The Woman Who Had Two Navels

Manila, 1947. A young Filipino woman claims to have two navels and seeks help from a Spanish doctor in Hong Kong whose own past in the Philippines is entangled with her family's. Joaquin uses this strange premise to dispatch from inside the Filipino colonial psyche — the layers of Spanish and American influence, the question of what Filipino identity is beneath the colonial sediment, whether there is an authentic Filipino self that survived three centuries of foreign rule. The foundational Filipino novel in English and the most formally ambitious. A dispatch about national identity as something that has to be excavated from under other people's stories.