In 1930, a Filipino immigrant named Fermin Tobera was shot and killed by white men in Watsonville, California, an all-too-common and mostly unpunished hate crime in the US at a time when they weren’t even labeled as such. Randy Ribay uses this period and this murder as the starting point in his new young adult novel Everything We Never Had, which spans four generations of teenage boys in the fictional Maghabol family, covering major historical events in Filipino American history, including violence against Asian agricultural workers in California, labor organizing, exiles from the Marcos years, and anti-Asian hate crimes during the COVID pandemic.
Although Ribay wrote this book for readers twelve years old and up, unlike most YA novels, the adults are just as central to the plot, especially Lolo Emil, who appears for the most part throughout. He’s first introduced as a teen in the chapters set during the labor strikes of 1965; later as a father of his teenage son Chris in the 1980s; and finally as Lolo Emil, or grandpa Emil, during the outbreak of COVID in 2020. It’s this recent era that’s the most touching part of the book.
As rumors of the pandemic start spreading in the United States, Chris worries that his elderly father Emil will be exposed to the new virus in his retirement home. Father and son have not gotten along in years, but to provide Emil with a safe environment, Chris brings him to his home in Philadelphia to live with his family. Chris is married to a Puerto Rican woman named Julia and they have a son, Enrique Lorenzo, who goes by Enzo. At first Emil does not want to engage much with Chris, Julia, and even sixteen year-old Enzo.
The family dynamics slowly unfold. Back in the 1930s, Francisco—Emil’s father—is trying desperately to make a living in California while white residents in his town harass and try to intimidate his friends and him. At one point, Francisco realizes that the American Dream may never be possible.
The others often exaggerate and omit and outright lie when writing home, sending photographs of themselves sharply dressed in borrowed clothes to bolster the deception about the success of their lives in America. Francisco doesn’t want to lie, but neither can he bear the thought of sharing his humiliating reality, of admitting that after nearly one year, he has failed to save enough money to send home and that he’s not sure how many more years it will take before he does have enough.
Francisco stays in the US and each generation that follows has an easier time getting an education and assimilating. By the time Chris is a teen in the 1980s, the Philippines seems like just a blip in the family history. Chris stumbles upon the history of the Philippines when he’s working on a school assignment and meets a new student whose family had just fled the Marcos regime. Chris has no clue about any of this. He has an emotional conversation with Emil, who grew up at a time when assimilation was the norm—and the ideal.
“It’s not just some assignment, Dad. It’s that you never bothered teaching me anything about our people’s history, about where we came from, because you didn’t think it was important. Well, I do. And now I have to teach myself everything.”
“It isn’t important. You’ll understand when you’re older.”
“You couldn’t even be bothered to teach us Tagalog.”
“You’re not some FOB, Christopher. You’re a third-generation American, for crying out loud. And besides, our family wasn’t even Tagalog—they were Ilokano.”
“Whose fault is it that I don’t know that?”
By the time Enzo is born and becomes a teen, it’s more normal in the US to celebrate one’s differences, which becomes challenging during the COVID pandemic and the rise of anti-Asian violence. Enzo becomes closer to Lolo Emil and their relationship ends up bringing Emil and Chris closer, yet these three generations still have issues to work out in the end.
Ribay writes in his author’s note that people from the Philippines first set foot in North America in the late 16th century, yet his novel doesn’t read like a textbook. The characters are strong and lifelike, and the inter-generational relationships seem universal. But the historical parts of the book are also important, especially for teen readers who don’t learn this history at school.