The Windup Girl

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2009

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Themes

Buddhism: Duty, Karma, and Reincarnation

Buddhism permeates the novel, and its pervasive presence appears in the ranks of praying monks, disembodied spirits, shrines, temples, and characters’ contemplation of their respective fates.

During his own short stint as a kind of unofficial monk, Jaidee realizes the central truth of Buddhism: the only thing that really exists is change. The events of one’s life come and go and can change instantly. For this, it’s almost as if one steps into a brand-new incarnation at a moment’s notice. These conditions fluctuate: sometimes one enjoys pleasant karma, at other times not so pleasant. Karma (or kamma as it appears in the text) can be altered by every action a person takes. One’s actions determine karma—good brings reward, evil results in punishment—but this is not a moralistic world. As in the case of Kanya (whose name comes very close to karma) violence and killing are sometimes necessary in order to fulfill one’s duty, or damma, as the text terms it. In the Bhagavad-Gita for example, if one’s duty is to kill as a warrior, then that’s what one does. It’s not about guilt or punishment, necessarily, but it is inextricably bound up with karma.

Karma has determined past lives and one’s present life, and future lives will be based upon one’s present actions. For example, Hock Seng wonders what he has done in past lives so that his once-prosperous sea merchant business has now decayed, and he finds himself a yellow card. Kanya wonders how her actions will determine what she returns as, and the Buddhist belief in karma means that one can return as a cockroach a million times until past actions have been accounted for. Kanya also hates windups because they are a mockery of a real human being; a windup’s actions don’t determine anything because they have no karma. Gibbons, on the other hand, thinks that’s exactly the point. New people are perfect people because they don’t have to worry about good or bad. Their soullessness means they have escaped the karmic cycle, which can take eons to work out.

Eventually, the karmic cycle ends, and one merges with the godhead or the universe, and the figure of the Buddha under the bo or bodhi tree represents enlightenment or nirvana. Jaidee studies the old image of the tree as he realizes this core truth of life. The smiling Buddha has been usurped in Bangkok by the corrupt Dung Lord, and the bo trees have been infected by ivory beetles. Despite these conditions, it’s nothing but a temporary setback. Climate change signifies the collective karma of the world, and the sea walls holding back the flood are an ephemeral structure created by man to stave off the high sea levels generated by humans, industry, and trade. The sea wall itself thus functions as a temporary respite, itself subject to karma and change. Ultimately, the wall is blown up to wash away the corruption of Bangkok and instill a new order.

The Other: Social and Psychological Uses of Personal Difference

The Other is a useful phenomenological term to define a Self against the otherness of individuals. The Other can take many forms, and it usually designates those personally, socially, economically, or culturally different from the powerholders in a society. Heteronormativity, for example, is the view that anything other than heterosexuality is not normal, and any individual or behavior that does not adhere to heterosexuality is immoral or wrong. Gays, lesbians, transgenders, bisexuals, and seemingly aberrant sexual practices such as fetishism and sado-masochism fall outside the realm of normality in this view. Thus, these individuals and behaviors are condemned as perversions to be avoided, shunned, despised, and even destroyed. Ironically, however, what goes on behind closed doors of those who subscribe to heteronormativity reveals that the strident tone of this rhetoric is often quite different from what events actually transpire.

In the novel, the Other abounds in the figures of windups, cheshires, and yellow cards. Emiko, as a windup, exemplifies the contradictory nature of Otherness. She is Japanese, like Mr. Yashimoto, but his technology company is situated in Bangkok and he is tolerated only because he is useful. A hatred of windups exists, but the real reason that a windup girl like Emiko or Hiroko invites such hatred is never superabundantly made clear. Kanya despises them for their soullessness, their mockery of humanity, and their seemingly real emotions, which aren’t genuine emotions. Emiko is valuable to Raleigh because of the highly-sexualized performance she can deliver, although the men of the club irrationally despise her. Both desire and disgust curiously and ambivalently mix. Emiko, as Other, is useful one moment and despised the next, as is often the case of the Other in any society.

Yellow cards evince the more overtly political side of the Other. Though they are refugees always on the verge of obliteration, they also are useful as objects of frustration. When sociopolitical affairs reach a boiling point, they become an easy target, a way to blame the rest of the culture’s problems on a group that can be quickly and conveniently eliminated to quell current social unrest. The Holocaust, for example, exemplifies how social unrest of the dominant powerholders can be focused on “undesirables” who supposedly embody cultural corruption. Yellow cards are used to funnel the frustrations of the native Thai, even though the citizens and the white shirts have their own tense conflict.

Climate Change: Global Warming, Rising Sea Levels, and the Destruction of Nature

The setting of the novel exhibits the consequences of unchecked climate change. Bangkok is extraordinarily hot, so much so that its citizens must take an enforced siesta at the hottest time of the day. The sea levels have risen to the point that a wall precariously holds the ocean back. Crops have been seriously affected, Buddha’s sacred Bodhi tree is bug-infested, and the global food chain now depends upon genetically-modified foods always at risk of diseases. Power thus resides in those who can command the seed bank, which houses the genealogy of past plants. The novel’s major conflicts revolve around harnessing energy and controlling the food chain.

Akkarat’s coal-diesel car, the use of methane gas, and the presence of coal production in the novel show how despite the horrific consequences, business in the form of the Trade Ministry (headed by Akkarat) still prevail, even though evidence of the damage lies literally all around the people of Bangkok. In such a nightmarish scenario, however, brute survival takes hold. When one is foraging for food and shelter, loftier and abstract concerns such as philosophy, art, and environmental awareness take a back seat. Indeed, very little evidence of culture exists in the novel. The closest to the artistic in the novel lies in religious rituals such as dance and pictures of the Buddha, though these are decayed vestiges and are more religious than cultural and secular.