The Charm Buyers

Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8248-5852-0
Verlag: University of Hawaii Press

Buch, Englisch, 328 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 140 mm x 213 mm, Gewicht: 454 g

The Charm Buyers describes extraordinary beauty and turbulent change: Tahiti during the last years of French nuclear testing in the Pacific in the 1990s.

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 A-tai 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 the calm and confident 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, 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Howan, Lillian

Über Autor(innen)

Lillian Howan is an attorney and writer whose parents immigrated to the United States from Tahiti and Raiatea. She 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 the Asian American Literary Review, Cafe Irreal, Calyx, New England Review, and Under Western Eyes, an anthology edited by Garrett Hongo.