The Windup Girl

“It’s difficult not to always be aware of those high walls and the pressure of the water beyond. Difficult to think of the City of Divine Beings as anything other than a disaster waiting to happen. But the Thais are stubborn and have fought to keep their revered city of Krung Thep from drowning. With coal-burning pumps and leveed labor […] they have so far kept at bay that thing which has swallowed New York and Rangoon, Mumbai and New Orleans.”

This quotation describes the setting of the novel, with a future Bangkok experiencing the effects of global warming, including rising sea levels. People have kept the sea rise at bay using coal-burning water pumps, which only further contribute to global warming. The residents seem to have little choice, however, and the flooding of the city threatens to drown them as it already has other major cities around the world.

“Hock Seng shudders at the sight, remembering his own people similarly disassembled, other bloodlettings, other factory wreckage. Good warehouses destroyed. Good people lost. It’s all so reminiscent of when the Green Headbands came with their machetes and his warehouses burned. Jute and tamarind and kink-springs all going up in fire and smoke. Slick machetes gleaming in the blaze. He turns his eyes away, forcing down memories. Forces himself to breathe.”

The megadont’s attack makes Hock recall the violence that he endured in Malaya, China. Hock is a refugee, a yellow card, whose position in the Thai culture is always at risk. The traumatic nature of his past rises in his memory in the form of the Green Headbands, who destroyed Hock’s merchant fleet. 

“[Cheshires] were supposedly created by a calorie executive[…]for a daughter’s birthday. A party favor for when the little princess turned as old as Lewis Carroll’s Alice. The child guests took their new pets home where they mated with natural felines, and within twenty years, the devil cats were on every continent and Felis domesticus was gone from the face of the world, replaced by a genetic string that bred true ninety-eight percent of the time.”

The whimsical cheshires, invented as a kind of curiosity, demonstrate how genetically-engineered creatures can prove to be the dominant creatures in the survival of the fittest. Not natural selection but an unnatural selection, a genetic intervention, led to the prevalence of an artificial breed of cat, so much so that the cheshires obliterated true old-fashioned cats that now are merely shadows of the past.