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All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
It is emotional memory what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. These questions mark the terrain I will explore in this essay. To be more specific, I examine how two Filipino American novels, Ninotchka Rosca's State of War and Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters , image the Philippines through a postmodern idiom and how these texts rework textual referents to the socio-political and economic forces affecting the homeland of the exiled or expatriated writer. Ultimately, this paper seeks to link the historical reality of American imperialism with the imagined construction of the Philippines by two Filipina American writers. The essay follows this trajectory by examining the re-writing of Philippine history in the metonymic claims of the two novels.