[T]hey could never go home now, thought Pepe Monson, more vividly remembering that house he had never seen (as he remarked to the woman standing beside him at the window) than any of the houses he had actually lived in.
While discussing his father's stories about his childhood home in Manila, Pepe remarks to Connie's mother about the strange phenomenon of being able to remember vividly a house he has never actually seen. The passage is significant because it speaks to the power that fantasy can have over reality, which is a major theme in the novel. While one might assume Pepe would remember the places he has lived in better than a house he has only heard about secondhand, Pepe has dedicated so much hope and mental energy toward constructing an image of the house in his imagination that he remembers it better than physical spaces he has inhabited.
“I told her that people who had our advantages must expect to be envied and reviled by people who were not so fortunate; and that there were many things grown-ups did which couldn’t properly be judged by young people until the young people were grown-ups themselves; and that moreover it wasn’t ‘stolen money.’ Do you know what she said? She said no, it wasn’t stolen money, it was ‘blood sucked from the people.’ She had picked up all those frightful phrases from the newspapers of course but she insisted that they were insults the girls at school flung in her face."
In this passage, Connie's mother tells Pepe about how Connie, as a schoolgirl, was incensed to learn of a bribery scandal her father—a public official—was involved in. Connie's mother relates to Pepe how she dismissed her daughter's concerns and attempted to articulate how the corrupt dealings her father was embroiled in were to be expected for people of their privileged class. The passage is significant because it conveys how Connie's mother lacks the moral scruples her daughter independently develops. The rift between moral principles and abuses of privilege is an example of one of the many ways in which Connie is emotionally torn, a dual state of being symbolically represented by her two navels.
“How you and Tony used to lord it over us when we were kids because of that going home stuff—”
“We were brought up on the dream.”
“Your poor father, Pepe—”
“I suppose he had to wake up sometime.”
In this dialogue, Paco and Pepe discuss how Pepe and his brother Tony used to share their father's incessant talk of returning to their lavish home in the Philippines once the country gained true independence from the United States. Now that Pepe's father has visited his homeland and become disillusioned by the experience, Pepe talks of him as having woken from the dream he used to keep alive through stories. The passage is significant because it speaks to the conflict between fantasy and reality. Having invested so much emotional energy into preserving the dream of returning home, the reality of what the homeland is like contrasts so intensely with the fantasy that it devastates Pepe's father.
[T]he Filipinos being in this department (as well as in a number of others) the agents between East and West, building the Harlem gods a bamboo habitation this side of the Pacific.
In this passage, the narrator elucidates Paco's thoughts on the unique character of Manila jazz, a sub-genre of music Paco grew up listening to on a short-wave radio. Because the U.S. colonized the Philippines during the age of jazz music, Paco believes Filipinos were in the perfect position to translate the Black Western musical style for Asian listeners. Joaquin captures the postcolonial cultural transmission with the metaphor of Filipinos building a "bamboo habitation" for musical "gods" of Harlem, a majority-Black area of New York City known for jazz. The passage is significant because it builds on the major theme of postcolonial identity.
Paco sensed an unreality in both worlds: the people who occupied them did not seem to be living there at all. They denied the locale—but their denial was not the asceticism of the mystic nor the vision of the reformer, but merely the aversion of the opium eater. They stepped over reality as they stepped across their gutters with the transient frown of the tourist, the neutral disgust of the foreigner.
In this passage, the narrator comments on how Paco, disillusioned with the señora de Vidal, walks alone through Manila, seeing the city anew. No longer enchanted, Paco senses the eerie phenomenon of people turning a blind eye to the desperation, filth, and poverty amongst which they live. Paco registers the practiced air of ignorance in both the poor and the rich, all of whom live in a fantasy world within their minds that allows them to deny the grim truth of their existences.
And when at closing time one night, two weeks after they had parted, he came out of the club and saw the yellow convertible waiting and her face at the window, the world around him swiftly lost impact; the babble of departing folk faded remotely; the moonlight turned fluid and he found himself being washed into her car, his every step the graduated motion of a figure in a delayed movie.
After two weeks without seeing the mesmerizing Connie Escovar, Paco leaves the jazz club one evening to find her waiting in her distinct yellow convertible. In this passage, Joaquin captures the sense of unreality Paco experiences as his visual field melts away and he sees only Connie. As though impelled by forces outside of himself, he moves with the fluid atmosphere and is "washed" into her car. The passage is significant because it conveys how Paco finds himself helpless against Connie's strangely alluring presence.
The small room reeked of the wasting wax and the joss sticks. He stood behind her and looked over her shoulder at the god on the altar—an old fat god, with sagging udders, bald and white-bearded and squatting like a Buddha; and the sly look in its eyes was repeated by the two navels that winked from its gross belly.
While Paco is hopelessly drawn to Connie and expects they will consummate their mutual attraction, Connie instead takes him to the Chinese quarter, where she buys a plastic doll she offers to an idol in a temple. The passage is significant because the narrator reveals that the idol has two navels—the same affliction Connie complains of at the beginning of the novel. In an instance of dramatic irony, the reader understands the significance of the idol while Paco is oblivious to its relation to Connie.
But that was hardly father who came back, thought Pepe, remembering the stranger’s footfalls he had been alarmed to hear in his father’s room when his father should still have been in Manila.
At the end of the novel, Pepe thinks about how Paco, like his father, has returned from the Philippines a changed man. In this passage, Pepe recalls how his father returned from his trip earlier than expected, waking Pepe in the night. The extent to which his father has changed is reflected in the way even his footsteps sound unfamiliar to Pepe, who assumes the man he has known all his life is a stranger.
He felt the emptiness of his father’s silence. In their different ways, they had all betrayed and forsaken the old man—their mother had died; he, Pepe, had turned to horses; Tony had turned to God. They had become, as they grew older, more and more restive under the old man’s brooding monomania. They had apostatized, leaving the old man to carry on his cult alone. . . . Now the cult had abruptly come to an end; the candles had all been extinguished and removed. There was only a vacant darkness, a vacant silence.
At the end of the novel, Pepe leaves Paco in the park and reflects on how he, his mother, and his brother have each betrayed his father's dream of returning to the Philippines of his father's childhood. In this passage, Pepe thinks of his father's obsession with the dream of returning as a cult that the others had abandoned. Left alone to carry on the fantasy, his father was destroyed when the reality of what the newly independent Philippines shocked him out of his memory of a gilded past. With the vivid dream gone, the exiled Filipino family is left to live within a vacuum of silence and darkness.
The mirror’s cracked world was safe no longer; was perilous with broken glass, teeming with ghosts; was now the world where Paco waited for the strangle-hold and dear good Mary told lies and the cautious Rita was dazzled by dragons and Tony hid in a monastery and fathers took drugs and mothers had lost their dictionaries and young women had two navels….
In this passage, Pepe comes to conclusions about how he and other Filipinos who haven't traveled to the Philippines themselves are not safe from the distress of those who have. With Pepe's father, Paco, Connie, and Connie's mother moving between the cracked barrier that separated fantasy from reality, the Philippines from Hong Kong, now Pepe, Rita, Mary, and Tony were liable to be affected by the mental and emotional instability of having split identities. The passage is significant because it ends the novel with a last word on the major themes of postcolonial identity, the passage between worlds, fantasy vs. reality, and fatalism.
