I feel like the section we just read is setting up Joey and Lolita Luna in such a way that they’re…. aligned? They briefly meet, have a power struggle over the German and clearly don’t like each other very much, but when they come apart there’s now this association that they have with one another, particularly Lolita with Joey in her chapter. They both seek to escape Manila more actively than any other characters in the book; both of their lives are inextricably tied to sex and its exchange for some form of money, power, or the potential for the escape; they’re also both addicts, of course, and they both have former lovers that they refer to only by their nationality. (Now that I think about that last point, and about Lolita’s desire to escape, their power struggle over the German can actually be seen in a new light.)
This is all quite surface-level, but I do feel like it’s made some kind of impact about how I’m thinking about the two of them as characters. Is this true for anyone else? Has anybody noticed other connections like this in the book?