Reality vs. Fantasy
The conflict between reality and fantasy is a central theme in The Woman Who Had Two Navels. When Connie tells Pepe at the beginning of the novel that she has two navels, and Pepe believes her, Joaquin signals to the reader that the story blends the credible and the fantastical with destabilizing consequences. The more Pepe sits in Connie's presence, the more he finds his sense of reality becoming blurry; the furniture in his office seems to hover above the ground. Pepe is momentarily grounded by Concha's refutation of what she says are lies Connie has told. However, Pepe learns that Concha's take on reality is also unreliable when he speaks with Paco, who Concha pretended not to know as well as she does. After hearing of Paco's violent obsession with Connie, Pepe reflects on his father's analogous disillusionment. Having perpetuated the fantasy of returning to an independent Philippines for decades, Pepe's father returns to find his childhood home destroyed and the American-influenced culture alien. Reality shatters Pepe's father's illusions, leaving him a shell of his former self—just like Paco. By the end of the novel, Pepe considers how he and others close to him are also vulnerable to having fantasies distract and disturb them.
Parent-Child Relationships
As a novel concerned with generational differences, The Woman Who Had Two Navels pays close attention to the relationships between parents and children. Connie and Concha represent a strained and cold parent-child relationship in which Connie's sensitive and moral nature is blithely dismissed by her status-obsessed mother. When Connie leaves boarding school upon learning of her father's corrupt dealings and goes to work as a dishwasher, her mother has no sympathy for her daughter's attempt to live an honest life. Instead, she brings the police in to remove her daughter from the restaurant, bringing chaos to the impoverished neighborhood and humiliation to Connie. Connie attempts to become a high-society woman cast in her mother's mold, but her fundamental difference—symbolized by her supposed two navels—prevents her from fulfilling the role waiting for her, and Connie becomes increasingly mentally disturbed. Pepe and his father represent another significant parent-child relationship in the novel. As a Filipino rebel living in exile in Hong Kong, Doctor Monson raises Pepe and his brother Tony on dreams of returning to the homeland. However, the sons abandon the cult-like obsession long before their father does, betraying him by focusing on other concerns in their lives. Pepe's father visits Manila alone, and he is alone in his grief when he realizes that his fantasy has been undermined by the ruinous reality of what his former home has become. As with Connie and Concha, Pepe has struggled in his life to maintain his allegiance to his father. By the end of the novel, Pepe feels guilty for having abandoned his father, who alone carries the grief of having lost the dream of returning to a home that no longer exists.
Postcolonial Filipino Identity
The search for identity within a postcolonial cultural context is another dominant theme in The Woman Who Had Two Navels. Revolving around characters moving between Manila and Hong Kong, the novel is concerned with how Filipinos define their cultural and national identity when their newly independent country has long been colonized by Spain and the United States—the two now-severed umbilical cords of Filipino history. Pepe, though ethnically Filipino, has never set foot on the land. For him, the Philippines exists as a promised land his father spoke of when Pepe was growing up. His father's illusion is shattered, however, when his father returns to Manila to find his family home in ruins and the culture nothing like what he remembers from when he fought alongside General Aguinaldo. Paco grew up with no such narrative. His father told no stories about the country he had left, meaning Paco was free to form his own idea of the place through the Manila jazz he listened to on a short-wave radio. When Paco goes to the Philippines, having mastered an American-Filipino music style despite having lived in neither country, is disturbed to discover that American culture has permeated every level of society in Manila. Rich and poor, everyone lives with the fantasy that they are wealthy American bankers and illustrious American movie stars: "the men were all Pierpont Morgans, and all the women unaging, unfading Betty Grables." By the end of the novel, none of the major characters has a stable sense of self, their personal identities ungrounded by the history of sociopolitical upheaval they have lived through.
Ruin
Ruin—the disintegration of something once stable—is a key theme in The Woman Who Had Two Navels. Explored most explicitly in the character of Pepe's father, the theme of ruin touches Doctor Monson's life in both abstract and concrete ways. He begins adulthood as a charming and respected doctor in Manila, later fighting alongside General Aguinaldo against the Spanish and the Americans. Doctor Monson is exiled to Hong Kong, vowing not to return to the Philippines until the country is free. In the meantime, he tells his sons about what his lavish family home is like, stoking their imaginations and promising they will one day return to the place that is rightfully theirs. However, the post-independence Philippines he returns to is unfamiliar and alienating. The ancestral home of his memory is destroyed, with nothing but a foundation and a staircase extending to nowhere. The sight of the physical ruin crushes his hopes of returning to the homeland, and Doctor Monson goes back to Hong Kong devastated. After the emotional disturbance of realizing everything he has waited for is gone, he becomes addicted to opium and relies on his sons to look after him. Like the house, he is a ruin of his former self.
Intercultural Transmission
Much of The Woman Who Had Two Navels is concerned with people, concepts, and memories being transmitted between cultures. As members of the Filipino diaspora, characters like Pepe, his father, Paco, Tony, Rita, and Mary represent people who exist between cultures. Along with Pepe's father comes memories of the homeland that he shares with his sons, transmitting his values and fantasies to the next generation. The theme of transmission between cultures also arises when the narrator comments on Paco's lifelong habit of listening to Manila jazz on a short-wave radio. The jazz, itself an intercultural interpretation of Black American music, is transmitted across the sea separating Hong Kong from Manila. Paco receives the music, re-interpreting it himself until he has mastered a music style originating in a country he has never been to. The theme returns when Pepe compares his father's and Paco's disturbing visits to Manila with Alice having gone through a mirror into another world where regular logic is reversed (an allusion to Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass). Having gone through the mirror to the other world, the men have come back significantly altered by their disorienting experiences. Ultimately, the theme of transmission between worlds resonates with Joaquin's emphasis on the difficulty of defining one's identity in a postcolonial context where influences clash and contradict as they mix.
Wealth Disparity
Another of the major themes in the novel is wealth disparity—the stark differences between rich and poor. From the outset of the novel, Pepe, as a man of modest economic means, is distracted by the fur and pearls Connie wears to signal her wealth. Her mother is similarly ostentatious, dressed in fur and a silk dress emblazoned with dragons. The appearance of the women dazzles the poorer Hong Kong residents in the book, who all live in cramped, overpriced apartments. Connie and Concha, meanwhile, live in a mansion in the suburbs of Manila, existing as high-society women whose lives are focused on social gatherings rather than work. As a musician, Paco's cultural status gains him access to the gilded social sphere of rich women, and he finds himself hopelessly drawn in despite his distaste for the willful ignorance the rich practice when moving through a city riddled with poverty. Ultimately, Paco believes he will return to Connie and Concha, whose prestige, though mired in what he conceives as "evil," is too alluring for him to disregard.
Fatalism
Fatalism—a belief that events are predetermined and therefore inevitable—is a dominant theme in The Woman Who Had Two Navels. Joaquin expresses the theme most explicitly through the characters of Connie and Paco. Connie's fatalism is introduced when she discusses how she has always known she was different from other people—a difference symbolically represented by the two navels she claims to have discovered when she was a girl. The two navels mark her throughout life. Though she tries to become the high-society woman her mother has trained her to become, she consistently fails because she knows if anyone gets too close they will discover her shameful secret. Paco's fatalism emerges when he meets Connie and finds himself hopelessly attracted to her. The attraction becomes an obsession, and the obsession turns torturous. He behaves as he would never have expected himself to act, believing that he is operating in obedience to "evil" forces outside his own free will. At the end of the novel, Paco's fatalistic attitude is captured in the moment he tells Pepe that he will inevitably return to Connie and her mother when they call him. In this moment, he expresses that he believes they have broken his will, and he is doomed to submit to people more powerful than himself.
