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There’s a story I keep trying to tell. But it seems I have difficulty finding the words to tell it. Words are often never enough.

The story is simple: child of immigrants. Born in America. Trying to find a will and a way to survive surrounded by a dominant culture: White and English-speaking.

I have been an “other” my whole life. Born in the late 1950s to immigrant parents here in America, I grew up believing the definition of our new home as one without national borders, distinct language or long-standing cultural traditions. There were two to three different dialects spoken at home: Ilocano, Tagalog and a hybrid: Taglish. The sounds of my home were boundless, without borders. A polyglot of assimilation that evolved as my family grew more comfortable in their new, foreign surroundings.

As people far away from mother country, we were free to make up our hybrid culture within this multi-ethnic stew called the “US”, incorporating our culture into every day American life as much as possible without shame. In the early days — the 1950s and 60s — those opportunities were rare.

Because we were growing up in an era where English only was the one available tool that prevented our isolation, our parents had us speak to them only in English. It was our foundation in school to learn, read and write English not only well, but perfectly.

I also think now they felt it would better help them to acclimate to the new language, learning it from their children rather than to admit their language shortcomings before impatient adults in charge with their often racist slurs. That language divide was done for all our protection. But it was also a loss.

By the time I was 10, I lost that part of me that understood and spoke my mother’s tongue. I’ve never gotten it back. That terrible divide happened at the intersection of time where my mother was peri-menopausal, I was entering early puberty — and not very well (according to my mom) — when the year 1968 began. Life must have been hell on wheels for my poor Dad.

Yet, with this primary loss of connection an indelible, cellular memory stays within me — that of food, hospitality, “making much out of nothing at all”, and the healing, nourishing promise of the kitchen: where life is sustained; families held intact; and traditions continue generations forward.

It is there in the busy, non-verbal moments of the kitchen that the common sense of my mother’s cooking whispers into my ear. That watching my father work as a cook in a migrant labor camp in Watsonville, California, I coded his skill in preparing meals for 200 men a day two meals a day deep into my hard-wiring.

I have difficulty finding the words to tell it. To tell this story of me and The Road Home, words are often never enough. But there are stories within this story. Recipes that are legend, medicine, truth and memory: of friendships that transcend cultural suppositions and history, of family connections deeper than a piece of paper confirming citizenship, of love that overcomes death.

This kind of story often times can not be written as prose, but spoken in sounds:  my mother’s footsteps across a catwalk in a frozen food factory; the sound of men bustling in a kitchen to throw down lunches for three to four work crews of 40 or more scattered around the Salinas Valley. It is the sound and smell of steak fat on a grill. It is the sound of onions, tomatoes and garlic sauteeing in a pan. It is the sound of slurping soothing spoonfuls of ginger-laced arozcaldo (congee) and my grandfather holding five year-old me while I was in a fevered daze.

These are recipes that are stories, and stories that are recipes…for the heart.