Sixteen-year-old Adeline Siow has the gift of fire, conjuring and controlling flame from her fingertips at will. But, in the recently independent and rapidly modernizing Singapore of 1972, “magic was for uneducated gangsters. It had no place in the proper city.” This is why Adeline’s mother, who also has fire magic, urges Adeline to “keep it hidden.”
The order to “keep it hidden” slices across many domains in When They Burned the Butterfly—magical, romantic, occupational—and Adeline increasingly flips the bird to these various demands to conform. Take Tian, positioned from the outset as Adeline’s main love interest, and a member of the all-female, magic-wielding Red Butterfly gang. When Adeline and Tian bond over their shared fire conjuring, a surge of mutual recognition flares up as “[t]he twin flames flickered between them.”
This erotic symbolism queers a long history of mainstream appeals to complementarity. In one recent instance of this “opposites attract” cliché, the 2023 Pixar film Elemental portrays the excitements and challenges of a romance between an anthropomorphized fire-being and water-being. Going against this stock imagery of couple-as-elemental-contrasts, Adeline’s and Tian’s shared fire suggests that attraction doesn’t always need contrast; sometimes like attracts like, too. Moreover, as Adeline becomes more enmeshed in the Red Butterfly gang and the patron deity that gives it its name, “Adeline [starts] associating the goddess with these pleasant flickers of recognizing other Butterflies.” The modern city’s persecution of magic-users mirrors its intolerance of sexual minorities, a connection eventually made explicit in characters’ perusal of a (historically authentic) newspaper article about Singaporean lesbians. As one character says, in a layered reference to the binary of closeting and outing, “The world changes when you no longer have the option to hide.”
Hiding one’s stigmatized attributes becomes complicated in a “new nation” that “made new myths at will,” a rapidly modernizing city-state with “more cranes than real birds by the roads.” The book continually asks, “What were the old gods to the better world?” We the readers have the pleasure of immersing ourselves in this turbulent, hidden world in which resourceful magic perseveres against aggressive modernization. This alternate Singapore is saturated with the supernatural: A polytheistic magic system proliferates among gangs who use a variety of often-rough methods to channel power from various local gods. The rich historical setting is a great strength of the book, leaving no doubt that the author is, as her postscript states, “constantly writing toward Singapore as a site of imagination and spirit.” In one particularly lively description, “the market and the business of Chinatown in the daytime crossed dozens of languages through the ear like passing bees … The city had been woven from different directions for hundreds of years, full of worn holes as much as it was dense with threads.” The book’s lushly realized, immersive world allows the reader not only to feel the varied textures of the city but to think critically about it, pondering whether its traditional magic will, or should, be “inevitably buried beneath the wheels of progress.”
This magic system channels the powers of the deities through many methods, but especially via tattoos. As the narrative explains, “The more tattoos, the more magic flowed, and each gang has its own style and ritual system to go along with its unique patron divinity.” This aspect of the novel’s worldbuilding reflects how many Asian cultures have well-developed traditions of ritual tattooing for various magical purposes. [1] The novel’s treatment of tattoos is also probably influenced by Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s classic 1910 tale “The Tattooer,” in which a sadistic tattoo artist stalks and kidnaps a young woman, drugs and tattoos her against her will, but then, through the power of the tattoo (a giant black widow on her back, naturally), she ironically takes total psychological control over him after she wakes up. This tattoo motif, and the literary and cultural histories behind it, evokes themes of transformation and questions of where mortality ends and divinity begins.
The Butterfly goddess of Tian and Adeline’s gang itself also draws upon a skein of influences. The author’s postscript explains that the “Red Butterfly was a real all-female gang in the ’50s and ’60s.” Lee also quotes a well-known Daoist scripture in her epigraph: “I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.” The novel is, furthermore, a subversive reappropriation of Puccini’s famous story-opera “Madame Butterfly” (1904), whose title character is a Japanese housewife who is breathlessly preoccupied with what her absentee American military husband thinks of her. [2] In Lee’s story, instead of a homebound Asian bride who speaks in caricatured broken English, and who remains entirely emotionally dependent on the capricious attentions of a European man, the figure of Madame Butterfly is a fierce matriarch of organized crime. Breaking the fourth wall with this source material, Adeline at one point reflects on “a story … not quite by herself, of the goddess and the first Butterfly,” musing that “beneath her soft round face she had made a pact with something far more dangerous than an English admiral.”
“Dangerous” is a good word to describe the plot and atmosphere of novel as a whole, which, as an instance of what librarian and cultural critic Kelly Jensen calls the “East Asian crime noir” genre, ladles on heaps and heaps of violence, blood, and death. So much so, in fact, that I will admit to growing somewhat weary of the book’s pattern of having Adeline walk into a room to discover a mangled corpse of some tortured victim. It would have been gratifying, for me at least, for the book’s nearly continuous parade of violence to be more counterbalanced with reflections on the ethics of complicity and culpability that the novel somewhat belatedly comes around to, as well as giving the reader even more insight into the emotional tolls of the various losses Adeline suffers. But perhaps I am unduly imposing my own wishes on the protagonist, since it may be important to her character that Adeline approaches but ultimately turns away from sustained introspection. In one particularly important turning point, which I won’t spoil, Adeline realizes that “for the first time she understood why anyone might think about the future.” However uneven Adeline’s own thoughts “about the future” might be, this novel certainly confronts the reader with the possibilities and problems of the future in vivid, memorable ways, pondering its pathways and gutters, questioning who the future is made for, and who gets left behind.
Endnotes
[1] See, for example, Lars Krutak’s Tattoo Traditions of Asia (U of Hawai’i Press, 2024) and chapter two of Brooke Schedneck’s Living Theravada (Shambhala, 2023). [return]
[2] The character “Madame Butterfly” traces back at least to Pierre Loti’s 1887 semi-autobiographical novel Madame Chrysanthème. The character “Madame Chrysanthemum” transformed into “Madame Butterfly” in a short story of that title by John Luther Long in 1898, which was then adapted into a one-act play by David Belasco in 1900. The story took on its most famous form in an operatic adaptation by Giacomo Puccini in 1904. [return]