The book presented itself to me while roaming in a local library. I was in the middle of running a project with my writing class students on language use. My students, already multilingual in their home countries, were learning American English as community college students. I wanted to offer an opportunity for them to know that there is a variety of Englishes spoken in the United States, and all the languages they speak share equal values. It was my attempt to shatter the internalized misconception of some students who say, “I speak broken English” or “My English is bad.” 

Quiara Alegria Hudes turned out to be a friend of my partner who grew up in Philadelphia. His family still lived in the vicinity of Philadelphia, and through yearly visits, I got to know about the region’s racial and ethnic diversity as well as its segregation. Hudes told me much more about it through her personal stories. But I got more than mere information about Philly’s populations; I got affirmed for what I had been doing myself—telling my story. Hudes talks about the Perez women from her Puerto Rican mother’s side, and I talk about my people, Korean women. “By naming our pain and voicing our imperfections, we declare our tremendous survivals.”

Hudes also talks about the disparity between life with her family in North Philly and one at her elite schools, Yale and then Brown. While studying “white” music—Western classical—at Yale, Hudes missed her hometown music: at funerals, at graveside visits, at praise ceremonies, at after-work hangs, during morning showers, or from cars rolling by. In contrast to her classmates who grew up with English-speaking parents and grandparents with advanced degrees, Hudes’ elders were educated in various languages, inconsistently. Instead of verbal communication, other means took the main stage in her family’s connection: dancing, ass-slapping, cooking, eating, hair-dressing, and banging a pot to beats. 

At the end of the book, Hudes brings back the significance of the Perez women’s bodies. Although White society deems them fat, they celebrated their bodies as living proof of their survival. Despite their disconnection from the homeland and earth, they carried all their spirits in “one human-size patch of the earth”: their bodies. 

Review by Linda (she/they) in January 2023
Twitter @KoreanLindaPark
Essay writer at DefinitelyNotOkay.com 
Podcaster at AmericanKsisters.com