The Story
Every name in the ledger belonged to someone else.
In the years of the Exclusion Act, thousands of Chinese immigrants entered America as “paper sons” — buying the identity of a citizen's child, memorizing a false family down to the number of steps to the village well.
Wai-Lun is sixteen when he lands at the Angel Island station with a name that is not his own. Detained for weeks, interrogated on a life he has only rehearsed, he is finally released to a father, a shop, and a household who must all pretend the fiction is blood.
But a paper family keeps paper secrets. When an inspector reopens the ████████ case, the smallest inconsistency threatens everyone who signed for him — and Wai-Lun must decide whether the self he abandoned at sea is worth drowning for twice.