The Windup Girl

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2009

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Chapters 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 13 Summary

Jaidee arrives at the temple dressed in his white shirt uniform for his public humiliation. He confesses to Trade Minister Akkarat and General Pracha that he has accepted bribes and has been avaricious. Pracha strips him of his position. Jaidee will pay penance for nine years by residing in a monastery, and he will lose all of his possessions. His sons will be adopted, and the family name erased. Jaidee confronts Akkarat about the whereabouts of Chaya but Akkarat says he has no idea what Jaidee is talking about. Jaidee threatens to kill Akkarat, who tells him, “you’re lucky that General Pracha is your friend. If I were him, I would have turned those two boys of yours out into the street to beg for blister rust scraps. That would have been a true lesson” (145).

Chapter 14 Summary

Anderson and Carlyle are in the compound of the Environment Ministry and have just witnessed the humiliation of Jaidee. Carlyle has somehow engineered this ceremony as a check to the white shirts and to Pracha. As a result, the merchants whose goods Jaidee burnt are paid reparations. Anderson tells Carlyle he wants to meet Akkarat. He thinks he sees Emiko in the crowd but it is another windup that is expensively dressed and traveling with a Japanese delegation.

Anderson is led to a black limo by a group of Thais, Akkarat is inside. Anderson tells him he wants access to the seedbank. Akkarat tells Anderson such a thing is impossible; on top of it, they are on opposite sides, since Akkarat tries to maintain the food supply while the calorie companies that Anderson represents have been trying to take the food supply from the Thai Kingdom for five hundred years. The seedbank to which Anderson alludes has been their survival, after companies like Anderson’s destroyed India, Burma, and Vietnam. Anderson explains he needs new genetic material because “if the world is going to keep eating, we need to stay ahead of cibiscosis and blister rust and Nippon genehack weevil” (151). Akkarat says he is in a good mood, otherwise he would have had Anderson killed in an instant and no one would care. He concludes by saying “I’ll consider your offer” (152).

Chapter 15 Summary

Emiko sits in the market at night, eating a meal of noodles, when the white shirts appear. She has been thinking about the villages of the New People and feels conflicted. The whole purpose of the New People is to serve and, in a way, running away is a great betrayal. On the other hand, she thinks of the abuse that Kannika (who is also a New Person) inflicts on her at the club, as well as the treatment by a client of hers last night, someone “who fucked her and then spat on her before he left” (155). The white shirts talk about what happened to Jaidee as they order their food and crowd about. One of them idly touches Emiko on the back of the neck and she is convinced they will identify her as a windup and turn her into mulch. They leave after demanding a bribe from the woman cooking because the methane she uses for fuel isn’t government regulation. Emiko goes to the club to talk to Raleigh about the New People villages. He is irritated at her request, tells her it’s hard to live in the jungles, and becomes abusive at what he construes as her thinking she is special. He says, “you were useful to someone, once, so I see how a windup like you might forget herself” (159). He intimidates her, says she has nothing to offer, that she is a bad investment, and that he could have her turned to mulch. He reluctantly agrees to help her earn the money to make her way North.

Chapters 13-15 Analysis

These chapters shed further light on the ways of the white shirts. They are nominally the authority figures, but they are fueled by bribes and corruption themselves. The Environment Ministry headed by Pracha is at odds with the Trade Ministry, which is headed by the contemptible Akkarat. Though both are at odds with one another, they would both agree that a calorie man like Anderson should not be permitted access to the seedbank. “I may want to see General Pracha with his hair and eyebrows shaved off,” Akkarat says, “living in a forest monastery and despised by all, but on this, at least, he and I would agree” (151).

Jaidee’s complete humiliation he endures to get back Chaya so far hasn’t illuminated her whereabouts, or if she’s even alive. The white shirts remain a formidable group, however, and the reparations scheme Carlyle has somehow orchestrated is a dangerous move. Having been humbled, the white shirts still maintain control, as the bribe from the woman cooking in the night market attests. (She cooks with blue methane instead of green, and after one of the white shirts asks to look over her accounts, she gives them free tilapia and sends her daughter to the ministry with bribe money.)

Emiko’s own tenuous situation at the hands of the white shirts resurrects in her a personal purity and integrity. The client who spits on her, and Raleigh’s abuse, as “he looks her over with barely masked disgust, as if she is a piece of dog shit stuck to his shoe” (158), begin to take their emotional toll. She reminds herself that though she is not human, living in a New People village is perhaps the best option she has. Still, the journey will cost bribe money, just as Raleigh bribes the white shirts to leave Emiko alone. Raleigh’s reluctant willingness to help her comes at a cost: Emiko must be willing to be with any man who wants her, so that her novelty might make him return.