Mia Manansala Believes Food Always Tells a Personal Story

Anthony Ocampo interviews Mia Manansala about her “Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery Series,” writing immigrant narratives beyond trauma, and—of course—food.

Mia Manansala was ten years old when she fell in love with mysteries. As an employee at Waldenbooks, the bookstore chain, Manansala’s mother brought home new mystery books every week for her daughter to devour. Then her mother got a job at the public library restocking books in the fiction section, which is how Mia was introduced to cozies like Joanne Fluke’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder.

It wasn’t until Manansala was in her late twenties that she even considered writing one herself. After a three-and-a-half year stint teaching English in Korea, she returned home to Chicago and experienced what she called a “quarter-life crisis.” On a whim, she enrolled in her first-ever creative writing class with award-winning mystery writer Lori Rader-Day, who told Manansala. “I think you’re a mystery writer.”

In 2015, Manansala started writing culinary cozies because it combined her two favorite things: mystery books and food. She secured a three-book deal with Berkley/Penguin Random House for her “Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery Series,” which centers the story of Lila Macapagal, a Filipina American who returns home to the small town of Shady Pines, after spending her early twenties in Chicago (the series has recently been expanded to a six-book deal). The first two novels Arsenic and Adobo and Homicide and Halo-Halo were released during the pandemic (in May 2021 and February 2022), and the third book in the series Blackmail and Bibingka comes out in October 2022.

From her ube-colored-walled home office, Manansala and I spoke over Zoom about Filipino American underrepresentation in publishing and the food industry, and how her books are a Trojan horse introducing Filipino cuisine and culture to the broader public. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Anthony Ocampo: When reading Adobo and Arsenic and Homicide and Halo-Halo, I noticed something. When talking about Filipino food, you provided succinct descriptions. For example, sinigang is “a delicious, tangy soup that manages to be both comforting and refreshing” and lumpiang shanghai is “meat-filled fried spring rolls.” Other times though, you left Filipino vernaculars—Ninang (godmother), tsismis (gossip), or phrases like “Diyos ko!” (My God!)—undefined. I’m wondering how you navigated the choice to explain or not explain these terms.

Mia Manansala: It was honestly tough. Because I was like, “How much hand-holding do I want to do?” White American culture never really has to explain itself, even though it’s not my point of view. It’s assumed to be universal, like You should understand it. Even thinking about classic literature, I use this example of Jane Eyre. I love Jane Eyre. But there are entire swaths of it that are in untranslated French. There’s like zero context to understand. There’s like entire paragraphs. It’s 2020-plus. You’ve got Google. You’ve got the internet at your fingertips. You can look it up, you know? There’s only so much teaching I should have to do. It wouldn’t make sense for Lila to have to explain things if it’s her lived experience.

In my books, I try to use context. Sometimes Lila is explaining Filipino words to an outsider, which means I can explain it to the reader. And then other times, they can figure it out through context. But when it comes to food, the whole point is to tantalize and draw people in, and so there, I will go out of my way to explain what it is.

AO: I mean, even as a person who grew up eating Filipino food, there were some foods I’d never heard of. There are, after all, over 7,000 islands in the Philippines. How can any one person know them all? Like I didn’t know kwek-kwek were deep-fried quail eggs! I did notice in both your books though, there were some creative experiments with Filipino food—ube crinkles, a pandan-infused latte. Where’d those come from?

MM: So the recipes that are in the books are ones I came up with. I think about food a lot. I’ll think, What would be a great combination? Or I’ll see something on Instagram and I’ll be like, That sounds amazing. I’ll try those recipes, but I’m not going to just copy and paste. That’s not cool! I’m always like, How can I put my own spin on it? What can I fiddle with to make it more like my own taste?

AO: It’s clear you have a lifelong love for Filipino food. But in media outlets, we always hear stories about Asian children of immigrants and their “lunch box moment,” the childhood memory of bringing a traditional ethnic dish to school and getting made fun of by their white friends. Did you ever experience the lunch box moment that so many consider to be a quintessentially Asian American experience?

MM: I grew up in a neighborhood called Hermosa, which was majority Latine. I went to a Catholic school that was like 80% to 90% Latine, with a couple of Polish people and a couple of Filipino people. I’ve never had that moment because ethnic food was common. It wasn’t really strange.

The lunch I brought to school was usually “American,” but not because my parents thought I’d be embarrassed. It was because they didn’t have time. So during the week, for school, my mom would just buy loaves of cheap generic ALDI brand bread with generic ALDI brand meat. And then she’d be like, “Alright, make yourself a sandwich and take that to school.” [My parents] had to work, so during the week, we didn’t get anything fancy.

Filipino food was for after school. The cook in my family was my dad. The real cooking-cooking was my dad. A lot of our dishes were very meat heavy: picadillo (ground meat and diced vegetables in a tomato stew), sinigang (tamarind soup with pork, eggplant, green beans, and cabbage), nilaga (beef chunks with cabbage in broth). We had a big ass family so everything had to be really hearty.

The only time I ever got laughed at wasn’t because my classmates thought my food was weird. It was because it had a strange name. One time in fourth grade, we had International Day, and my dad made puto (a sweet rice cake). As a kid, I didn’t think much of it. I was like, “This stuff is delicious. I can’t wait to share it with my class.” Now imagine standing up in front of a class of twenty Latine kids and saying, “This is called puto!”

They weren’t really laughing at me. They just thought it was hysterical. They thought I was just cursing in front of the class. Like, I didn’t get it at the time that it was a swear word. To me, it was just a rice cake.

AO: Other Asians have their “lunch box moment,” but I feel like Filipinos who grow up around Latinos all have their “puto moment.” Speaking of moments, you hear a lot of media outlets talk about Filipino food having its “moment” or becoming the “next big thing.” There’s ube ice cream at Trader Joe’s and chicken adobo at Whole Foods. What do you think about the mainstreaming of Filipino food, or this idea that Filipino food has “arrived”? Do you find it validating or annoying?

MM: A little of both. Because it’s really pretentious to think that this food that has this long history suddenly has worth now that white people know about it. At the same time, it’s kind of nice that Filipino food is easier to find. Growing up, whenever we went out to eat, it was never Filipino food because we were like, “Daddy makes it better. Why would we spend money on this?” But now he’s gone—he passed in 2018. My mom is not a cook, bless her. So if we want Filipino food, we have to go out to restaurants.

In the past, there weren’t a ton of options [in Chicago]. Even now, there are some, but not a lot. I can appreciate that Filipino food is growing so I can have access to the food of my childhood. I like that people are knowing more about it, but maybe it’s the language that people use around it that I don’t like—presenting it like “it’s arrived.” I’m like, it’s been here.

AO: Yeah, it has been here. It’s nice to see all these Filipino chefs and food writers like Ligaya Mishan of the New York Times and the James Beard-nominated author and restaurateur Nicole Ponseca making a name for themselves. You wrote a culinary cozy, but I’m wondering how much you keep up with the broader Filipino food movement?

MM: I have Nicole Ponseca’s I Am a Filipino: And This is How I Cook, and I have Amboy [by Alvin Cailan of Eggslut]. I have a stack of cookbooks because I genuinely like reading cookbooks. I like cookbooks that are almost like part memoir. Where there’s a story of some kind.

I like that people are knowing more about [Filipino food], but maybe it’s the language that people use around it that I don’t like—presenting it like “it’s arrived.” I’m like, it’s been here.

AO: What draws you to that?

MM: Just the idea that food connects you to a personal story or personal journey. My dad was an old school cook. He didn’t really measure anything. He didn’t really use recipes. As I got older, I wanted to learn how he made things. He would give the list of ingredients and vague instructions. I’d ask him [about measurements] and he never gave a clear answer.

But for my middle brother, he actually wrote down his recipe for picadillo! It’s the only written recipe that exists now. I was like, “For you? I’ve been asking him for recipes for years!”After my father passed, my brother made copies for me and my other brother. And so, the first time I made picadillo was from the recipe that he left behind. That’s such a personal connection.

So even though you and I both know picadillo, we know picadillo in different ways. And I find that fascinating—that you can insert so much meaning in a dish. I’m sure some people are like, “It’s just ground meat. Who cares?” But for me, there’s so much meaning to it. When the smell was filling up my kitchen, I almost started crying. It’s like that book Crying in H Mart [Michelle Zauner’s memoir about losing her Korean mother to cancer]. I was in Seafood City, and I was like, “Oh no.”

AO: Did you have a “crying in Seafood City” moment?

MM: Yeah! Because after my father passed, I had to learn how to make [Filipino food] myself. And I went to Seafood City, and I was like . . . sigh. Grief hits you in weird moments. You think you’re fine and then you go to the Filipino grocery store, and you have this weird wave [of grief] hit you.

AO: I love how, in your books, you write about how there’s more to these Filipino food sites than meets the eye. Like how Tita Rosie’s kitchen—the family restaurant in Shady Pines where Lila works—is more than just a restaurant. It’s a community center. It’s where Tita Rosie and other characters get to educate people about Filipino culture.

MM: I wanted to capture that because they fulfill multiple things. Seafood City is relatively new to Chicago—it opened in 2016. Before that, we’d go to the sari-sari stores, which were all-purpose, like a New York-style bodega; within these stores, there’d be a grocery, a “turo-turo” or takeout food spot, remittance-sending services, movie rentals, and more. With Filipino restaurants, there’s this one that my cousin loves going to—Ysabel’s Grill—where it also has karaoke. It’s like a regular restaurant, and then someone will bust out a Magic Mic, so you’re trying to enjoy your dinner and then someone just gets up and starts singing. He’ll go there with his Filipino-basketball-league friends. There are dried Filipino foods and instant coffee there. There’s really an eclectic mix of things there. It’s not a huge restaurant with a special karaoke room. It’s a multipurpose thing. It’s what people need it to be. I wanted that feeling of, it’s a restaurant, but it’s also a gathering place for the Filipino community in that town.

AO: Another thing I love is that your books center strong female characters. These past two years, so much about Asian women was about the awfulness—the violent attacks, Filipino nurses disproportionately dying from COVID-19. Yeah, your books have dead bodies, but it was comforting for me to exist in this space where the narrative about Filipina women—like Lila, her ninangs, her lola, her tita—wasn’t just about tragedy. They got to be all sorts of things. They got to be fully fleshed out human beings.

MM: Okay, first of all, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. It’s really important to me that I get to portray Filipinos as just human beings, with all our good things and all our flaws. So much of Asian American literature is trauma-based. The publishing industry really loves to push that narrative. I think they’re hugely important stories with very beautifully written prose, but I’m not trying to be that. There’s trauma and pain in the immigrant experience, but that’s not all that I am. It’s not all that we are.

It was really important for me to show Filipino American characters that just exist. Like with Lila, her story is about trying to pick up the pieces after her life falls apart, about finding her way home again, while trying to solve this murder mystery. I leaned very heavily into [cozy] genre tropes on purpose. I wanted to show readers that we do belong [in the genre].

In my household, the only women in the house were me, my mom, and my maternal grandmother. My grandfather and dad were there, but growing up, it always felt like it was the women who were holding it together. My dad made the money, and he was the cook, but my mom and my grandmother were the ones on the front lines taking care of us. There is that narrative of Asian women being weak or submissive or docile or dragon ladies or really sexual, but I wanted you to know that Asian Americans, specifically Filipina American women can be full human beings with agency.

They can be flawed and still deserve love. Like the Calendar Crew—Lila’s ninangs—they can say really hurtful things about your romantic relationships, your weight, but they truly think they’re helping. They’re not trying to be hurtful. I was trying to let them be 3-D characters instead of flattening them into caricatures. I’m always scared of doing that, and so I have to try to balance it to make them feel as real as possible.

There’s trauma and pain in the immigrant experience, but that’s not all that I am. It’s not all that we are.

AO: What has been the reaction from readers to your books?

To be completely 100% honest, I was really scared of whether Filipino American audiences would accept the book. Because we—not just Filipinos, but people of color and any marginalized community—tend to judge our own community the hardest. In some ways I get it because we have so little mainstream representation that you get excited about [any Filipino representation], but then it’s not what you expect. It’s such an unfair burden to have to be everything to everyone. There’s no way I could represent everyone’s experience in a way that feels real and meaningful to every single Filipino American. That was a huge worry for me early on.

But I’ve been very lucky. The people who reach out to me have been so, so kind. A lot of them are like, “This is the first time I feel seen,” or “This is the first time I’ve ever seen a Filipino American character.” I’ll get messages from people on my website, and I’ll just start crying because they’ll say really wonderful things.

There was one person, a Korean American, she was telling me she wanted to be a mystery writer. And she was telling me that she hadn’t realized until she read my book that she was unintentionally making her characters white. Because she thought that’s what she was supposed to do. She said my book was the first time she saw Asian main characters in crime fiction. She was like, “Oh, we can do that!”

AO: Okay, now you’re gonna make me cry. Whew.

MM: Yeah. You know, I have this weird thing where I’m super confident. I genuinely believe I’m a good writer. But never in a million years would I have imagined that I’d have an impact on anyone. I thought, You’re gonna read my book, and you’re gonna have fun. If I’m lucky, I made you laugh. And if I’m really lucky, I will have distracted you from the shit show that is the world right now. And that’s all I could ever ask for. That’s how I want it to be. That’s what books were for me. They were that escape. When life was tough, books gave me a few hours of peace. That was the highest hope I had.

So getting some of those messages about making people feel seen or making them realize they can make it as a writer and that they can make it as a writer writing characters like themselves—it’s amazing.