Tans Interwoven

Meet the Tan family: Crescenciana, Olivia, Audrey, and Kenneth. They live their lives interwoven, their stories spanning time—from the 1920s to the modern day—and geographies—from the Philippines to Canada to the United States.

After Kenneth did the running man for kindergarten show-and-tell, his older sister, Audrey, did a veritable quickstep inside their garage while balancing a tray of piping hot pastries. Their mother, Olivia, cha-chaed on Friday nights with her nursing school classmates, and her mother, Crescenciana, stole away for an evening waltz at a secret town fiesta even as Japanese forces occupied her village during World War II.

Be it dancing or admiring women with rough hands or learning a super hard—yes, that is a technical term—language, the Tans find common threads running through the stories that they take turns sharing.

Tans Interwoven is an intergenerational collection of honest, heartwarming, and humorous memoirs written by a Filipino American family, with illustrations created by matriarch Crescenciana Tan and her grandson Kenneth Tan.

Braiding their stories together, the Tans remind us that in our own families, with our lives entwining, we won’t see the patterns we’re repeating unless we take a moment to stop, step back, and look at the entire tapestry altogether.