The Charm Buyers

by Lillian Howan

Ka Palapala Po'okela Award for Excellence

The Charm Buyers describes extraordinary beauty and turbulent change: Tahiti during the last years of French nuclear testing in the Pacific in the 1990s.
A love story, a tale of magic, a bildungsroman, a chronicle of cultural change, The Charm Buyers unfolds on many levels, tracing growing consciousness against nuclear testing. Marc Antoine Chen, the troubled heir of black pearl cultivators, narrates his journey through a labyrinth of elusive truths. As a child, Marc lives in a dreamlike world with his great-grandmother and her stories of a semi-nomadic Hakka culture that no longer exists. The Hakka, originally brought from China to Tahiti to work in cotton in the nineteenth century, settled in communities throughout the South Pacific.
On the verge of adulthood, Marc falls in love with Marie-Laure Li, but when she leaves to study in France, Marc drifts, becoming the lover of the enigmatic painter Aurore du Chatelet. Years later, Marie-Laure returns, suffering from a debilitating malady―one of many illnesses surfacing in the wake of nuclear testing―and Marc is offered a strange, magical proposal in exchange for the life of his once beloved.
A supernatural, shamanic reality exists together with the traditions of the Hakka Chinese, set against the background of the French colonial past and the Ma‘ohi struggle for independence. The Charm Buyers presents a world in transition and its people—black pearl cultivators, artists, taro farmers, politicians, smugglers, and shamans.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction

328 pages, Paperback

Published January 31, 2017

About the author

Lillian Howan spent her early childhood in Tahiti and later graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. She is the editor of Wakako Yamauchi's collection, Rosebud and Other Stories (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011). Her writings have been published in Asian American Literary Review, Café Irreal, Calyx, Jellyfish Review, New England Review, South Dakota Review, Vice Versa, and the anthologies Ms Aligned 2 and Under Western Eyes. Her debut novel, The Charm Buyers (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017), received the Ka Palapala Po'okela Excellence in Literature Award.

"Howan’s language is breathtaking, building a land and family with detail and power. The novel is full of characters, all related to one another in various ways, yet each person stands out for a different reason. Everyone feels real, and the conversations and other interactions between the characters are lifelike and believable...The Charm Buyers is a thought-provoking insight into a time of cultural change. It captures an essence of existing between reality and surreality, dreaming and wakefulness, the past and the future."
– Foreword Reviews

"Ultimately what makes this novel a haunting, dreamlike and immersive read is its crisp, elegant and sumptuously precise prose that weaves an engrossing tale which draws the reader in...The protagonist discovers the power that stories have for people is often built on the strength of what cannot be known for sure – gossip based on suppressed secrets, the existence of ghosts based on ephemeral childhood memories, and the power of shamans based on the magic of a charm to save a life."
- Pacific Rim Review of Books

Reviews

[Ceallaigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

“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.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

CW // 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

[Ann Gelder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Howan's novel of intertwined lives on Tahiti captivates from the very first sentence. A love story that's wistful and funny, it gently delivers harsh truths about history, colonialism, and the widely shared human tendency to get in one's own way. Beautiful.

[Hilary · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 💕

[Olga Zilberbourg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is set in the 1990s, on Tahiti. Marc Antoine Chen, of a wealthy Hakka Chinese family, has been more or less abandoned by his parents and grows up surrounded by large extended family, without any interest in education or family business. The novel is told from his point of view, in the course of a few years when he finishes school, goes into Army service in France, and then returns to Tahiti to start his own, largely illegal business. I would describe this novel as a Bildungsroman, though Marc Antoine eschews traditional forms of education and chooses to learn about life primarily by stumbling into adventures with people he finds interesting. He's got a large heart, and it's a particular pleasure to see him fall in love, grow, and then fall in love again.

[Jill Koenigsdorf · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The things you've heard about me-they're true, especially the lies." So begins the lush, mesmerizing novel by Lillian Howan. Her Tahiti is a place of rumor and mystery, of half-seen things, and of the far-reaching connections between her characters. Everyone seems to know everyone else, and gossip travels freely via the grapevine aka radio-cocotiers. "You could drive around the island of Tahiti in two hours, in a day, in two days..." she says, yet the way Howan explores the layers of the place, its secrets and heartbreak, the island seems vast and impenetrable. From the black pearl market to the tragedy of the nuclear testing on the atolls to the simple pleasures of ice cream in a remote café, we follow our protagonist Marc as he searches for himself and some meaningful version of love.

[Rebecca Lawton · Rating 5 out of 5]

No one writes the South Pacific like Lillian Howan. Gorgeous prose, superb dialogue (I really feel myself in the conversations), intimate knowledge of the subject paradise. Just as Howan lures a reader in with the beauty of the tropics and the sense of belonging to a community--she turns the view upside down, so subtly it too me by surprise. Howan plies her magic so deftly I didn't know where she'd lead me on sea breezes and scent of fresh flowers til I found myself close to the characters in her story I least expected to know best. She's working on a sequel now. Can't wait!

[groovy · Rating 4 out of 5]

why did they have to be cousins?

[Mills College Library]

Fiction H8479c 2017

[Marianne Villanueva · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's the book's powerful language that pulls you in: hypnotic, dreamlike, thick with unease, it's a language that floats, but also contains so much melancholy. I read this book very very slowly, because that's how anything this carefully written demands to be read. You will discover a culture that is new (the Hakka culture of Tahiti) and rich and strange but never exoticized.

Bravo to the author.