His wife is a former nightclub hostess who wins a beauty contest, becomes a starlet, and affects the airs of a grande dame after her marriage; hardly a lady even if she is fair; she is a poisonous version of Eliza Doolittle. The Alacrans have a stormy marriage, and they are further disappointed by their daughter, Rosario “Baby” Alacran, who is ugly, chews her nails, exudes body odor, breaks out into rashes, and elopes with the vulturelike Lieutenant Colonel Pepe Carreon, a specialist in the torture of political prisoners. It is clear that Hagedorn is highly critical of this upper class, which, according to her portrayal, exerts its power by its ability to unleash terror and to control dreams. Carreon and his boss, General Nicasio V. Ledesma, are their agents of terror. The Alacrans’ film studios and their stars (Lolita Luna and Nestor Noralez) are the manufacturers of celluloid dreams, an opiate for the masses. Hagedorn portrays this class of people as a contemptible and dangerous oligarchy.

Hagedorn’s sympathies lie fully with a contrasting family on a somewhat lower economic rung. This is represented by Senator Domingo Avila, leader of the opposition to the regime. He is an idealistic populist and the only main character in the novel who is altruistic and who has a vision of the Filipino past, a national identity, and a national psyche. Indeed, his wife is an outspoken professor of Philippine history. In contrast to the ugly Baby Alacran, the Avilas’ daughter, Daisy, is a beauty and wins a beauty contest (engineered perhaps by the first lady), much to the embarrassment of her parents. After the beauty contest, however, Daisy goes into seclusion, weeps incessantly, and then gives a media interview that is scandalously critical of the ruling regime. Senator Avila’s ideology and career bear some resemblance to those of the real-life Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, the husband of President Corazon Aquino, and like Aquino, Avila is assassinated by the regime’s security forces. After her father’s assassination, Daisy, who has by then married and divorced a British financier and become the lover of a guerrilla leader, is arrested, tortured, gang-raped, and exiled with the other members of her family. Daisy, however, returns illegally and, with her cousin Clarita (an erotic artist), becomes a guerrilla fighter.

The upper middle class is represented by the Gonzaga family, from the narrative viewpoint of the daughter, Rio Gonzaga, ten years old when the novel opens, and the character who most closely resembles Hagedorn herself. Freddie Gonzaga, Rio’s father, is the central figure of this grouping, and his life is bound up with the Alacrans in that he is the vice president (“chief pimp”) of Severo Alacran’s international conglomerate, Intercoco. Freddie golfs and gambles with Alacran (“we’re related by money”) along with other Manila bigwigs while his wife, Delores, a Rita Hayworth lookalike, nurses a discreet passion for the Brazilian ambassador. Rio’s cousin, Pucha, voices some of the most meretricious and reprehensible values of her class. A daughter of the less wealthy branch of the family, Pucha wishes to clamber atop the country-club social ladder, marry an Alacran, and become richer in order to realize her Hollywood-Max Factor fantasy of materialistic splendor. Pucha also derives a sense of racial superiority from her Spanish ancestry (somewhat like a Mayflower descendant’s pride carried to excess), so much so that she is bigotedly anti-Chinese. Rio, however, wickedly informs her that their Spanish blood sprang from a fornicating friar and that their great-great-grandmother was Chinese.

In a sense, these ruling strata of society represented by the Alacrans, the Avilas, and the Gonzagas are the top dogs of Philippine society. The underdogs are the working class, victims of their society’s exploitation as well as of their own penchant for delusion. Orlando “Romeo” Rosales and Trinidad Gamboa, star-crossed lovers in an empty romance, are Hagedorn’s primary representatives of these proles. Both are youths from the surrounding countryside who have migrated to Manila to seek fulfillment. Lacking both talent and contacts, Romeo unrealistically pursues the dream of becoming a movie star; in reality, he is merely a waiter, forever in attendance, limited to aping one matinee idol or another. Trinidad Gamboa (no Calypso enchantress she) is a homely, gold-toothed cashier who longs to be “devirginated” and who cheerfully allows Romeo to take advantage of her, body and purse. Both of them are captives in the Alacran financial web—Trinidad works in an Alacran department store, and Romeo can only achieve stardom by obtaining a role in an Alacran-owned studio. A disposable and convenient victim, Romeo is set up by the police as the alleged assassin of Senator Avila; this eventuality is made doubly ironic by Hagedorn, for, on one hand, she presents the cynical official version of the champion of the oppressed as being allegedly gunned down by one of the oppressed, a transparently false allegation, but on the other hand, it contains a grain of truth when one reads it as an allegory of a Christlike martyr betrayed by an ignorant mob.

Hagedorn rounds off her Manila with a demimonde. This is made up of actors and performing artists of singular and multiple sexual preference and dexterity. Chief among these is Joey Sands, orphan of a drowned Filipina sex worker and a Black American serviceman. Adopted by “Uncle,” a sinister, Fagin-like figure who trains street waifs to become pickpockets and criminals, Joey grows up to become a sex worker and the disc jockey of CocoRico, a gay discotheque run by an Alacran. There he initiates a one-week liaison with an eminent German filmmaker; this ends when Joey witnesses Senator Avila’s assassination, realizes that Uncle will betray him to the police, and flees Manila to join a guerrilla band whose members include Clarita and Daisy Avila.

These families, characters, and grouped personages who represent so many different strata of Philippine society give Hagedorn’s reader nothing less than an epic slice of Philippine life in all its variety, sleaziness, and tragedy. If the form and substance of the novel are epic, however, its narrative mode, by contrast, is lyric.

The narrative of the novel is carried on mainly by first-person narrators, notably Rio and Joey. Even when a third-person narrative is used, the point of view is usually lodged in the consciousness of a single character, be it Romeo Rosales’s, Lolita Luna’s, or someone else’s. True, the novel is interlarded with brief excerpts from historical documents and contemporary news reports (some actual, others not), but the dominant effect of the book is that of many solo voices rendering their individual parts. Hence, though the overall effect of the book is epic, the texture of its individual component episodes is, unexpectedly and refreshingly, lyric.

A novel with so many characters and narrators may at first seem to boggle the reader’s sense of pattern, but Hagedorn has woven an integrated web of complex interactions among the various strata of society she depicts. The strands of different characters crisscross in terms of livelihood and aspirations, jobs or dreams, life and death. The central event of this complex web of characters is the assassination of Senator Avila, which involves characters from multiple strata of Manila society. The assassination, Hagedorn implies, was conceived and agreed upon at the highest levels of the upper-class oligarchy and then contrived by its constabulary. It is witnessed by the demimondain Joey Sands, and the proletarian Romeo Rosales is framed to take the blame for it.

Apart from this central event in Hagedorn’s epic, various repeated themes and images unify the book. One repeated image, which uses the novel’s title as its point of departure, is that of food. Even the opening sentence of the novel alludes to it—“sugary chocolates”—and the first chapter is studded with the gustatory pleasures of the teenaged upper class: merienda (snack) at the Café Espaila with cake and TruCola. Not only is food described, it is also used to indicate character: Rio, who has little appetite for these cloying sweet foods, is portrayed sympathetically, whereas Pucha, who lingers over them, is projected antipathetically. Food is used to make a similar comment on social class in another episode when the Gonzagas give a dinner party. Their cook is a consummate artist with local dishes such as kangkong adobo and leche flan, but for their dinner party the Gonzagas absurdly purchase foods such as Hunt’s Catsup, Kraft Mayonnaise, and Velveeta for the sake of their brand names and because such Western items (mundane in the United States) are expensive imports in Asia. In contrast to these images of foolish upper-class gourmandizing and conspicuous consumption of food, Hagedorn sets images of the working-class effort at the production of food: “she is tearfully cleaning grains of rice, picking out the tiny pebbles and white worms before the rice can be cooked.” Further, food also corresponds to mood. In contrast to the images of feasting that dominate the first half of the book, images of fasting dominate the latter half after Senator Avila’s assassination. After the assassination, many of the episodes are told through Joey Sands’s point of view; up to this point he is portrayed as having a voracious appetite, but after the assassination, this suddenly turns to disgust with food, and he cannot eat: “Smelling the pungent odors of cooking . . . Joey salivated. Garlic, vinegar, chocolate meat. Pig entrails stewing in black blood. He gagged at the thought of his favorite dish.” It is as if this dominating imagery of distaste for food were symptomatic of the distemper of the nation after Senator Avila’s assassination.

A repeated theme that also unifies and pervades the book is that of dreams, dreams as psychological phenomena as well as aspirations. Some of the dreams raise hopes and cheer; others provoke tears and terror. In either case, the dreams indicate the dreamers’ discontent with their individual realities and, cumulatively, a whole society’s dismay with the facts of its day-to-day existence. For example, Joey Sands dreams of escaping the Philippines and plying his trade in the United States, so much so that he adopts a last name derived from a Las Vegas hotel. The solidly middle-class Freddie Gonzaga has his bags packed and passport ready for flight to Spain at an instant’s notice; his wife and Rio do leave him and emigrate to the United States. Many such dreams are induced by the mass media through soap operas and trashy films; these fantasies lead people such as Romeo Rosales to hopes of easy fame and riches and Rio to conceive of the ideal life as America á la Hollywood. Such simplistic escapism contrasts with the ideals of social justice propounded by Senator Avila and his family, who are willing to pay the price of martyrdom and exile to further them. (The chapter describing Daisy Avila’s torture and rape is entitled “The Famine of Dreams.”) On the other hand, in a tellingly symbolic sequence, the first lady dreams of swimming through a sea of syrup toward a “white plantation house . . . with white pillars . . . white shirts . . .  white shark-skin”—the associations with American political power, Southern slavery, biblical hypocrisy, and death are clear. She hobnobs with the wealthy, the elegant, and the divine (Cristina Ford, George Hamilton, and Pope John XXIII). In contrast to the satirical symbolism of the first lady’s dreams, Hagedorn counterposes the pathos of Rio’s dream of herself and her brother which occurs toward the end of the novel. Now an emigré in the United States, Rio feels “at home only in airports,” and her brother has become an emphatically un-Catholic born-again preacher. Rio repeatedly dreams of her brother and herself as fragile and beautiful nocturnal moths drawn toward the light in “a deserted, ramshackle house . . . perched on a rocky abyss . . . overlooking a turbulent sea. . . . We flap and beat our wings in our futile attempts to reach what surely must be heaven.” Rio comments: “The meaning is simple and clear.” This closing dream of the novel is the opposite of the dreams of escape from the Philippines that so many of the characters have nourished earlier in the novel. Rather, it is, like Avila’s, a dream that yearns toward the fulfillment of the potential of a nation that has been wracked by the greed, corruption, and violence of its history, a history to which the United States has made and continues to make no small contribution.

Jessica Hagedorn, then, has with her first novel achieved an ambitious epic of Filipino life during the corrupt regime of the late President Ferdinand Marcos. The author is to be lauded for the depth and breadth of her vision, the variety and immediacy of her characters and details, and the steadiness of her gaze, at once critical and sympathetic. Dogeaters is indeed an eminently notable addition to the achievement of recent Asian American writing.

Dogeaters has quite distinct main parts. “Part One: Coconut Palace” is episodic, a series of individual scenes with unstated though deducible thematic linkages. It features an imposingly large cast of characters, both major and minor, who are largely both one-dimensional and static. Though the characters have numerous nuances of foil relationships to one another, they are all predominantly function characters; often they merely make cameo appearances. The plotlessness of the story and the lack of multifacetedness in the characters enhances Dogeaters’ depiction of a society of stagnation, fragmentation, and utter degeneracy. These effects are reinforced by the intercalary chapters, consisting of snippets principally from Jean Mallet’s The Philippines (1846) and fictitious new stories from the equally fictitious Metro Manila Daily newspaper, with occasional supplementation from other sources, such as William McKinley’s address to a delegation of Methodist churchmen (1898).

The episodes vary in tone. The relatively ingenuous opening chapter finds Rio Gonzaga, Pucha Gonzaga, and their chaperone, Lorenza, at the Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman movie All That Heaven Allows and afterward at the Café España for merienda. The crude, dull Pucha, Rio’s cousin, leads on a group of lewd boys at a neighboring table—a foreshadowing of the contemptuous attitude of males toward women and the instances in which women support this male outlook by degrading themselves. “Mister Heartbreak” (chapter 4, though the chapters are unnumbered), however, is a plunge into the demimonde. Here the reader meets the CocoRico disc jockey Joey, who picks up other men; Andres, called the Queen of Mabini, who owns the CocoRico; the Igorot CocoRico employee Pedro, who is said to eat dog meat; and, via photographs, Andres’s lover, the intersex Eugenio/Eugenia.

“Part Two: The Song of the Bullets” has several strands of plot, but the story line markedly declines in intricacy and increases in pace. It follows Romeo (Orlando) Rosales to his tragic end; details Joey’s liaison with the German film director Rainer, from whom Joey steals money and drugs; and covers Daisy Consuelo Avila’s brutalizing at the hands of General Ledesma. The narrative treats Joey’s flight to Uncle’s shack in Tondo after the assassination of Senator Avila; Uncle’s attempted betrayal of Joey; Joey’s killing of Uncle’s dog, Taruk, and robbery of his erstwhile sponsor; and Joey’s flight to the mountains with guerrillas. Interspersed in the narrative are such items as a strange dream of the first lady’s, a letter from Romeo to his mother, “news articles” from Celebrity Pinoy, and an Associated Press dispatch.

Both parts of Dogeaters are characterized by the infusion of substantial quantities of Tagalog and Spanish locutions, which masterfully create atmospheric effect, though at some cost of full comprehension of the text on the part of the reader unfamiliar with these languages. Yet a case could be made for the resultant intensification of the effects of fragmentation, perhaps even alienation, created by the kaleidoscopic nature of the episodic story line. Perhaps a similar explanation—heightening the effect, in this case of degradation and degeneracy—can be applied to the uncensored diction. The grainy language may also be taken as an indication of a deep-seated disrespect for women, even when the utterance is from a woman.

Dogeaters is a wild ride into the underbelly of Manila society. It is also a clever tour de force that illustrates American and Spanish influence with energetic detail. One of the central themes of the novel is reality versus fantasy, and the novel poses the question of what will be revealed if pretense and deception are stripped away.

Hagedorn explodes pretense in the ruling class, bitterly satirizing the profligacy and waste of a corrupt regime. She also exposes the depravity and desperation in slum towns such as Tondo, home of Joey and Uncle. Morality on both these levels has been sacrificed, to greed in the first instance and to survival in the second. If any scenario among the many varied episodes displays human warmth and caring, it is the guerrilla contingent of Daisy and her cousin Clarita, with whom Joey finds refuge in the mountains. Removed from Manila, this community of supporters is also a long way from the aggression, deception, and depravity that are common features of city life, high and low. Joey’s wasted life thus shows the possibility of transformation and resilience in exile. Rio is also hopeful in her pragmatic exile. That she and her artist mother will succeed away from Manila is assumed.

Dreams are a central feature of the novel; together with radio serials and film plots, dreams are manifestations of the fantasies in which all the characters indulge. Joey’s dreams while he is transported to the mountains are forceful and terror-filled. The long dream sequence that opens the novel’s second half is an obscure, sacrilegious hallucination by the first lady, complete with appearances by Hollywood stars and the pope. Rio’s recurring dream about her brother and herself as nocturnal moths drawn to a light in a deserted house ends the book.

Another unifying feature of the characters is the tsismis (gossip) in which they indulge. They are all as addicted to gossiping as they are to eating, to drugs, and to sex. Cora Camacho and the first lady are the most blatant and manipulative in this. A final letter from Pucha to Rio also suggests that some facts about Pucha’s life as Rio has presented it are just unfounded gossip. Excerpts from the Metro Manila Daily, itself a fiction, present intermittent gossip and inaccuracies.

Hagedorn’s title, Dogeaters, has generated outcry among Filipino readers and represents her most radical statement. The term is a pejorative for Filipinos. Her novel exposes a dog-eat-dog world with canine ferocity. As Uncle tells Joey at one point, his dog eats better than they do. Trinidad and Romeo wonder casually if the barbecue on a stick that they’ve just purchased from a vendor might be dog meat; Romeo teasingly says that he does not mind eating dog. The title, thus, is sassy as a slap, signaling readers that the novel will audaciously break taboos and explore much that is forbidden.

One striking respect in which Dogeaters, a nominee for the National Book Award in 1990, impacts women’s issues is its exploration of the protean nature of gender. Gay men such as Andres and Joey are complemented by the intersex Eugenio/Eugenia, the transvestite “Uncle” Perdito (a dressmaker), and straight men such as Severo Alacran and General Nicasio Ledesma. The unfixed nature of gender orientation breaks down stereotypical notions about male-female roles and functions.

Another important consideration is the novel’s uncensored, frank presentation of male disrespect toward, dominance of, and even brutalization of women and girls. The opening scene finds fourteen-year-old Pucha Gonzaga and ten-year-old Rio Gonzaga first at a film and then at a merienda, chaperoned by the servant Lorenza, reminding the reader of the mistrust of women and girls that chaperonage implies. Boomboom Alacran, scion of a cultured family, hisses and makes kissing sounds in the direction of the buxom Pucha, a foreshadowing of the condescension toward women that, as a whole, the male characters exhibit. Almost immediately, the reader is informed that Severo Alacran “flaunts his mistresses” and brags about sleeping with his servants.

Dominance is most visible in the arrangements General Ledesma has made for the actress Lolita Luna to be his mistress. He always reminds her of her status and on occasion abuses her enough to produce bruises on her face and thighs. Yet Ledesma’s rough handling of Lolita only sets the stage for his rape and torture of Daisy. He whispers in her ear as she is being raped by the others that after his men have finished with her, he plans to take her to another room that has special equipment, which he describes. Finally released, Daisy becomes a revolutionary. Her empowerment is revealed in her assumed name, Aurora, and in her mastery of firearms, revealed in a passing remark about teaching Joey to use a gun.

Even when chauvinism is absent, the relationships between men and women in Dogeaters are strained and combative, an antidote to the idealized Hollywood assurance that marriage means living happily ever after and thus a refutation of the assumption that female fulfillment is achieved through the acquisition of a husband or a lover. Severo and Isabel Alacran feud constantly; Daisy’s marriage to Malcolm dissolves almost immediately; Romeo is shot en route to breaking off his relationship with Trinidad; and the love nest of General Ledesma and Lolita is anything but a picture of domestic tranquility.

Dogeaters is the chronicle of four Filipino families whose lives intersect as the plot unfolds. Most of the action takes place in the capital city of Manila, Philippines, in the 1950s. As the novel opens, it is many years later, however, and one of the three main narrators, a young girl named Rio Gonzaga, begins the story of her family with a flashback to 1956. A corrupt dictator and his former beauty queen wife (patterned after Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos) are in power. The country is a chaotic mix of corrupt politicians, waste and extravagance, abject poverty, fomenting rebellion, American movies, drugs, sex, beauty pageants, and violence. Against this backdrop, the characters search for identity, both personal and national, amid the turmoil of a country trying to define itself after a century of colonization.

Author Jessica Hagedorn describes the Philippines as a “tropical archipelago of 7,100 known islands.” It is a country “serenaded by mournful gecko lizards, preyed on by vampire bats,” and protected by giants that hide in the acacia trees. It is enchanted by evil spirits that live in caves. Its humid landscape swarms with beetles, flies, and butterflies. At certain times, locusts and cockroaches blacken the sky. Mosquitoes are everywhere, ready to infect children with brain fever. It is also a country awash in lush vegetation and adorned by a myriad of beautiful flowers that scent the air with their perfume. It is a “fragmented nation of loyal believers divided by blood feuds and controlled by the Church.” It is both beautiful and dirty, full of life and full of death. There is a cultural tug-of-war between the leftover influences of two former colonizers, Spain and the United States. It is a country of the very rich and the very poor, a corrupt nation controlled by dictators whose power is being challenged by a growing revolutionary movement. Its people are torn between the past and the present as they try to define their future. It is a country of contrasts.

The Philippines were colonized by Spain in the 1500s. They named the island nation Las Islas Filipinas after their king, Phillip II, and established their language and their religion. In the Treaty of 1898, which ended the Spanish-American War, Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States. During this war, the Philippines declared its independence from Spain. The United States refused to honor this independence, however, so the Philippines then declared war against the US (the Philippine-American War) but were soundly defeated. The US controlled the Philippines, making it a commonwealth in 1935. When World War II broke out, the Japanese invaded the country and established a puppet regime. The Japanese were defeated in 1945, and the United States gave the Philippines its independence in 1946. World War II ravaged the Philippines, however, and in the aftermath of war, the country’s multiple warring factions caused political instability for many years. In 1965, Ferdinand Marcos was elected president. His wife, Imelda (nicknamed “the Steel Butterfly”) was constantly by his side, and together they “ruled” the country with an iron hand. In Dogeaters, the Marcos character is called “The President” and his wife is referred to as “The First Lady” or “Madame.” Philippine law limited the presidency to two terms. When Marcos’s second term was nearing an end, he declared martial law in September 1972. In order to retain power, he established a strong military presence in Manila, represented in the novel by the cruel General Ledesma. Marcos justified martial law by claiming it was necessary to preserve the peace and protect the country from the Islamic insurgency, Cold War tensions, and threats of Communist rebellions. Several of the teenage characters in Dogeaters are arrested from time to time and must be bailed out of jail by their wealthy parents for minor infractions during the period of martial law.

In 1983, Marcos’s chief rival for power, Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, returned from exile in the United States in an attempt to oust Marcos. Aquino was assassinated as he stepped off the plane at the Manila airport. In Dogeaters, this event is depicted by the death of the popular senator Domingo Avila. Opposition leaders convinced Aquino’s wife, Corazon, to run for president, but in a rigged election, Marcos was declared the winner. Rebellion broke out over the election results, and Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos eventually were forced into exile in Hawaii. Corazon Aquino became the new president of the Philippines in 1986, but the excesses of the Marcos regime had left the country with a staggering national debt. It was later revealed that the Marcoses had embezzled billions of dollars of public funds during their years in power.

By the time the Marcos regime was overthrown by the People’s Revolution (depicted in the novel by the beauty-queen-turned-guerilla Daisy Avila, sex worker Joey Sands, and revolutionary Santos Tirador), Filipinos had suffered twenty years of corrupt government, secret arrests, torture, mysterious disappearances (such as that of Romeo Rosales and Trinidad Gamboa in the novel), and assassinations. The first lady’s vanity and callousness was ridiculed all over the world. Imelda Marcos became a laughingstock when it was discovered, for example, that her closet contained over three thousand pairs of shoes.

The characters in the novel come and go in a mélange of Manila’s neighborhoods, from the ritzy Monte Vista Golf and Country Club where the Gonzagas, Avilas, and Alacrans spend their days drinking cocktails and playing golf, to the Tondo Dump where Joey Sands’s “Uncle” lives in a cardboard shack amid filth and disease. The wealthy characters spend hours each day having facials, manicures, and dress fittings in the most exclusive salons while the low-class, marginalized characters sniff, inject, and snort themselves into oblivion in sex clubs and brothels. The cloud of American colonial influence still lingers in the form of movies, department stores, fashion, food, and drink. The Spanish colonial influence still lingers in the form of the Catholic Church, which condemns all of the most popular American movies that the Filipinos want to watch. The military leaders live in posh subdivisions “patrolled by men in blue uniforms” and maintain secret torture camps where enemies of the state are questioned, tortured, and disappeared.

Jessica Hagedorn explains that in Dogeaters, she has tried to subvert fiction by peppering her novel with factual documents, speeches, and news reports. There are various snippets from Father Jean Mallat’s 1946 History of the Philippines, excerpts from a speech about the Philippines given by US President William McKinley, a poem by José Rizal, and several news articles from the Associated Press. These tricks of setting serve to realistically fictionalize the Marcos-era Manila. The novel’s setting is a postcolonial nation of conflicting social, cultural, political, and economic forces whose passive citizens are waiting to see what will happen in a country of “guns, goons and gold.”