Everything We Never Had
As the Covid-19 pandemic makes its way around the world and to his Philadelphia home, Filipino American high-school sophomore Enzo Maghabol doomscrolls through his social media accounts while learning that his temperamental grandfather, Emil, will be moving from assisted living into Enzo’s bedroom to avoid catching the deadly virus. School closes down, isolating Enzo from his social support, and he watches his father, Chris, fight constantly with Emil. But the teenager wants a relationship with his grandfather, and his efforts lead to a greater understanding of his family’s history over four generations, including the traumatic event before Enzo was born that gave him his name.
Filipino American author Ribay uses four separate timelines to tell the story of the Maghabol men. The first is that of immigrant Francisco, Emil’s father, who becomes a labor organizer after experiencing exploitative conditions and deadly racism in the orchards of California’s Central Valley in 1930. Thirty-five years later, Emil (originally named Emilio) rejects his father’s activism, choosing the path of assimilation and prosperity at any cost. To pay for college, he works at his aunt’s restaurant, which she acquired cheaply in the early 1940s from a Japanese American family sent to an internment camp, a small but revealing detail. Emil marries a white schoolmate and moves to Denver, where in 1983 his son Chris uses a school assignment to learn the family history that his father denied him.
In elegant prose, Ribay explores the theme of fathers seeking to give their sons everything they never had—dignity, economic security, connection, love. The result is a thoughtful and emotionally powerful tale of what it means to be an immigrant, a parent, and a boy coming of age over the past 90 years in the United States. Young adult.
