Via four generations of Filipino teens’ alternating perspectives, Randy Ribay, author of Patron Saints of Nothing, a National Book Award finalist, examines masculinity and familial trauma in his historical YA novel Everything We Never Had. After emigrating from the Philippines to Watsonville, Calif., in 1929, Francisco finds his dreams of a fresh start waylaid by racial violence. Francisco’s son Emil later struggles to support himself and his mother while his absent father fights for farm workers’ rights in 1965 Stockton, Calif. In 1983 Denver, Chris yearns to learn more about his Filipino background, something his father Emil would rather ignore. And in 2020 Philadelphia, Enzo’s tense relationship with his father Chris is put to the test when Enzo’s estranged grandfather Emil moves in with his family during the pandemic. In a conversation with PW, Ribay discussed how grappling with one’s identity can impact family dynamics and reflected on his own father-son relationships.
Everything We Never Had is your first historical novel. Did writing this book present any unique challenges?
I tend to gravitate toward projects that I think are going to challenge and push me, though I don’t think I ever thought I would try to write historical fiction. I wasn’t horribly confident in my ability to do the research that was necessary. A lot of the history that was available about Filipino Americans—at the time I was researching, at least—was limited so, at first, it was hard to get that perspective. There’s certainly a lot of history about the Filipino labor struggle and that first wave of Filipino immigrants, but it kind of reduces them to only field workers and laborers. One of the hardest things was looking beyond that, getting to really understand what was going through people’s minds at that time, understanding their full humanity outside of just being workers in the fields along the West Coast. Thankfully, I ended up finding some really good resources that gave me glimpses of that.
What elements of the story did you first home in on?
I started with a spreadsheet. I knew I wanted to cover three characters who would be alive in 2020, but I also knew I wanted to go one generation deeper than that, to explore the lasting impact of those who are no longer with us in the present. I lined up each character with whatever historical moment was occurring during their storyline, as well as what they were personally experiencing in that period. I had a few other details in there, like their birth years and such, to logistically figure things out, but that was my starting point.
How much research did you do and in what ways did the information you learned inform how you approached writing this novel?
I had a basic knowledge of each of these time periods, but before I started drafting, I did a lot of preliminary research where I was reading whatever articles or primary source newspapers I was able to access online. That initial round of research helped me get the facts straight and gain the confidence to believe that I could write about these historical time periods.
But as I was writing the older sections, I kept running into all these minor things that I didn’t know about. For example, in the opening, Francisco is in the field picking apples. Except I didn’t know how they actually did that. I didn’t know what clothes they wore, what equipment they had, what the physical process was like. Even though I would try to push through, it made it difficult to lose myself in the story in the way that I need to when I’m drafting. That’s when I said to my wife, “I need a research assistant.” At the time, I was still a full-time high school teacher, and so I was only writing for an hour and a half early in the mornings before I went to school, and I was falling into this trap of spending that entire time researching, “How do you harvest fruit in 1929?” I was making very little progress on the story.
I ended up hiring Skya Theobald. I would shoot all the random questions that I had to her on Sunday, and then she would send me several pages of information with all the answers and her cited sources within a week. That really helped me keep moving. After I had a complete draft, I went back and did more research myself to make sure that everything was as historically accurate as I could and to have any changes I made be intentional—because I did stray from historical records. I wanted to be able to say, “I changed this for the sake of telling the story.” I wanted to be aware of the stuff I was changing, rather than just getting it wrong. Though, I’m sure I still did get some stuff wrong.
From where did you draw each of the characters’ differing approaches to understanding or reconciling with their Filipino identity and how did these struggles affect their relationships with one another?
I tried to think about what was going on in their life and what was going on historically at the time. What might they need to do to survive in that moment? What might they need to do to survive—at a personal level—what’s happening with their family? When I’m looking at them as teenagers, that’s the primary question. And then when I look at them later, as adults, the question becomes, “How did what they experienced, and what they needed to do to survive, impact the way that they parent? How would that inform what they value or what they see as important to being a man?” They all grew up in different situations and all experienced different things, and while that is helpful to the way they parent in some ways, it also leads to conflict in others. Emil is trying to, as he says, give Chris what he never had, but at the same time, he’s failing to understand that Chris is in a different circumstance. As much as we strive to make things better for the next generation, there’s always going to be that inability to fully understand what they’re going through.
In terms of breaking cycles of generational trauma, how did crafting Enzo’s perspective compare to writing those of his ancestors?
As difficult as it was to write about 1929 Watsonville, writing about the start of the pandemic while we were still at the height of it was a challenge. I first started outlining the story in 2021, and one of the early conversations I had with my editor, Namrata Tripathi, was, “Should I set it at this point? Or should I set it before the pandemic and not even deal with it?” Ultimately, I decided to lean into it. By the time I was writing it, I certainly didn’t have a grasp on how the pandemic would impact teenagers several years down the line, but I think at that point—I was teaching still—I had a pretty good grasp on how my students were experiencing the start of lockdown. I remember what a lot of my students were going through. I remember what I was going through. I felt that I could address that aspect of the pandemic.
A big part of it for many of my students was the anxiety surrounding the idea of being trapped with their family in a way they hadn’t necessarily ever been before. Students who were used to their parents being gone a lot for work or themselves being off at school were instead crammed in the same space all day long for months. I thought that it was the perfect incubator, the perfect inciting incident for why Enzo and Chris and Emil would have to face some of the things that they’d never faced before. And then there’s the added layer of a teenager spending time with essentially only their family when they are biologically wired to be social and do the exact opposite of that.
How did your relationships with your own father and son inform the ones you crafted in Everything We Never Had?
Having my son was what triggered the idea for the story. I was thinking about the kind of father I wanted to be and the kind of human I wanted to raise. But how do you do that? I think, for a lot of us who become parents, it’s natural to think through those things, and about your own childhood: “What did I like growing up? What was healthy for me? What do I want to continue and pass down?” And then also, “What have we outgrown? What do we no longer need? What was maybe even harmful to me that I want to avoid? What do I personally still need to heal from so that I can do that?”
My stories all start with a question. In this case, that question was, “What does it mean to be a father?” It’s the kind of question that maybe some people can just talk through and answer, but I have to make up fictional people and move them around my fictional world to think through that. From my perspective, there are certainly positive and negative aspects to how I was raised, and I think writing this story softened a lot of the criticism or judgment that I might have had toward my own father. It made me really appreciate the positive aspects of our relationship, and the fact that he was doing the best that he could with what he knew at the time.
Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay. Kokila, $18.99 Aug. 27 ISBN 978-0-593-46141-9
