In 1975, then relatively unknown Filipino-American poet named Jessica Hagedorn wrote poem called Song for my Father in which life in Manila took on some of the surreal appearance of life in some Latin-American city under siege: dope dealers are executed in public and senators go mad in prison camps the nightclubs are burning with indifference curfew draws near soldiers lurk in jeeps of dawn warzones as the president's daughter bogies nostalgically under the gaze of sixteen smooth bodyguards and decay is forever even in the rage of humorless revolutionaries (Danger and Beauty 37) The tone of this poem, and of few other poems and stories dealing with life in the Philippines, suggested an interesting contrast with Hagedorn's other work, her Filipino-American writing which, although it shares the same sharp-edged glitter and flamboyance of the Philippine-centered work, lacks its dreamy, fantastic cast. Hagedorn's novel, Dogeaters, nominated for the National Book Award, deals with life in Manila in the 1970's, and makes this reader think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude. In contrast to Marquez, Hagedorn's story is urban-centered (and terribly urbane), moving in milieu which could only be Manila, with its outrageous blend of Spanish elitism And elegance gone seedy, American flash and decadence, and Third world desperation and brazenness. It is slicing and cutting and irreverent, disjointed like Marquez's dream world, but little more nerve-tingling than dust-covered Maconda. Nevertheless it carries strong sense of magic realism, of bizarre characters and strange coincidences, of real life gone unreal with sudden verbal twist, exposing the reader to a world totally reconstructed and subverted by fantasy (Llosa 5). We are left in limbo between the magic and the real, in world as it might be described by peasant, for instance, or street-boy - someone far removed from the logic and power of that world, experiencing reality but reality touched with the magic of incomprehension. Jessica Hagedorn was born in l949 in the Philippines to Visayan Hagedorn family. She immigrated to the United States as a, twelve-year old in 1961, living in San Francisco and New York, where she was deeply influenced by black soul music, black culture, rock and roll, and group of black and Chicana women writers and musicians. She was one of four women featured in McGraw-Hill's early collection of ethnic and women's poetry, Four Young Women: Poems. She has published in various Asian-American collections and magazines: Liwanag (1975), Time to Greez (1975), The Greenfield Review (1975), and. Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian-American Poets (1983). She has published three books of her own: Dangerous Music (1975), Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions (1981), and Dogeaters (1990). As Filipina writing in the United States, Hagedorn had strong literary antecedents to draw on. Filipino immigration to the mainland United States started in the 1920's, after the waves of Chinese and Japanese immigration had been controlled by discriminatory legislation. By 1932 Carlos Bulasan, an Ilocano of basically peasant stock, had launched his very prolific writing career, in effect getting head start on what was to become the Asian American Movement of the seventies. Bulosan's America is in the Heart is still considered the classic account of the Filipino-American historical experience, and the old manong whom Bulosan loved so, still around in the fifties and sixties and seventies, older, of course, and maybe poorer, became the natural starting point for the new Filipino-American writers. Oscar Penaranda worked in the hop fields and the salmon canneries to duplicate the experience of the manongs, while Al Robles recorded hundreds of hours of taped interviews with the old-timers and Lou Syquia went into political activism to forestall the demolition of the old International Hotel in San Francisco, where so many of the manongs lived. …