55 pages • 1 hour read
The Windup Girl
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Chapter 1 Summary
The setting of the novel is Bangkok, Thailand, sometime in the distant future. The protagonist, Anderson Lake is head of SpringLife factory, which develops energy sources and is fueled by megadonts, or gigantic, “gene-hacked” and “elephant-derived animals” genetically disinterred from the Pleistocene Age; they possess four tusks that have been sawed off for the factory workers’ safety (8). The Earth’s population is starving and depends upon genetically-modified food such as TotalNutrientWheat, SoyPRO and HiGroCorn. The ocean-levels have risen, and while Bangkok has constructed walls to prevent flooding, other coastal cities such as New York and New Orleans have vanished under the sea. The climax of the chapter consists of an ill-treated megadont that revolts, smashes up the factory, and grabs Anderson with its trunk. It is on the verge of killing Anderson, but he has previously managed to shoot it with “toxins concentrated from AgriGen research on wasp venom” (19). Convinced he will be converted into “jelly under the foot of an oversized elephant” (19), Anderson instead witnesses the pitiful death of the dumb and exploited animal. As the chapter ends, Hock Seng, a Malayan Chinese refugee who has survived the cryptic “Incident” back in China, while other Malayans starve in the street, bends over Anderson, touches his neck and informs his boss “you’re bleeding” (20).
Chapter 2 Summary
The point-of-view shifts from Anderson to Hock Seng, who observes Anderson being sewn up and yelling at the doctor, who is also Malayan and a “yellow card” refugee. Hock dislikes Anderson, since he somehow managed to take control of the factory from its previous head, Yates. Hock is not simply a yellow card precariously in danger, as he has experienced success himself and was his own boss four years earlier. Now he feels demoralized by Anderson, whom he describes as an American who is “one moment joyful, the next petulant,” and whose “karma has made him a foreign devil, and Hock Seng’s karma has brought them together” (25). As the carcass of the megadont is being cut up, mysterious cheshire cats arrive to lap up the blood. They have been genetically engineered and their procreative ability have rendered extinct the traditional house cat. Hock “has a measure of respect for the devil cats,” since “they are clever, thriving in places where they are despised” and “almost supernatural in their tenacity” (26). While the factory lies in shambles and the Megadont Union needs to be appeased and repair work done, Hock, despite his disgust at the carnage, schemes to outwit Anderson. His plan is to steal the original blueprints created by Yates that are locked in a safe. The documents constitute “a next generation of energy storage” that Hock will exploit to secure a “hope of resurrection for himself and his clan” (31).
Chapter 3 Summary
The point-of-view once shifts to Emiko, the windup girl of the title. As one of the New People, Emiko is genetically engineered to be disease-free, with perfect eyesight and skin that is so non-porous that she heats up. She is a kind of robot doll that nonetheless experiences emotional and sexual pleasure. She works for a man named Raleigh, who owns a gentlemen’s club called the Ploenchit, where the religious Grahamites and the authoritative “white shirts” hypocritically enjoy her sexual company. They sometimes return alone, filled with ambivalent shame and desire. Part of their fascinated disgust with Emiko has to do with the way she moves. Kannika, the female pimp of the club, objectifies Emiko and reduces her to “nothing but a silly marionette creature now, all stutter-stop motion—herky-jerky heechy-keechy—with no trace of the stylized grace that her mistress Mizumi-sensei trained into her” (37).
On this night in the club, Kannika characteristically humiliates Emiko by pouring beer over her head and penetrating her with fingers and a jade dildo. The men join in and laugh because, as Kannika announces, “[Emiko] is nothing, and will always be nothing, and for once the dirty Japanese get what is coming to them” (38).
Raleigh calls Emiko out back, where she meets Anderson, and her boss tells her to tell Anderson the story of the white shirt boy who shamefully returned the other night. Anderson learns that this boy has bragged about his aunt’s ability to produce ngaw, a valuable genetically-modified fruit familiar to Anderson and with which he wishes to corner the market. Emiko also disgusts Anderson, but he gives her money for her help and informs her of villages in the North populated by New People like Emiko, who have escaped. Previously feeling dead inside, Emiko has hope that she can escape being a ridiculed circus act able to live among her own (new) people.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The setting of the novel consists of a nightmarish, post-environmental disaster version of Bangkok, Thailand that has managed to survive the coastal flooding that has swallowed other major coastal cities. Life is precarious at best, since a wall holds off the fury of the sea while bribes grease the political machinery and arbitrary annihilation intimidates foreign refugees. Hock Seng worries about his tenuous position as a Chinese outsider while Emiko, the windup girl, survives on the hypocrisy of the religiously-conservative Grahamites and the fascist white shirts, for whom she provides a sexual outlet.
Western financial invaders such as the pioneering Yates and the midwestern Anderson have made some measure of success in this world of genetic modification, but as the monstrous megadonts, the eerie cheshires, and the carnage of the factory evince, an unnatural environment still fueled by coal even after the ravages of climate change has gone unchecked. The SpringLife factory, in all of its ambition, figures as both dangerous and costly. Unions must be appeased after the accident; feng shui counselors must be consulted; Buddhist monks must bless, and psychics must discern the wishes of the dead. This management is deftly handled by Hock Seng who, although he dislikes Anderson and his work, hopes the factory stays open so that he can manage his own metaphorical resurrection.
Undesirables such as Hock Seng and Emiko also highlight the role of social division and personal difference. Hock, and the doctor who sews up Anderson, for example, signify yellow cards that survive merely because they can provide a service while other yellow cards starve in the streets and clog unemployment lines. Emiko also thrives because of her patron, Raleigh, who cares for but also abuses her by permitting Kannika to demean and exploit her for male clients. The horrible quality of life also highlights how the natural, animal, and human (and even cyborg, in the case of the New People) is neither cultivated nor nurtured. At the end of Chapter 1, for example, Anderson witnesses the death of the megadont and notices how:
[T]he rage is gone. Long-lashed eyelids blink. Anderson wonders what the creature is thinking. If the neural havoc tearing through its system is something it can feel. If it knows its end is imminent. Or if it just feels tired. […] The monster was never meant for fighting. The megadont lets out a final gust of breath. Its body sags (20).
The painful and piteous death of the megadont evokes pathos and poignancy. Even Anderson, for all of his ambition and rudeness, feels sympathy for it. This scene emphasizes the disregard of all life (even if sympathy still exists), since humans have trashed the global environment, have created genetically-engineered creatures and foodstuffs that now dominate society, and have manufactured cyborg-like quasi-humans such as Emiko that can feel emotion at the hands of selfish abusers. Emiko’s role in the novel might also be seen as that of transgender figure, one who simultaneously fascinates straight men who nominally exhibit contempt yet secretly seek sex from Emiko.
If Anderson had not offered Emiko a glimmer of hope, her life would continue to be unbearable. His fleeting description, at the end of Chapter 3, characterizes the Northern villages as “poor country, genehacked half to death, out beyond Chiang Rai and across the Mekong” populated with “windups […] [who] don’t have any patrons and […] don’t have any owners” (46). Previously dead inside, Emiko experiences “a pounding heart and a sudden urge to live” (46).
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