Review of Paper Names by Susie Luo

*Paper Names* by Susie Luo (2023). Published by Hanover Square Press.

Some books I tend to stumble upon when wandering my library, which many of my dedicated blog readers are highly aware of. I don’t live far from a pretty decent library, so I am thankful that I can drive three minutes, or walk fifteen minutes, to get to the library whenever I want or need to.

I really stopped buying books once I tapped more into the library’s resources, and although I know this is how you support writers, I don’t think I’m financially in a position where I could afford to spend a ton of money on books. Nor do I really have the space, as I live with my parents and my childhood bedroom is getting quite full, if we’re going to be honest.

I was wandering the library’s new fiction section when I stumbled upon Paper Names, and as soon as I read the synopsis, I knew this was right up my alley.

Asian American literature, and Asian literature as a broader whole, are my personal preferences for what kind of fiction books I read, and I think that books that deal with the subject matter like Paper Names are so important. So I picked it up, and a week later, I got to it on my TBR list and ended up getting through it in less than a day.

Onwards with the review!

A tale about immigration and the sacrifices made to make one daughter’s life better.

The bulk of this novel is split into different timelines, but for the sake of my sanity, I’m going to retell this story in chronological order. First, there’s the immigration. Tony is the focus of a good chunk of the novel, and his actual name isn’t Tony.

He’s an engineer in China who comes to the United States and his daughter to give them the chance of a better life than in China, and what they end up doing is this: he has to become a doorman for a wealthy Upper East Side building. His education is useless in the US, and his family finds solace in the spaces like Flushing that allows them to think about what they left behind.

Everything changes one day when he goes to work and a wealthy, connected woman in the building is robbed by a man. Tony ends up tackling the guy, gets beat up, then he fights the man back in order to get the woman’s purse. She feels indebted to him because of it, but when he ends up doing this, one coward just watching it all go down is Oliver, a hotshot lawyer who hides his connections to his grandfather, a criminal, because it would spell the end of his law career.

Oliver ends up talking to Tony because of this, who fears he’s going to get deported when the cops come around. Oliver gets roped into teaching Tony’s daughter Tammy piano, which sets up this rather creepy dynamic that’s going to continue throughout the novel.

We first meet Tammy when she’s nine and innocent, but then she grows up to be someone we won’t even recognize halfway through the book. She’s trying to become a lawyer like Oliver, with his guidance, and has had a relationship with him.

Her father, Tony, throughout the years put himself through school with the doorman gig and bettered their circumstances. He was able to move them up north to a wealthier suburb, where Tammy didn’t see kids like herself. A special occasion was going down to Manhattan with her mother to look at Urban Outfitters clothes, even though these clothes are too expensive for them. And like I mentioned before, she eventually claws her way up into becoming a lawyer.

However, she begins to clash with her father because of their generational and culture differences. She doesn’t take his abuse, how he would hit someone instead of using his words, and she eventually calls him out.

This leads to a big argument where she storms out, and when he prepares to go out that night, he’s hit by a career that Oliver, the lawyer is in. Tony dies, despite having lived through heart problems before, and that upends their family’s world. Oliver confesses to Tammy that he did it by being an accomplice in the car, which naturally pisses her off. The novel ends soon after that, with the prospect of returning to China with her mother.

Overall Thoughts

I think novels like these are so important, and critical in a world where we need to read for empathy, but I found this book a little difficult to get through at time. If we had just focused on the family without Oliver, I think it would’ve been perfectly fine.

The fact that this rich white man is basically grooming Tammy from a young age and ends up helping her get a job later on is a pretty terrifying one to me that kind of gets swept under the rug.

Granted, I doubt the author is endorsing this perspective at all, but I think that it ends when he runs over her father only is a kind suspicious thing for me. That was just difficult to read. I just wished the novel focused exclusively on Tammy’s family, though. I’m sure someone out there loves all parts of this novel, though.

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