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A review by justabean_reads
Reuniting With Strangers by Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio
5.0
Canada Reads Longlist. Roughly linked short stories about Filipino families coming back together (or not!) after part of the family travels to Canada to work as caregivers, often via Hong Kong or the Gulf States. Most of the strangers are parents and children, but the stories also include siblings, neblings, grandparents, cousins, married couples and wider definitions of family. Some stories are exchanges of e-mails, or advice columns/survival guides, some deal with the unreliability of memory and perspective. One character appears in all of the stories, often tangentially, which hit a lovely balance between "not everyone from this country knows each other, lol" and "realistically this community is fairly small/connected."
I really loved the pure variety of relationships and experiences, how many different ways people saw each other, and the gap between the Philippians and Canada (physically, economically and culturally), how much all of that shifted between generations, and what choice was the right one. Each of the stories stood on its own (other than the bookended pair dealing with the same characters), and none of the answers were the same between stories, and I loved the strength of that collective, and how many possibilities it contained. The panoply of personalities and experiences is such an eloquent response to how Canadian society views and treats foreign workers. Which is not to say the book ever felt preachy or didactic.
I really loved the pure variety of relationships and experiences, how many different ways people saw each other, and the gap between the Philippians and Canada (physically, economically and culturally), how much all of that shifted between generations, and what choice was the right one. Each of the stories stood on its own (other than the bookended pair dealing with the same characters), and none of the answers were the same between stories, and I loved the strength of that collective, and how many possibilities it contained. The panoply of personalities and experiences is such an eloquent response to how Canadian society views and treats foreign workers. Which is not to say the book ever felt preachy or didactic.