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aweekinthelife's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
a story set in Tahiti during the time of French nuclear testing. the story centers Marc Antoine, a Hakka Chinese son of a successful pearl farmer. the writing is good and there's a lot of exploration about colonialism/imperialism, family (relationships and obligation), community, love, and loss. the writing is beautiful but the book is not a favorite for me.
content warning note: shares the same relationship as The Death of Vivek Oji and Earthlings
content warning note: shares the same relationship as The Death of Vivek Oji and Earthlings
Content Warnings
Graphic: Incest
hilaryreadsbooks's review
5.0
I happened upon Lillian Howan’s THE CHARM BUYERS in a bookstore’s Asian literature section and knew I had to pick it up after reading the synopsis. We are transported to Tahiti in the 1990s, into a tight-knit Hakka Chinese community bound by gossip, business, love, and magic. Remnants of Tahiti’s French colonial past linger in every aspect of life—from the popa’a (white people), including the mesmerizing painter Aurore du Chatelet, who sometimes treat the non-whites as “backwards”; to multiracial bloodlines; to French names; to military service abroad in France; to the nuclear tests done by the French, at first named after stars, but there were so many tests, in fact, that “they ran out of the names of…stars,” and then names of constellations, and then names of mythological figures. Marc Antoine Chen, the handsome son of a wealthy womanizing father and an absent mother, is brought up on Hakka language, culture, and stories by his great-grandmother. But when he is taken away to live with his father, his downfall begins as he falls deeper and deeper into the illegal world of drugs and smuggling, a secret affair with the older Aurore, and then, a bargain with dark Hakka magic when his cousin (and lover) Marie-Laure Li falls ill from an autoimmune disease likely caused by French nuclear contamination.
THE CHARM BUYERS is moodily magical and enigmatic, Howan’s writing transportative. The themes in this book are deeply imprinted into the setting and plot, but never so overt that it feels Howan’s trying too hard—from the racial tensions between Aurore and Marc, to the Hakka superstition ingrained in Marc’s decisions, to the unspoken familial and community customs and tensions, to the Hakka’s own complex dependence on business generated by French nuclear testing. I know so little about the Hakka in the South Pacific, who immigrated to Tahiti from South China as cheap labor for cotton plantations. Howan is true to this history, including a Hakka story about heroic and innocent Shim Siou Kong, who came forward and confessed to the death of a French plantation overseer when the entire Hakka community was threatened with punishment (Shim later waited a month for his execution because they shipped a guillotine by boat from France). And yes: I loved every minute of it. THE CHARM BUYERS was published back in 2017, and I’m upset that more people don’t know about it! Please request it at your local bookstore and / or library 💕
THE CHARM BUYERS is moodily magical and enigmatic, Howan’s writing transportative. The themes in this book are deeply imprinted into the setting and plot, but never so overt that it feels Howan’s trying too hard—from the racial tensions between Aurore and Marc, to the Hakka superstition ingrained in Marc’s decisions, to the unspoken familial and community customs and tensions, to the Hakka’s own complex dependence on business generated by French nuclear testing. I know so little about the Hakka in the South Pacific, who immigrated to Tahiti from South China as cheap labor for cotton plantations. Howan is true to this history, including a Hakka story about heroic and innocent Shim Siou Kong, who came forward and confessed to the death of a French plantation overseer when the entire Hakka community was threatened with punishment (Shim later waited a month for his execution because they shipped a guillotine by boat from France). And yes: I loved every minute of it. THE CHARM BUYERS was published back in 2017, and I’m upset that more people don’t know about it! Please request it at your local bookstore and / or library 💕
ceallaighsbooks's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
“In the night long ago, there were the Walkers, those who guarded memories. They walked through the night and they knew everything that had ever happened. It was how they remembered, by walking from when the sun went down and the moon rose. Memory in those times wasn’t little scratches of ink on paper: it was in their footsteps and their legs and their voices, chanting the long histories of the past, and it was in the night and the black ocean and the darkness that always returned.”
TITLE—The Charm Buyers
AUTHOR—Lillian Howan
PUBLISHED—2017
PUBLISHER—Latitude 20, University of Hawai’i Press
GENRE—literary fiction
SETTING—Tahiti, late 20th c. (the riots of 1995 happen halfway through the book)
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—the beauty of the Tahitian islands, Hakka community & heritage in Tahiti, imperialism, bon-bon chinois, CEP nuclear testing, cultural displacement, love & secrets, storytelling, mythmaking & oral traditions, unreliable narrator
WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
CHARACTERS—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
STORY/PLOT—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
BONUS ELEMENT/S—The descriptions of the natural world of the islands were particularly vivid and enchanting. The subtle depth of the book’s themes was stunning.
PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
“During the day, there was work, things to buy and sell, accounts to be settled, but at night came the stories of the past, things forgotten and now remembered, tales of wanderings and horses and terrible sacrifice. “We come from the North,” A-tai said, but it was so long ago. No one talked about why we, the Hakka, had left this North or where it was located: in China? Further north? It was vague like everything else, real only in the voice of the storyteller.”
I do not know why this book hasn’t been sweeping up all the awards and garnering reprints worldwide but this is one of the best, most beautiful and heartbreaking books that I have ever read.
On the surface this is a beautifully written book about the life of Marc-Antoine Chen, the son of a wealthy black pearl farmer and a member of the Hakka-Chinese community on the Tahitian islands during the late 20th c. The story centers the experiences and lives of the islanders in a world that is always trying to push them to the perimeter, that denies them their agency and, often, their futures.
But Howan does more with this story than just create a beautifully rendered portrait of the islands and its people, she explores the themes of family, community, identity, marginalization, euro-centrism in a colonized landscape, the utter destruction left in the wake of imperialism, activism & whose responsibility is it to “speak up”, traditional ways of life & belief in a “modern” (i.e. imperialized) world, injustice, the pressures of sociocultural expectations, oppression, love, and life’s purpose: specifically what does it mean to *live* one’s life.
Rereading this one will be a requirement for me. It’s too beautiful not to.
I would recommend this book to readers who want to read a beautifully written work of literary fiction set in the Tahitian islands—and who also want to cry a lot. 🥺😭😢
“I should know better than to start thinking that it would turn out all right, but here I was, thinking the same thoughts again. And what was I thinking? That it might be different. That you never really knew. Life was unpredictable and sometimes it surprised you with impossible hope.”
“I was so crazed I couldn’t speak, and then I had done the unthinkable. I touched her, on the cheek, on the corner of her mouth, and she closed her eyes and it all became possible.”
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
TW // animal cruelty, illness caused by nuclear testing (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)
Further Reading—
- THE BONE PEOPLE, by Keri Hulme
- BUILD YOUR HOUSE AROUND MY BODY, by Violet Kupersmith—TBR
- ONCE WERE WARRIORS, by Alan Duff—TBR
- THE EMPIRE OF DIRT, by Francesca Manfredi—TBR
- FOX, by Dubravka Ugrešić—TBR
Content Warnings
Moderate: Animal cruelty and Terminal illness
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