PAPER NAMES

An ambitious debut novel that follows a Chinese immigrant, his daughter, and a White lawyer over three decades.

Tony Zhang is a quick-tempered engineer from Dalian who uproots his life in China and moves with his wife and daughter to New York in search of a better future. He finds work as a handyman at The Rosewood, a fancy apartment building, where Oliver, a handsome lawyer at a white-shoe firm with a dark family history, resides. The novel opens in 1997, when a violent incident brings Oliver into the lives of the Zhangs. Told in alternating perspectives—those of Tony; his daughter, Tammy; and Oliver—the novel reprises staple themes of Asian American fiction: generational differences, anti-Asian racism, the dogged pursuit of the American dream, and the challenges of dating across racial lines. As the novel progresses, Tony lands a job at an engineering firm and moves up its ranks, Tammy grows up to become a Harvard-educated, headstrong young lawyer, and Oliver becomes the youngest partner at his firm. The prose is at times bogged down with exposition; lengthy internal dialogue often unnecessarily supplements direct speech. The characters also verge on caricatures (that an attractive White lawyer from a wealthy background is conceited and cowardly is surely no surprise to anyone, nor is the trope of him being changed by his acquaintance with a young woman from a working-class family). But the plot is propulsive, prompting the reader to keep turning the pages, and the novel as a whole is undeniably enjoyable.

An entertaining and touching debut from a new voice in Chinese American literature.