My mother is an immigrant from the Philippines. Most of my family immigrated here when I was kid. They were escaping martial law, government corruption, state sponsored violence, and a brutal, capricious dictator. I remember when my grandfather was dying and he asked me to read from “The Conjugal Dictatorship,” a book a friend of his had written.

“You know,” he said, “they had him killed for what he wrote. They threw him out of a plane…