Arsenic and Adobo (Tita Rosie's Kitchen Mystery, #1)

by Mia P. Manansala

Besides, I hate seeing someone unsatisfied with their food. It means they’re going unnurtured. Unfed.”

In typical Filipino fashion, my aunt expressed her love not through words of encouragement or affectionate embraces, but through food. Food was how she communicated. Food was how she found her place in the world. When someone rejected her food, they were really rejecting her heart. It crushed her.

But her refusal to try anything new and insistence on me being a “real” Filipino grated on me. As a second-generation member of a colonized country, born and raised in the Midwestern United States, what did that even mean?