The Middle Place: Mediation and Heterotopia in Nick Joaquín’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels

Iping Liang adopts the historical trope of the “middleman” in order to explore how the ethnic Chinese migrant merchants had historically straddled the divide between the Spanish conquistadors and the local indigenous peoples in the Philippines and investigates the spatial intermediation of the “middle place” in Nick Joaquín’s seminal novel, The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961). By drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Edward Soja, Robert Tally, among others, this chapter examines the literary cartography of the “middle place” in the novel. First, it focuses on the ethic enclave of Binondo, Manila Chinatown, which mediates between the native city of Manila and the colonial regime of the US after the war. Second, it applies Edward Said’s thoughts on postcolonial exile to the exilic setting in Hong Kong and investigates how the island space, as a site of Foucauldian heterogenic intermediation, is also a “middle place” that provides Filipino expatriates with a sense of postcolonial exilic agency.