“Yellow Card Man” by Paolo Bacigalupi, Hugo Awards 2007 Nominee
The Hugo Awards winners for 2007 was announced last month at Nippon2007. I don’t imagine this little factoid would be of any importance to most of the readers here (all eight of you, plus your pets). Except that one of the nominees for Best Novelette was a story written by Paolo Bacigalupi, titled “Yellow Card Man”.
The story is set in a dystopian future Bangkok, and revolves around a man named Tranh. He used to be the head of a multi-national trading company, Three Prosperities, operating out of “Malaya”, but had been forced to flee the country after the “Incident”. What this Incident was, exactly, was never explained but you get some hints. But the net result was that he had lost his company (probably to a “Malay native”), his sons were dead and probably his daughters too. The story narrates a short snippet of Tranh’s life in Bangkok after all that. It was not a good life.
I don’t really want to say much else, really, except that you should go and read it. That it was set in Bangkok, and that the protagonist was a “Malay-Chinese” is interesting for us, though the story is not so much about that, but more about environmental issues and genetically modified food. However, to whet your appetite further, here are some snippets from the story:
And isn’t that why the Green Headbands in Malaya hated us Chinese? Because we looked so good? Because we looked so rich? Because we spoke so well and worked so hard when they were lazy and we sweated every day?
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Yellow card people as far as the eye can see: an entire race of people, fled to the great Thai Kingdom from Malaya where they were suddenly unwelcome.
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He searches around, pawing for more portions of the sign, wondering if anyone treadles a phone call to that old phone number, if the secretary whose wages he once paid is still at his desk, working for a new master, a native Malay perhaps, with impeccable pedigree and religion.
For what it’s worth, while the winner of the Hugo for Best Novelette was good[1], I personally think that this one is better.
To read both these novelettes and a whole slew of other fantastic science fiction, I’d recommend buying the book “The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection” edited by Gardner Dozois. There are three copies left at MPH One Utama, last I looked, and one in Border’s at the Curve.
[1] “The Djinn’s Wife”, by Ian McDonald. It’s set in a future Delhi, where India’s fallen apart into different autonomous regions, with Artificial Intelligences “living” side-by-side with humans. And djinns.