Manila Days
A decolonial coming-of-age memoir set in Manila 1957–1972, tracing one American child’s formation inside a Filipino world she loved but could never fully claim.
About
Kerry Poethig grew up in Manila as the daughter of progressive Presbyterian missionaries whose work immersed them in Filipino life and movements for social change. She came of age during the rise of radical student activism in the years leading to martial law, loving a country that shaped her but was never hers to claim.
As a feminist scholar-activist, engaged in peacemaking and religious anti-imperial movements in Southeast Asia, she returned to those formative years to write Manila Days.
This memoir explores how a child reads the world — a sensorium of human and non human interchange, American and Filipino entanglement, confused belonging, family memory, and the lifelong work of understanding what it means to inherit a colonial history.