Scan barcode
A review by hilaryreadsbooks
The Charm Buyers by Lillian Howan
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 💕