A novel depicting the power of broken dreams and past memories as well as the healing power of love.

"A dazzling and heartfelt novel about the disorientation of grief, the hollowness of the American Dream, and the bravery of rebuilding one's identity, as the remaining daughter of a self-made Chinese-American dynasty sets off across the world to define herself in the wake of her beloved sister's death"--

Set in New York and China over three decades, Paper Names explores what it means to be American from three different perspectives. There's Tony, a Chinese-born engineer turned Manhattan doorman, who immigrated to the United States to give his family a better life. His daughter, Tammy, who we meet at age nine and follow through adulthood, and who grapples with the expectations of a first generation American and her own personal desires. Finally, there's...

In the summer of 1986 in a small Chinese village, ten-year-old Junie receives a momentous letter from her parents, who had left for America years ago: her father promises to return home and collect her by her twelfth birthday. But Junie’s growing determination to stay put in the idyllic countryside with her beloved grandparents threatens to derail her family’s shared future. What Junie doesn’t know is that her parents, Momo and Cassia, are newly...