Manila Days

Kerry Poethig didn't ask to come, but her Presbyterian parents did--so she grew up in Manila: teeming, cheerful, and grimy, loving it with an alab ng puso, an impassioned heart. Manila Days is a hybrid memoir of a missionary child coming of age at the edge of American empire. The daughter of labor-focused "fraternal workers" with the United Church of Christ in the Philippines, Poethig weaves a Taglish narrative of family, faith, and politics from 1957 to 1972. Poetic, wounded, and often funny, she recounts a childhood shaped by longing and improvisation--where Jesus whispers, "If it's not magic, don't believe," and tree spirits, dreams, and Scripture coexist. Drawing on fragments from a family "Decade Box," she reconstructs a world where identity is performed and belonging is never secure. As anti-imperialist tensions rise, the question of "we" becomes urgent: allies, enemies, or both? Manila Days traces the limits of solidarity and the cost of innocence, asking what it means to speak "we" ethically within the unequal realities of a postcolonial world.