chess moves among superpowers. Ambitious, intimate, and incisive, Concepcion explores what it might mean to reckon with the unjust legacy of imperialism, to live with contradiction and hope, to fight for the unrealized ideals of an inherited homeland.
"If Concepcion were only about Samaha's mother, it would already be wholly worthwhile. But she was one of eight children in the Concepcion family, whose ancestry Samaha traces in this. . . powerful book." –The New York Times
A journalist's powerful and incisive account of the forces steering the fate of his sprawling Filipino American family reframes how we comprehend the immigrant experience
Nearing the age at which his mother had migrated to the US, part of the wave of non-Europeans who arrived after immigration quotas were relaxed in 1965, Albert Samaha began to question the ironclad belief in a better future that had inspired her family to uproot themselves from their birthplace. As she, her brother Spanky-a rising pop star back in Manila, now working as a luggage handler at San Francisco airport-and others of their generation struggled with setbacks amid mounting instability that seemed to keep prosperity ever out of reach, he wondered whether their decision to abandon a middle-class existence in the Philippines had been worth the cost.
Tracing his family's history through the region's unique geopolitical roots in Spanish colonialism, American intervention, and Japanese occupation, Samaha fits their arc into the wider story of global migration as determined by chess moves among superpowers. Ambitious, intimate, and incisive, Concepcion explores what it might mean to reckon with the unjust legacy of imperialism, to live with contradiction and hope, to fight for the unrealized ideals of an inherited homeland.
Editorial Reviews
Praise for Concepcion:
"If Concepcion were only about Samaha's mother, it would already be wholly worthwhile. But she was one of eight children in the Concepcion family, whose ancestry Samaha traces in this. . . powerful book." –The New York Times
"At the bighearted center of Concepcion is Samaha's desire ‘to honor my elders.' . . . He succeeds ably, putting a human face and history on a. . . community largely left out of the Asian American canon and U.S. literature generally." –The New York Times Book Review
"Informative but approachable, heartbreaking but hopeful. . . Concepcion speaks to the inherently human desire to build something better." –Buzzfeed
"A sprawling and impressive work…[Samaha] unearths a wealth of documentation that runs counter to the kinder, gentler version of American history we're taught in school." –San Francisco Chronicle
"An extraordinary feat of personal, family, and colonial history. . . . Samaha switches seamlessly from the epic to the extremely intimate." –Philippine Daily Inquirer
"Intimate and urgent." –Electric Literature
"Extraordinary . . . an evocative window into global issues of immigration and American imperialism. . . . [and] an extraordinary look at the freedoms and perils of making a new life in America." –Publishers Weekly (starred)
"An expansive view of Filipino history and the experiences of Filipino immigrants . . . that provides an intimate perspective on the legacy of colonialism." -Kirkus Reviews (starred)
"A captivating, thoughtful, classification-defying read. . . . [An] insightful, fresh perspective [on] immigration, history, and what it means to be American, all so fascinating and engagingly shared." –Booklist
"Surprising and complex … Samaha plants [his relatives'] stories alongside his own and grows a remarkabl...
"If Concepcion were only about Samaha's mother, it would already be wholly worthwhile. But she was one of eight children in the Concepcion family, whose ancestry Samaha traces in this. . . powerful book." –The New York Times
"At the bighearted center of Concepcion is Samaha's desire ‘to honor my elders.' . . . He succeeds ably, putting a human face and history on a. . . community largely left out of the Asian American canon and U.S. literature generally." –The New York Times Book Review
"Informative but approachable, heartbreaking but hopeful. . . Concepcion speaks to the inherently human desire to build something better." –Buzzfeed
"A sprawling and impressive work…[Samaha] unearths a wealth of documentation that runs counter to the kinder, gentler version of American history we're taught in school." –San Francisco Chronicle
"An extraordinary feat of personal, family, and colonial history. . . . Samaha switches seamlessly from the epic to the extremely intimate." –Philippine Daily Inquirer
"Intimate and urgent." –Electric Literature
"Extraordinary . . . an evocative window into global issues of immigration and American imperialism. . . . [and] an extraordinary look at the freedoms and perils of making a new life in America." –Publishers Weekly (starred)
"An expansive view of Filipino history and the experiences of Filipino immigrants . . . that provides an intimate perspective on the legacy of colonialism." -Kirkus Reviews (starred)
"A captivating, thoughtful, classification-defying read. . . . [An] insightful, fresh perspective [on] immigration, history, and what it means to be American, all so fascinating and engagingly shared." –Booklist
"Surprising and complex … Samaha plants [his relatives'] stories alongside his own and grows a remarkabl...
Readers Top Reviews
Holly McCamant
Samaha seamlessly weaves his family's hstory into the larger immigration trends and political movements of the times. It's captivating, the sort of book to suck you into an entire day reading it. A must read for anyone interested in the American immigration story, but also the human experience.
David HaldaneFRSjosi
The book starts out well enough as a somewhat interesting exploration of Philippine history and the immigrant experience. Fairly quickly, however, it devolves into a partisan rant against Donald Trump, US colonialism, and what Samaha sees as American racism, though his personal examples of same are scant and unconvincing. Like many liberals, the author doesn't really understand opposing viewpoints and so sets up his own mother--probably the only conservative he knows--as sort of straw-figure conservative whose opinions he can easily knock down. He partially relents towards the end of the book when, during a two-week excursion to the family farm in the Philippines, he actually does make an effort to understand and explain the strong support in Mindanao for President Rodrigo Duterte rather than simply condemn it. It's disappointing that he is unable or unwilling to extend the same journalistic courtesy to his adopted country in which, after all, he seems to be doing fairly well. One last point regarding the audio version; it should have been narrated by a professional rather than the author himself. Samaha reads the book as if it's poetry which, though competently written, it decidedly is not. Probably an indication of his opinion regarding the quality of his prose which, obviously, is far higher than mine.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
The Score
My mom almost got scammed this one time, not long ago. She'd met a guy who seemed promising, a white dude who prayed with her over the phone and talked about business deals he was making all over the world. She had been struggling for a while. She'd bounced across a half-dozen cities over the past decade, started and ended a bunch of jobs, sometimes grinding two or three gigs at a time to keep the rent paid and the lights on, and life was only getting harder. By the end of 2018, she hadn't broke even in months. Her credit card debt rose to sums she would only whisper to me, even when nobody else was around. The temp agency she was working for hadn't given her an assignment in weeks. On the last, filing papers for a property management company at a Section 8 apartment complex, a tenant had threatened to shoot up the place after learning he was getting evicted. My mom was so scared that her boss let her go home early. "OMG, what a stress," she had texted me, punctuating the message with an emoji of a frowning face with a bead of sweat dripping from its forehead.
She was living in San Francisco now, in the cramped ground-floor unit of a creaky two-story duplex that had been in our family for decades. Her landlord, her cousin-in-law, kept the rent at a family discount. The space had once been a doctor's office, and it was drafty and narrow. When I visited from New York, as I did once or twice a year, I slept on the couch bundled in a hoodie, nodding off to the Gregorian chants coming from the boom box in my mom's bedroom.
The neighborhood used to be known as the Fillmore District, or the Western Addition, but newcomers call it NoPa, for "north of the Panhandle," because the developers buying up the housing stock and the brokers writing the listings want to distance their increasingly valuable buildings from the area's reputation as a historically Black community. In recent years the area began sprouting the amenities you might expect from a place with a name like NoPa: a cafe serving seven-dollar toast, a bar decorated with surrealist art available for purchase, a three-floor entertainment center featuring vintage arcade games, one-bedroom condos going for $700,000-a world of luxury just outside my mom's door, but tauntingly out of reach. The contrast was disconcerting. As the neighborhood's prospects brightened, hers only dimmed.
She always assured me she was doing fine. She described her days to me as simple and peaceful, and as evidence sent me photos from her early morning walks on Ocean Beach-dogs splashing in the tide, jellyfish washed ashore, messages she wrote in the sand, like "Happy Birthday, Jesus!" with a heart dotting the exclamation point. She collected shells, stones, and sand dollars, some for their unusual colors, some for their smooth, perfect form, some because they bore marks in which she saw the face of Christ. My mother saw miracles everywhere.
When she was a kid back in the Philippines, her own mother would wake her and her brothers and sisters at three a.m. on each of the nine days leading up to Christmas, to walk thirty minutes in the dark to a packed church where they would pray the novenas; by the fourth or fifth day, my mom was the only one of the children who could be gotten out of bed. Anytime something good happens, my mom says, "Praise the Lord!" and anytime something bad happens, she says it's part of God's plan. She goes to church six days a week, and on Good Friday she hibernates in prayer from noon to three, the hours Christ hung on the cross. Every time she moves, she has a priest bless her new home with holy water, and when she drives, she listens to a Catholic AM radio station or Christian rock CDs. The background on her cell phone is a portrait of Jesus-not a Renaissance classic or an image of suffering, but a handsome, square-jawed, smiling white Jesus with romance-novel hair. Whenever I express concern or apprehension about anything big or small, her response is, "Don't worry, God will take care of us."
There was a time when I shared that certainty. Over the years I'd come to doubt that tribulations have greater purpose, that justice awaits the righteous, that misfortune is the product of anything but human malevolence or sheer chance. But I kept this to myself. Why undermine my mother's hope if I had no alternative to offer? Instead, I concentrated on solutions. More and more, our phone calls and texts focused on ways to address her money problems. More and more, I worried about...
The Score
My mom almost got scammed this one time, not long ago. She'd met a guy who seemed promising, a white dude who prayed with her over the phone and talked about business deals he was making all over the world. She had been struggling for a while. She'd bounced across a half-dozen cities over the past decade, started and ended a bunch of jobs, sometimes grinding two or three gigs at a time to keep the rent paid and the lights on, and life was only getting harder. By the end of 2018, she hadn't broke even in months. Her credit card debt rose to sums she would only whisper to me, even when nobody else was around. The temp agency she was working for hadn't given her an assignment in weeks. On the last, filing papers for a property management company at a Section 8 apartment complex, a tenant had threatened to shoot up the place after learning he was getting evicted. My mom was so scared that her boss let her go home early. "OMG, what a stress," she had texted me, punctuating the message with an emoji of a frowning face with a bead of sweat dripping from its forehead.
She was living in San Francisco now, in the cramped ground-floor unit of a creaky two-story duplex that had been in our family for decades. Her landlord, her cousin-in-law, kept the rent at a family discount. The space had once been a doctor's office, and it was drafty and narrow. When I visited from New York, as I did once or twice a year, I slept on the couch bundled in a hoodie, nodding off to the Gregorian chants coming from the boom box in my mom's bedroom.
The neighborhood used to be known as the Fillmore District, or the Western Addition, but newcomers call it NoPa, for "north of the Panhandle," because the developers buying up the housing stock and the brokers writing the listings want to distance their increasingly valuable buildings from the area's reputation as a historically Black community. In recent years the area began sprouting the amenities you might expect from a place with a name like NoPa: a cafe serving seven-dollar toast, a bar decorated with surrealist art available for purchase, a three-floor entertainment center featuring vintage arcade games, one-bedroom condos going for $700,000-a world of luxury just outside my mom's door, but tauntingly out of reach. The contrast was disconcerting. As the neighborhood's prospects brightened, hers only dimmed.
She always assured me she was doing fine. She described her days to me as simple and peaceful, and as evidence sent me photos from her early morning walks on Ocean Beach-dogs splashing in the tide, jellyfish washed ashore, messages she wrote in the sand, like "Happy Birthday, Jesus!" with a heart dotting the exclamation point. She collected shells, stones, and sand dollars, some for their unusual colors, some for their smooth, perfect form, some because they bore marks in which she saw the face of Christ. My mother saw miracles everywhere.
When she was a kid back in the Philippines, her own mother would wake her and her brothers and sisters at three a.m. on each of the nine days leading up to Christmas, to walk thirty minutes in the dark to a packed church where they would pray the novenas; by the fourth or fifth day, my mom was the only one of the children who could be gotten out of bed. Anytime something good happens, my mom says, "Praise the Lord!" and anytime something bad happens, she says it's part of God's plan. She goes to church six days a week, and on Good Friday she hibernates in prayer from noon to three, the hours Christ hung on the cross. Every time she moves, she has a priest bless her new home with holy water, and when she drives, she listens to a Catholic AM radio station or Christian rock CDs. The background on her cell phone is a portrait of Jesus-not a Renaissance classic or an image of suffering, but a handsome, square-jawed, smiling white Jesus with romance-novel hair. Whenever I express concern or apprehension about anything big or small, her response is, "Don't worry, God will take care of us."
There was a time when I shared that certainty. Over the years I'd come to doubt that tribulations have greater purpose, that justice awaits the righteous, that misfortune is the product of anything but human malevolence or sheer chance. But I kept this to myself. Why undermine my mother's hope if I had no alternative to offer? Instead, I concentrated on solutions. More and more, our phone calls and texts focused on ways to address her money problems. More and more, I worried about...
