Gods or Garbage - A Literature Review of The Charismatic Charlie Wade

As it turns out, Christians are the only people who can be trusted with power.

Most of you have probably never heard of the online book called The Charismatic Charlie Wade, by the pseudonymous Chinese writer “Lord Leaf.” To be honest, before a couple of weeks ago, neither had I. Initially, I found the first few chapters of this work on Facebook (I know, I know…) where it seemed like it would be one of those uplifting short stories that make the rounds. However, after I followed up with it and found the whole thing online, it hit me that this was going to be quite a bit more involved. While this kind of fiction isn’t really my bag, after getting a bit into it, I decided that it might be a good subject for a book review.

I want to be up front about this review being done on something only partially read. That’s because this online work is looooooong. I mean, I am currently on chapter 613 out of (at the time of this writing) 5,469 total chapters and counting. Granted, most of the chapters are only a few paragraphs long. But still, “Lord Leaf” started TCCW in 2020 and is still adding to it to this day.

This book is very clearly culturally Chinese in origin. The setting is in a fictional city named “Aurous Hills” existing within an unnamed country somewhere within the Chinese cultural zone. Macau, Taiwan, and Hong Kong all receive mention as being outside places in the setting. Mainland China has not (yet) been mentioned, but it’s extremely unlikely to be the country in question. There’s no way the Chinese Communist Party would tolerate the sort of shenanigans which Aurous Hills’ rich people and criminal underworld appear to routinely engage in. While the PRC has a lot of extremely rich people, they tend to keep these folks on a very tight leash. Given that the exchange rate between Taiwanese and American dollars is such as to make the prices for items and property in this story seem more reasonable, I’m operating under the assumption that this setting is intended to be an expy for Taiwan.

So, on to the story itself. The main charactre is the eponymous Charlie Wade. Virtually all of the names in this work are oddly anglicised, which can make it surprising to see a Chinese criminal underboss named “Rambo Miller,” for example. Charlie is the much-despised “house-husband” son-in-law of the middling nouveau riche Wilson family (one of whose granddaughters he married) who was orphaned as a child and has basically been scorned and derided by this entire family, with the exception of his wife (with whom he has a genuinely good, if unconsummated, relationship).

The story sets the tone in the very first chapter - the Wilson family matriarch is having a birthday party, everybody in the family is giving her expensive (but useless) gifts, then Charlie has the audacity to ask her if he can borrow money to pay for the hospital expenses of a dear sweet older lady who was kind to all the children in the orphanage when he was growing up. Because the Wilson family (aside from Charlie and his wife Claire) are all a bunch of selfish idiots, this goes over like a lead balloon. He gets kicked out of the party so he goes to the hospital to visit the sick lady. Hence, Charlie is set up as the novel’s protagonist, someone who cares about the poor and the helpless.

While at the hospital, he is approached by an employee of the Wade family from the neighbouring city of Eastcliff, which happens to be the richest and most powerful family in the entire country. As it turns out, Charlie is the “young master” (basically, the scion who will be inheriting everything) of the Wade family whose parents had died and then had somehow become estranged from the family, thus ending up in the orphanage (even by chapter 613 much of his backstory hasn’t really been filled in yet). The employee hands him a charge card loaded with $10 billion dollars, as well as informing him that he has been made the secret chairman of the “Emgrand group,” the largest corporation in the city. Truly a rags-to-riches story. Setting the tone for Charlie’s charactre, he uses some of the money to pay off his friend’s hospital bills.

In the meantime, while Charlie accepts these gifts, he refuses to come out into the open as to who he really is and prefers to remain powerful behind the scenes (nobody in this setting seems to make the connexion between his last name and the Wade family, even after he starts revealing his power levels later on in the book). In retrospect, it seems like unveiling himself would have saved him a lot of trouble on down the line. Seriously, the way that people in this book who have already seen Charlie in action continue to treat him like a nobody is causing me to reassess the view that the Chinese are a high IQ population.

Initially, I had thought this story would be one of those cutesy heartwarming tales of love and redemption that people put up on normie social media all the time. However, after about chapter 20, I found out that I was so, so very wrong. This is like half Chinese bildungsroman and half screenplay for a Mortal Kombat movie. Since Charlie is now rich and powerful, but still walks around essentially dressed like a bum with no job, nobody in this story takes him seriously. The problem for them is that after they don’t take him seriously, and then find out that they were underestimating and insulting him, they essentially get completely destroyed.

For example, shortly after acquiring his newfound riches, Charlie goes to a high-end jewelry store to buy his wife a $13 million dollar necklace. The saleswoman, for reasons that would be obvious to the normal person, assumes he isn’t going to be able to afford it and blows him off. He then calls up his family representative, has the money shipped to the store in cash, thus proving that he actually can afford the necklace. Well and good, point taken, right? That’s when the family bodyguards proceed to beat the ever-loving tar out of the saleswoman, knocking out teeth and rendering her unconscious before throwing her into a dumpster (she also gets fired, by the way).

This defines the way the rest of the book rolls. The entire plot line, at least thus far, runs from one situation to the next in which Charlie (with or without his subordinates) is confronted by and then set up to get revenge on somebody who acts like a jerk/takes advantage of somebody/insults Charlie. In every case, the violence level is going to rev from 0 to 100 in about ten seconds and the only question is whether the antagonist(s) will end up dead, with broken limbs, or with other…more exotic consequences (if nothing else, “Lord Leaf” is creative). In nearly all of these, the retribution involved really is grossly disproportionate to the actual offences that took place.

This all is aided by the fact that Charlie’s power level continually rises throughout the work in a dramatically Mary Sue-ish fashion. Charlie’s family money allows him to bring the city’s underworld crime lord into his service, who he then uses as muscle moving forward. Charlie miraculously discovers an ancient Chinese “Apocalyptic Book” that allows him to learn all of the ancient secrets of Chinese wisdom. He becomes a Feng Shui master. He acquires an expert level in martial arts. He uses ancient herbalism to create magic pills that can rejuvenate and heal anybody, allowing him to bring several prominent rich and powerful families into his service. The pills also give him superhuman strength and speed. He has the ability to hypnotise people at will and to inflict impotence on men with a mere touch. He even calls down literal lightning a couple of times. (The translation of “charismatic” in the title is meant in the sense of someone being miraculous or a wonder worker.)

With a work like this, it’s always a little difficult to disambiguate how much of this is what the author thinks makes someone a tough guy and how much of it is actually culturally driven (i.e. what Chinese culture holds up as making someone fearsome). The former is usually heavily influenced by the latter, of course. Most of the people in this story are self-centred, concerned only about themselves, and view relationships (even familial) as conditional based on what benefits them. If we’re being honest, this is actually a pretty accurate description of a society of any kind that is not rooted in biblical principles. It’s natural that this would be presented as the way society “normally” runs.

Further, what we see concerning the violence and seemingly disproportionate vengeances exacted upon everyone who crosses Charlie is a perfect encapsulation of the non-Christian mindset as expressed in the exaltation of justice and retribution against wrongs unmoderated by mercy or mitigating circumstances. In a sense, the way people in this book deal with each other represents the distillation of the natural man’s innate instincts regarding how to treat other people. What is being perfectly described is the non-Christian type of “righteousness” in which deviation from what is “right” should be severely punished with no mercy whatsoever. While there might be the tendency to think this applies only to traditional “law and order” types of societies (such as a traditionally Confucian China), this is basically the same way modern left-wing wokesters are too.

Perhaps the surprise that a Westerner might feel at reading about people being kneecapped for getting into an argument with someone else stems from the differences between honour/shame versus innocence/guilt societies. As you can see from the map below, innocence/guilt societies tend to be those with a Christian heritage or which have a heavy Christian influence, while honour/shame societies do not,

Throughout TCCW, people are not so much concerned about whether what they do is right or wrong, true or false, but rather that they receive the appropriate amount of “face” from the person they’re dealing with. Apparently in the ideal honour/shame society it is considered acceptable to threaten to kill someone for insulting someone else of a higher social status, even if the insult was completely inadvertent. Ultimately, even when Charlie seems to be helping someone less fortunate than himself, it’s not so much because he’s showing mercy or lovingkindness as it is demanding the recognition of his own pride and exacting an unwaveringly merciless vengeance on some antagonist who has offended one of his friends.

Indeed, the abject servility that such a mindset both reflects and creates is completely at odds with the dignity afforded through the knowledge of our creation as beings bearing the image of God in ourselves. People in this setting treat everyone above them as gods and everyone below them as garbage, based on even slight differences in social status. They do this to the point where anyone with any self-respect grows disgusted with them, despite their being merely fictional charactres. Without the ameliorating influence of Christianity upon a society, its members will always either be at each other’s throats or each other’s feet - there is seemingly no middle ground.

God’s Word tells us that taking vengeance is a prerogative reserved by God to Himself,

“Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” (Romans 12:19)

The reason for this is, frankly, because God is the only one who can do it right. God is the only one who knows what the appropriate and righteous recompense against an offence actually is and is capable of dealing out that precisely measured response. Left to himself, man is capable of convincing himself that maiming or murder are appropriate responses to even the smallest of slights.

Whether you like it or not, a Christian society is the only one which can truly be trusted with power. People may not want to accept it, but Christian societies in which people are held accountable for their own actions but where justice is tempered with mercy are the only ones you’d really want to live in. You can burble on about those mean, nasty Christians who ban abortion or condemn homosexuality all you like, but you most likely would not want to live in a society where it’s considered acceptable to permanently maim somebody because they insulted someone slightly higher than them on the social ladder. Screech about Christians either being “too weak” or “too rigid” as much as you want, but in nearly all cases societies have become objectively better for the people who live in them after being Christianised.

This is why the arguments against Christian nationalism - which essentially amounts to the type of society Christian nations had for most of Christian history - are so short-sighted. Laws and punishments must be mitigated by a worldview which understands that mercy is not weakness and that righteousness is best served by bringing man’s laws into accord with God’s laws. Even the non-Christian is far, far better off under a Christian regime than he is under the type of regimen that any number of worldly non- and anti-Christian philosophies would impose - whether communism and socialism, woke progressivism, amoral libertarianism, unrestrained capitalism, as well as many others. Only Christians, or at least those whose worldview and basic instincts have been conditioned by participation in historically Christian society, can really be trusted with power. It’s hard enough to wield power over others without abusing it. It’s much, much more difficult to do so properly when there is not the restraint of Christian accountability to God in place. Whether it intended to or not, that is the ultimate lesson which The Charismatic Charlie Wade teaches us.