Multigenerational stories of the working-class Southeast Asian diaspora in America are difficult to come by. Western history books often flatten immigrant laborers into statistics, measuring them only by the jobs they performed, so few of their idiosyncrasies, struggles, and triumphs get recorded. Randy Ribay’s novel Everything We Never Had (Kokila, 2024) shows the humanity of Southeast Asian men with the interlinked stories of four generations of a Filipino American family, starting in the early 1900s.
The story begins with Francisco Maghabol, an immigrant picking apples in the fields of Watsonville, California, and weaves in the narratives of the following generations, as current as his teenage great-grandson entering the 2020 pandemic. In rotating chapters, Ribay juxtaposes the histories and perspectives of each generation of fathers and sons at different points of their lives. Each father has tried to provide what he perceives to be a better life for his son but ultimately falters in understanding the different societal challenges and personal hopes that occupy each son. The novel depicts how experiences of assimilation, familial care, and masculinity can reverberate and diverge across generations.
Ribay and I spoke via Zoom about the tension between individualism and collectivism within the Asian American community, how communication varies between generations, the movements towards and away from assimilation, and his research and inspiration as he wrote this book.
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The Rumpus: The author’s note mentions that Filipinos had established roots in North America more than four centuries ago, arriving in a multitude of circumstances. What compelled you to begin this four-generation story in the early 1900s?
Randy Ribay: Even though you have these earlier moments where Filipinos aboard Spanish ships ended up in Morro Bay in the 1500s, many went back to Spain. Then, there were others who were in Louisiana, too, but there’s just so little known about that community. It’s all super interesting, but I felt like it was beyond my research capabilities to find out enough about those communities to write about them. So, for me, it made a lot of sense to start with this first major wave of immigration in the 1900s. My family came over in the 1980s, so I don’t trace my own roots back to that generation of Filipinos who came over in the 1920s and ‘30s. I moved to California about eight years ago now and saw that a lot of Filipinos here trace their ancestry to those immigrants. That history is present here, so as I was working on the story, it was very much at the front of my mind. Even the neighborhood I’m in is close to where, historically, the Filipino American population in the city lived, so it all feels very alive and very pertinent to me, even if my own family doesn’t trace to those roots.
Rumpus: Many accounts of immigrant experiences, especially of the working class, are often flattened or nonexistent. How did you research the book? Were there any sources of research that surprised you in their depth?
Ribay: As I’m sure you know, the “official history” is pretty minimal. By official, I mean what you’d find in a textbook or a popular nonfiction book. The historical accounts of that time period—particularly, I’m thinking about that first generation that came over in the early twentieth century—come from independent or university presses. The most wonderful resources I found were community organizations, especially one called the Tobera Project, which collaborated with the University of California, Santa Cruz to archive oral histories, as well as to collect photographs and artifacts from the Watsonville region and digitize them in a project called “Watsonville is in the Heart.” In one place, you have all of these primary source documents directly from the people of that time period or from people whose parents grew up in that era. I found primary information about Watsonville and the riots there and everything about Filipino workers. Often, that information pretty much reduces Filipinos to field workers and doesn’t really humanize them. You don’t see who they were, how they lived day-to-day. The stories from the archives showed me individual stories, and I saw patterns emerge in terms of why people came, why they stayed, what they did, and how they spent their time. I saw their humanity and individuality—the people behind the labor that you might otherwise not see.
Rumpus: Each generation of the Maghabol family, in the novel, has a patriarch with his own distinct desire or resistance to assimilate in the US. Did you notice if societal pressures to assimilate changed, or didn’t, through the generations, particularly for Asian Americans?
Ribay: From my perspective, there seems to be a pretty common assimilation pattern. For most immigrant groups that arrived—the first generation—there is that pressure to assimilate for the sake of survival. And it’s easy for someone like me or anyone who is kind of removed from that experience to judge that choice and say, “You should have stuck to your cultural roots and resisted! Why did you decide not to teach your children the language?” But I think there’s a very real pressure to assimilate for the sake of survival and for what they viewed as the path to opportunity and upward mobility. At that time, that very well may have been the right choice.
However, one thing we’ve come to learn over time in the Asian American community is the impossibility of assimilation. We can’t be absorbed into whiteness, it’s often said we’re the eternal other. I can go to Trader Joe’s and somebody can still ask me, “What are you?” I don’t have a discernible accent, but they still see this person who does not look like they are from here, and they can ask that kind of question. There were some of us who grew up realizing that dynamic and who grew resentful of that attempt to assimilate and saw it as misguided. For many of us, there’s an attempt to reclaim that cultural heritage in order to know ourselves better. It’s certainly not everybody’s experience, and there are people, who are second and third generation who are still fighting to assimilate, who are still trying to insist that they can be absorbed into the white culture. I think some of us kind of wake up to that and realize that we won’t be free. We won’t know ourselves, truly, until we regain parts of the culture that our parents had to leave behind, for whatever reason.
Rumpus: While writing the book, did you discover ways to reclaim one’s history?
Ribay: A big one, obviously, is knowing the history of your community and other communities of color in the country and seeing the connections and throughlines that exist as well as listening to those stories and reacquainting yourself. If you’re able, traveling back to the homeland and learning or relearning the language are ways to reclaim. I know it’s difficult for different people in different circumstances but usually not impossible.
Rumpus: The novel explores familial relationships that skip generations, particularly between grandfather and grandson. What knowledge or understanding do you think can be more easily transferred or felt between grandparents and grandchildren versus parent-child relationships?
Ribay: Sometimes parent-child relationships can be more contentious because they spend so much time with each other and have too much history. There can be wounds between parent and child that are created and don’t have the space to heal. When you have a grandparent–grandchild kind of relationship, there’s a little bit more of an opening because there’s not the same kind of history weighing down the two people. Of course this is certainly not everyone’s situation. I’m thinking primarily of the characters of the story. There is a space and distance between the grandfather and grandchild, where they can start from a place that’s not as wounded. The wounds are not as fresh. The grandparent comes in with an understanding of the parent that can make them a little bit more sympathetic to the grandchild’s situation. Lolo Emil [the grandfather] can reveal and zoom into his own past while also being able to know [his son] Chris’s past, which fills in some gaps for [his grandchild] Enzo. Chris is not inclined to talk about difficult or personal things; he can relate to Enzo in a thousand other ways but not on an emotional level. Lolo Emil can give Enzo those missing pieces. When Enzo is struggling with his father, Chris, Lolo Emil can be a sounding board because he understands certain things about Chris, and that makes him a good listener to Enzo.
Rumpus: The novel depicts the complex relationship between fathers and sons—the unsaid tensions, the oblique or overstated gripes, the different ways in which they care and love. What did you want to say about how we can communicate better between generations of men?
Ribay: I wish I had the answer to that question. It sounds super cliche, but it requires that we tell our stories and speak our truths to each other. On the flip side, [it requires] listening to the stories and truths of other people from a non-judgmental perspective. When you’re reading the story, what I didn’t want was for you to think that Lolo Emil was a completely bad guy. I hope you thought that at times, but I also hope that, as you got to understand his story, you gained some understanding, context, and sympathy for him. I think that happens in real life as well. Like, the better you get to know somebody, the harder it is to hate them.
Despite more acknowledgement of toxic masculinity in today’s society, the idea of the Stoic male figure who has to dominate and control to be in charge of himself and of other people is still very much present in our society. I think communicating, opening up, understanding each other, sharing our stories, and listening to each other will go a long way to help us unlearn those ideals. I think if we truly understand somebody, we naturally come to care for them and not want to force them to be who we want them to be.
Rumpus: Certain anxieties follow each Maghabol man. They turn to different coping mechanisms, like ambition, avoidance, vices, and therapy. In what ways do you think our relationships with mental health have changed over generations? Are there aspects of mental health that are still stigmatized in this generation that you wanted to point out in the book?
Ribay: I think if you look from 1900 until now, we’ve made leaps and bounds in terms of understanding how we might tend to our mental health and its importance. We have the benefit of decades of academic study and those who have gone through therapy. It’s not like we “all of a sudden” got here. Those academics, therapists, and professionals gave us the language to begin to understand mental health and to heal. I am hopeful because you can see those terms being used and broken down, even on social media.
I was a teacher for a long time, and I saw a much greater awareness of the importance of mental health and the need to understand and critique systems—like patriarchy, capitalism, or colonialism—to understand how they impact our mental health. It’s not just like, “Oh, I need to go on walks and journal,” but that there are all these toxic systems that continue to impact people in different ways. I’m hopeful that we’re talking about them. My fear, of course, is always that as things become more mainstream or popular, they get watered down, and the true meaning behind those terms gets lost. I also worry about the way that capitalism takes over and co-opts mental health to say that if you buy this app or scent diffuser, it will help you feel better. Capitalism finds ways to sell you more products, which doesn’t actually address the root causes.
Rumpus: The book explores the tradeoffs of collectivism and individualism. Francisco, the first Maghabol man to immigrate to America becomes an activist, fighting for the rights of Filipino workers, though his pursuits come at a cost to supporting his family. His son, Lolo Emil, focuses on assimilating fully into American society for the perceived well-being of his family but also at the cost of not passing down his culture and heritage. I appreciate that the narrator doesn’t pass a value judgment as to what’s better. Why was it important to you to portray the impact of community versus family-oriented priorities, though they’re not mutually exclusive?
Ribay: I think it’s something that a lot of Asian Americans have struggled with—the Philippines and other parts of Asia, from my understanding, having an emphasis on community and family and one’s responsibility to the collective. Then in America, there’s the rugged individualism, the capitalistic, dog-eat-dog kind of world. The two ideals clash. To me, the answer is in the middle: We need community, and we also need individualism. The balance of those two is key but difficult. What does that balance look like at a practical level? I think every community and individual is trying to figure that out, kind of like a big cruise ship versus a small sailboat. There are individuals who can make choices along the way, but there’s still this larger force that we’re in the shadow of or riding on. Our collective individual efforts impact in some way, the community. It’s important for me to not pass judgment because we are all figuring it out. There needs to be a grace for each other and ourselves. We have to acknowledge that we’re all just figuring it out, and we’re all doing the best that we can do within the context of our lives and our historical circumstances. I wanted to present the characters, as much as humanly possible, with the full complexity of their lives, so that we hopefully understand them instead of trying to judge where they’re coming from.
Rumpus: Who do you write for, and what do you hope to get across?
Ribay: I’m writing first and foremost for the Filipino American living today. I never had these kinds of stories when I was growing up. I didn’t read my first book by a Filipino or Filipino American until I got to college, and even then, I had to find it on my own, so I’m writing the stories that I think I would have enjoyed or found interesting as a Filipino American teenager. I didn’t want to write a book for librarians or teachers, who pick it up and say, “Oh, this is important,” but where a teenager picks it up and thinks it’s boring.
My other hope is that there’s a little bit of exposure to Filipino American history—the kind of history that I never learned in school. This is not a nonfiction book, but I do hope the readers walk away with a little bit of that historical knowledge, and maybe, are interested enough to go off and learn more while or after reading the book. I hope it also gives them the space to reflect on their own lives and their own relationships with their family, especially across generations.
Rumpus: Were there any Filipino artists or writers who inspired you early on?
Ribay: The first author that I remember reading, who I still go back to over and over again, is Patrick Rosal, whose poem I use as the epigraph for Patron Saints of Nothing. He’s one of the first Filipino Americans I remember reading, where he uses terms—our words—that I was familiar with but had never seen in print form. I certainly never read them in school. There aren’t big readers in my family, either, so it’s not like they were feeding these Filipino American books to me. Early on, I also found and read Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, and José Rizal’s books. Those are some of the first Filipino writers and books that I had contact with, and they have stayed with me to this day.
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Author photograph by Leopoldo Macaya
