The Windup Girl

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2009

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Chapters 22-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 22 Summary

Jaidee has become lionized and immortalized as the people build makeshift shrines to him in order to stave off white shirt anger. One old woman, a food vendor, is smashed in the legs after attempting to bribe the white shirts because of her use of blue methane. The white shirts look for any opportunity to cause problems and the people, especially yellow cards like Hock Seng, are visibly afraid. He uses Mai as a guide since she is Thai. He still feels ambivalently toward her—in one moment she seems like a daughter; in another, he wishes to strangle her because he fears she will betray him. He makes it back to the slum where he lives and gives her money. She says she is not a yellow card and has nothing to fear after he asks her if she can make her way back. Hock “makes himself smile in return, thinking that she does not know how little anyone cares to separate the wheat from chaff, when all anyone wants to do is burn a field” (204).

Chapter 23 Summary

Carlyle and Anderson drink at Anderson’s apartment. Carlyle fumes about the lockdown that prevents him from trading and loses money daily. Anderson remains much more wistful about the loss of the factory since, as an agent for AgriGen, it has functioned as a front, at least for him. He mentions making a deal with Akkarat, who most likely could use allies, given the white shirts’ menacing ways. Anderson says AgriGen will reward Carlyle if he can broker a deal with Akkarat for access to the Thai seedbank and Gibbons, the legendary generipper whom Anderson suspects is still alive. At the end of the chapter, Anderson contemplates his next big move.

Chapter 24 Summary

We learn that the white shirts burnt Kanya’s village down when she was a child. Having known their violence, she conspired with others to exact revenge, so her having joined the white shirts is merely a ploy to destroy Pracha, who led the attack against Kanya and her family. She meets up with a man named Narong in a noodle shop, and he pushes an envelope stuffed with cash toward her, for her service. Kanya feels conflicted, in that she has betrayed Jaidee, and she contemplates the consequences of her actions and how her actions will determine her karma.

Kanya receives a summons to go to the Quarantine Department, the department that follows and tries to prevent plagues of cibiscosis and blister rust. She thinks how her betrayal of Jaidee will influence her karma. He haunts her, literally, as she hears his voice and turns around to see him: “Jaidee is trailing a few paces behind her” and “cocks his head, studying her […]Will he simply strangle her here, to pay her back for her betrayals?” (215). Fear fills her, but she gathers herself together. She learns of a new strain of blister rust that has jumped from vegetable to animal, and, if proven true, would mean the end of humanity. She is advised to find Gi Bu Sen, or Gibbons, to see if he will help, since he has helped Jaidee in the past.

Chapters 22-24 Analysis

White shirt revenge for the death of Jaidee ironically parallels Kanya’s own complicated and complex revenge scheme that began after her village was burnt. The concept of karma that pervades the novel literally haunts Kanya as she sees and hears Jaidee tell her that she should have thought about her karma before she engineered his death, and the impending death of General Pracha. The letter that summons her to the Quarantine Department sits on a side table in her room, like a “scorpion crouched” (212). The newly-found strain of blister rust that seems to have been hosting in two men is cause of the letter. The great Gi Bu Sen (Gibbons) who has previously helped Jaidee and whom Anderson seeks to find via Akkarat, thus figures as the goal of their mutual quest. Gibbons, then, is a kind of Holy Grail of climate change and may be the only person who can stop the new strain of blister rust and save humanity.