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| (Cover Artist: Raphael Lacoste) |
In short, The Windup Girl is a dense and carefully plotted novel, and moreover one whose author obviously devoted substantial effort to the task of educating himself in the nuances of the complicated social, cultural, and historical subjects that his story touches upon.
It would all be amazing but for the fact that the book is also mind-numbingly racist.
Set in a dystopian version of Bangkok, Thailand, The Windup Girl opens by introducing its readers to Anderson Lake--an American corporate agent working undercover for the multinational corporation Agrigen. Despised the world over for it's high profile trade wars with competitors, Agrigen's genetically engineered food products have as the novel opens slowly replaced much of the Earth's natural ecosystems, and resulted in a company that has a near complete monopoly on all forms of caloric energy.
Ostensibly running an industrial startup manufacturing "spring-powered batteries," Anderson's real reason for living in Bankok is to track down Gibbons, a scientist once employed by Agrigen whose unexpected death in a lab accident years earlier Anderson personally believes to have been a hoax. In the years since Gibbons's disappearance, Anderson has made it his mission to track down this figure, and prevent him from absconding with Agrigen's trade secrets.
Meanwhile, the dangerously illegal factory Anderson runs as a front for his undercover investigation is managed by Hock Seng, a Chinese-Malaysian refugee suffering from severe PTSD after having witnessed the murder of his entire family in a brutal genocide. Continually afraid that Anderson might close down the factory and deprive him of his only livelihood, Hock Seng secretly plots to steal the plans for the spring-powered batteries which Anderson's factory (pretends) to manufacture.
These two stories are further interspersed with those of Jaidee--a renegade customs agent working for the Thai government who has made it his mission to prevent any of Agrigen's genetically engineered products from entering Bangkok's fragile ecosystem, and the titular Windup Girl--a bio-mechanical android from Japan named Emiko who has been forced to live in sexual slavery after having been abandoned in Thailand by the businessman who used to call her his most prized "possession."
One of the reasons the setup of The Windup Girl feels so unusual is the skill with which Bacigalupi weaves together these seemingly unrelated narratives, in the process sketching out a surprisingly detailed portrayal of how the interests and experiences of his protagonists interact with one another. Through Anderson's eyes, we're introduced to a Bangkok underworld populated by super-wealthy businessmen pining for a loosening of labor laws, while via Hock Seng's jaded perspective we see the deadly working conditions in the factory Anderson himself runs--an industrial assembly-line which routinely employs child labour, and where massive workplace fatalities are a near weekly occurrence. Meanwhile, Jaidee demonstrates an alternate extreme in the novel's politics--an egotistical self-styled freedom fighter whose violent isolationism has earned him the moniker "the Tiger of Bangkok," and who is more than willing to kill in order to protect the fragile ecosystems of his homeland. Then, finally, there is Emiko, a woman whose identity as an artificial "New Person" means her basic humanity is refuted by all whom she meets, and who endures horrendous physical and mental torture lest she risk being "mulched" by one of Jaidee's fanatical soldiers.
All of these characters are inevitably drawn into a complicated and deadly network of conflicting interests as the novel's story develops, often finding themselves at odds with one another while all around them their world slowly falls apart. The result is that Bacigalupi's story of a mysterious plague, a violent military coup, and a secret underworld of post-human robots driven into hiding by the fear and superstition of prior generations all ends up feeling like a surprisingly complete narrative. Even in spite of its impressive scope, Bacigalupi still manages to support the confusing and sometimes impenetrable plot of The Windup Girl with a sense of scale and enthusiasm.
And yet, despite these weighty and compelling themes, the novel is ultimately undone by the most basic of failures--the author's seeming conviction that when writing non-white characters for a presumed-white audience, he must do so by deploying racialized stereotypes that continually distance the experiences and perceptions of these protagonists from those of his readers.
From the distracting ways in which Bacigalupi peppers Hock Seng's dialog with semi-fictionalized references to Buddhist religious traditions, to the exceedingly unrealistic depictions of code-switching that Emiko's English-Japanese narration constantly engages in, the result is that every time one of Bacigalupi's protagonists starts to assume even a tiny molecule of depth, the author quickly plasters over the scene with heavily orientalist narration which attributes this character's motives to some kind of religious prohibition, or (worse), an explicitly non-western custom which the author characterizes as a superstition.
There's one scene early on which demonstrates this tendency. Shortly after a catastrophic accident at his battery factory leaves many of his workers dead, Anderson discusses with Hock Seng the cost of repairs. Noting idly that the gore and blood from the accident has drawn a pack of hungry "Cheshires" (genetically engineered cats capable of camouflaging themselves like chameleons so that they seem to appear and disappear at will), Anderson coldly laments the difficulty that he and Hock Seng will have in convincing his employees to return to work. In this exchange, it's revealed that the Thai workers in Anderson's factory view the Cheshires as "evil spirits," and on principle refuse to enter a building where such cats have taken up residence.
Through this scene, Bacigalupi provides an interesting bit of world-building regarding the ways in which Agrigen's already ubiquitous "gene hacked" animals are viewed by the people of this society, but he also demonstrates what becomes one of The Windup Girl's more problematic failures. Specifically, Bacigalupi depicts the reluctance of the local Thai workers to reenter Anderson's factory as being entirely irrational, and in no way linked to the bloody accident that these individuals have just witnessed. The result is that the objections that the numerous (and unnamed) workers of Anderson's factory raise to the thought of working alongside the Cheshires are characterized by the story as meaningless. This is demonstrated in the below exchange that Anderson has with Hock Seng, in which both men discuss the easiest way to have the Cheshires removed so as to convince the workers to return.
Mr. Lake takes another pull of whiskey. "We'll never get them out."
"There are children who will hunt them," Hock Seng says. "A bounty is not expensive."
The yang guizi [white person] makes a face of dismissal. "We have bounties back in the Midwest, too."
Our children are more motivated than yours.
But Hock Seng doesn't contest the foreigner's words. He'll put out the bounty, regardless. If the cats are allowed to stay, the workers will start rumors that Phii Oun the cheshire trickster spirit has caused the calamity. (p.26)
Critically here is that both Anderson and Hock Seng are forced to set a bounty on the Cheshires not because these cats will actually interfere with the factory's operations, or even because the potential future workers at this factory might be legitimately reluctant to work in a facility full of invisible flesh-eating cats. Instead, Hock Seng puts out the bounty because the presence of the Cheshires will be seen by the workers as an omen of the trickster spirit Phii Oun, whom these people are characterized as fearing far more than the very real bloodbath they have all just witnessed.
That is, Bacigalupi imagines this future version of Thailand as a place whose citizens respond to Agrigen's advanced technology by creating a set of "superstitions" which manifest themselves in the story primarily as obstructions to the goals of his protagonists.
Similar issues appear in Bacigalupi's depiction of Hock Seng, whose internal monologue is regularly interrupted by semi-fictionalized references to Buddhist beliefs, or Chinese history. These passages, while initially interesting to follow, are quickly revealed to serve no purpose in the story other than to remind the reader that Hock Seng is originally Chinese, and is therefore in the author's mind seemingly incapable of making a decision in his life that does not in some way fall back on a religious belief or cultural prohibition that would most easily be recognized as Chinese by western readers.
What's even worse is that just as with the Thai workers in Anderson's factory, Bacigalupi regularly depicts Hock Seng's cultural background as comprising a set of beliefs and customs that often drive him to behave in a way which the book characterizes as irrational and misguided. In one scene, shortly after having learned that a mysterious plague has begun sweeping through Anderson's factory, Hock Seng seriously considers murdering a young girl whom he had previously begun to view as a kind of adopted daughter. His motives in this scene, while in part due to his own past trauma as a result of having witnessed the deaths of his family, are directly linked by Bacigalupi's prose to Hock Seng's unrelated belief that it would be unlucky to allow there to be four people who know of this newly discovered plague rather than three (the word "four" being a homophone for death in some Chinese languages).
Again, the problem here is not Bacigalupi's reference to these customs regarding the number four, but instead the way in which he racializes these customs, and then proceeds to depict them as restricting the actions of his characters in a way which hinders the plot. As a result, Bacigalupi depicts Hock Seng's identity as Chinese as a barrier which this character must overcome in order to view the world rationally--in order for him to, essentially, become a meaningful character in this novel's story.
Hock Seng looks down at the two sick men, then at the girl. Four of them in the room. Four. He winces at the thought. Such an unlucky number, four. Sz. Four. Sz. Death. A better number is three, or two...
Or one.
One is the ideal number for a secret. Unconsciously, Hock Seng's hand strays to his knife, considering the girl. Messy. But still, less messy than the number four. (p.164)
Critically here is the fact that Hock Seng's reaction to the number four is portrayed not as a result of his own PTSD, or even really his grim but pragmatic awareness that it will be easier to keep knowledge of the plague from others if he himself is the only one who knows of its existence. Instead, Hock Seng seriously contemplates the murder of a child he had previously cared for only because of his personal association of the number four with death. As if to drive the point home, Bacigalupi continually returns to the number four in the above passage, making it absolutely clear to his readers that the violent thoughts of this character are the result of a racialized superstition (and not something more psychologically complex and subtle).
All of this severely hampers The Windup Girl's themes as the book progresses, with even the more interesting characters often falling prey to the latent assumptions established by the author's prose. The character of Jaidee in particular at first provides an unexpectedly nuanced moral arc, with this figure's violent politics shown to derive not from simple xenophobic isolationism, but rather a knowledge that just as how Agrigen's ubiquitous food products are driving the Earth's natural ecosystems into extinction, so too will Agrigen's business practices ultimately erase Thai culture itself.
The problem here is that this theme is improperly explored by Bacigalupi, with the author eventually implying that Jaidee's ultimate obstacle in this book is not his unwillingness to intelligently and compassionately adapt his intensely conservative views to the reality of a changing world (and perhaps in the process find a more effective method of resisting Agrigen), but instead his refusal to accept the supposed obsolescence of Thai culture in the face of western imperialism.
That is, despite initially establishing Jaidee as an unexpectedly sympathetic character, Bacigalupi ultimately seems to imply that this character's primary arc in The Windup Girl requires that he learn to accept the complete destruction of the religion, culture, and history of the society in which he lives. In one particularly telling scene, Jaidee stares at a mural on the wall of a temple depicting the Buddha's enlightenment beneath a bo tree, and recalls sadly that the bo trees (a traditional symbol of the Buddha's teachings) have long since gone extinct from Thailand and been replaced with artificial creations. The text reads:
In a thousand years will they even know that bo trees existed? Will Niwat and Surat's great-grandchildren know that there were other fig trees, also all gone? Will they know that there were many many trees and that they were of many types? Not just a Gates tweak, and a generipped PurCal banana, but many, many others as well? (p.168)
The political implications of this passage are later stated directly by the character of Gibbons, who describes the isolationism of characters like Jaidee as being rooted in a foolish reluctance to discard the old in favor of the new. Yet while Gibbons is far from the novel's moral compass, the way in which Bacigalupi previously correlated Jaidee's distrust of genetic engineering with xenophobia (and furthermore racialized the homogeneous mass-produced future of Agrigen as "white" by embodying these forces in the interests of characters like Anderson), means that it's difficult to avoid seeing Gibbons's words as anything other than a thinly veiled form of white supremacy. The text reads:
“Everyone dies.” The doctor waves a dismissal. “But you die now because you cling to the past. We should all be windups by now. It's easier to build a person impervious to blister rust than to protect an earlier version of the human creature. A generation from now, we could be well-suited for our new environment. Your children could be the beneficiaries. Yet you people refuse to adapt.” (p.243)
Again, while Gibbons is far from The Windup Girl's moral compass (he is actually implied to be a kind of corporate war criminal guilty of having created the very "blister rust" disease that he references), any reading of The Windup Girl that vilifies his politics becomes difficult to parse given how Bacigalupi fails to portray a negative consequence to the future that Gibbon's offers. Worse, Gibbons's belief that Thailand should lift its trade restrictions and begin mass producing "Windup" humans is a perspective supported by the novel's actual moral compass--the titular Windup Girl, Emiko.
As the only character who comes across as wholeheartedly sympathetic, Emiko's narrative is initially driven only by her simple desire to escape her sexual slavery and (problematically) return to her so-called "master" in Japan. Later on however Emiko comes to recognize even that idealized past as a businessman's "most prized possession" to have been a form of oppression. Consequently, she realizes that all Windups like herself must be ready to replace humanity when it inevitably goes extinct due to the artificial illnesses that men like Gibbons have created.
Again, just as with Jaidee's story, this plot has all the elements needed for a fascinating and socially nuanced work--one in which the focal character struggles to identify her place in a world bent on her violent erasure. Yet Bacigalupi again insists on depicting the institutions which Emiko must recognize as oppressive as being innately linked to her identity as Japanese. The CEO of the company that originally built and sold Emiko, when he appears, is depicted as an almost comedic stereotype of a daimyo from Japan's Tokugawa period (he even has a samurai sword mounted above his desk, and a robotic Geisha who serves him tea while he practices his calligraphy). Likewise, Emiko's own recollections of her memories as a young "New Person" in Japan describe not a futuristic dystopia, but instead a tranquil recreation of historic Japan with heavily orientalist rhetoric woven into the more standard distopian elements.
Emiko remembers Mizumi-sensei at the kaizen studio where she taught all the young New People as they knelt in the kimono and took their lessons.
"What are you?"
"New People."
"What is your honor?"
"It is my honor to serve."
"Who do you honor?"
"I honor my patron." (p.153)
The effect of having Emiko be a character who is ultimately forced to abandon a set of cultural expectations explicitly coded to the reader as non-western, all in order to overcome her own internalized oppression, only reenforces the already questionable politics infusing The Windup Girl's story.
Similar to how the customs of the Thai workers in Anderson's factory lead them to see the Cheshires (and not Anderson's blatant disregard for worker health and safety) as omens of disaster, Emiko's experience of oppression is similarly racialized so that her identity as Japanese is treated by the author as an obstacle which she must overcome. That is, in order to accept her future (and the coveted place she and the other New People of The Windup Girl's world have in it), Emiko is depicted as first and foremost having to stop conforming to a set of cultural expectations and prohibitions that have been explicitly stereotyped as Japanese.
I don't think the author was aware of these implications of his story, and if anything I suspect that Bacigalupi's intent in writing this novel was to convey the opposite message to the one that The Windup Girl's text seems eager to adopt. In an acknowledgements section at the end of the novel, Bacigalupi discusses the extensive research process he underwent when preparing to write this book, and even makes a point of cautioning his readers against taking his depictions of the various real-world cultures appearing in this novel as faithful renditions of these societies. Moreover, I do think that it is worth noting that the unexpectedly violent conclusion of The Windup Girl's plot in some ways could be read as a rejection of the politics espoused by characters like Gibbons. Yet even if this is the case, these events seem to be framed by the narrative more as a foolish act of self-destruction on the part of the novel's protagonists, rather than the inevitable result of the actions of characters like Gibbons and Anderson.
Ultimately, even in spite of what I suspect to have been the author's better-than-accomplished intensions, the repeated failures that Bacigalupi makes throughout The Windup Girl are impossible to ignore. Not only are Bacigalupi's characters racially offensive caricatures lacking any meaningful depth, but his basic approach toward characterization itself renders much of his prose nearly unreadable. The result is that this book's most significant contribution to its genre is more a demonstration of how that genre should not be written. If there's any value in reading The Windup Girl, it's in examining it's failures, and those failures are rooted in such a fundamental aspect of narrative storytelling that this task itself becomes almost impossible.