“And why here?” Reading Hong Kong in Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels

Nick Joaquin (1917–2004) is a Filipino literary master and national artist whose numerous works include the prize-winning novel The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961). Its plot revolves around the Manilan protagonist Connie Escobar’s flight into Hong Kong and her insistence that “she [has] two navels” (1). Her assertion is complicated by her request for Hong Kong-born-and-based Pepe Monson to perform “an operation” on them (1). While this curious premise has generated numerous analyses over time, the novel’s setting—that is, post-1945 Hong Kong—remains understudied. Addressing this gap, the paper offers a geocritical intervention examining the historical conditions and spatial production of postwar Hong Kong in the novel. Drawing from spatial formulations of Edward W. Soja, Ackbar Abbas, and Rey Chow, it reads the city as a lived and negotiated environment through which Filipino postwar mobilities, labor circuits, and provisional communities become materially legible. Through apartments, convents, racecourses, harbor crossings, hotels, roads, and nightclubs, Joaquin refracts the overcrowded, cosmopolitan, and transactional conditions of postwar Hong Kong into the movements, performances, and anxieties of his Filipino characters. In doing so, the paper reads the novel’s Hong Kong as a refracted postwar chronotope and sheds light on Pepe’s recurring question: “And why here?” (6; italics in original).