First Name Second Name by Steve MinOn
“Carried by the breeze, microbes arrived, as well as mites in his clothes; small flies landed to lay their eggs in the folds of his skin. He expected he would be a rotted mess before too long and that the ants would have him eventually during the day, if not the worms and beetles and larger bugs who worked more quickly.”
Steve MinOn’s debut novel opens with a startling premise: our main protagonist has died – or has he? Winner of the 2023 Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer, First Name Second Name (UQP, 2025) is a darkly humorous family saga that follows the journey of Stephen Bolin and his family ancestry from China to Queensland, Scotland to London. Across four generations, we discover the highs and lows of migrant life from 1860s Queensland to the present day.
The novel opens with Stephen’s sisters being told he has left them a note with his final, somewhat bizarre request following his sudden death:
“The journey will be long and difficult, one thousand miles. Try not to be too obvious. Stick to the backroads. Walk at night and avoid the heat of day. You’ll know you’ve arrived when you get there.”
He wants his sisters to walk his corpse back to their first home in far North Queensland; confused by such an odd request, they understandably and immediately ignore it. So, Stephen takes matters into his own hands. Waking in the hospital morgue, Stephen’s corpse becomes a jiāngshī – a type of undead creature according to Chinese folklore that feeds on the qi of living people. It’s in this form that he begins the journey on his own.
We switch back and forth between Stephen’s death pilgrimage in 2002 to previous generations of his family. Beginning in 1878, we met Pan Bo Lin, Stephen’s great-grandfather, as he navigated life in colonial Australia. Here, he meets Bridget Wilkie, an Irish settler, and they both recognise a need from each other: Pan Bo Lin needs a wife so he can stay in the country, and Bridget needs a husband so other men will leave her alone. It’s a marriage of means with only one flaw – Pan Bo Lin already has a wife in China, a secret he holds onto for decades, long after the couple have children.
Eventually, we meet Stephen’s father, Willie, growing up in Innisfail and his mother, Aileen, the daughter of newly arrived Scottish migrants, Ewan and Hetty, and then move into Stephen’s own childhood and adolescence. Throughout, we get the perspectives of the different life, perspectives and cultural experiences of these people as they exist in and move through ever changing times. As Stephen grows, he grapples with his identity – both cultural and sexual – as he realises he is gay.
He moves to Brisbane to attend university in the 1980s and continues to struggle to bring all parts of his identity into a whole, quickly learning that others are all too happy to make these decisions on his behalf:
“Tony called Stephen ‘Asian Jesus’. When Stephen looked offended, Tony said he didn’t mean to be rude, he just meant that Stephen had long hair and was a bit of a prude. That was all. But Tony had categorised him so definitely as Asian, Stephen thought. Why not Scottish Jesus?”
Stephen’s sexuality adds another complex layer to his already fraught relationship with his father. It sees Stephen leaving Australia for work in Scotland and eventually London, where his struggles continue to play out in excessive partying and a loose lifestyle.
It’s in this second half of the book that the narrative begins to feel a little slow. Stephen’s journey as a jiāngshī becomes somewhat repetitive as he continues to decay and attack innocent bystanders he encounters to suck their qi from them. The timeframe between Stephen alive and getting back to Australia and his untimely death feels drawn out, with a hurried chapter at the end set ten years in the future. Stephen’s sisters, Carmel and Leanne, attend a family reunion that raises more questions than answers: why have so many in the family married caucasian individuals? Where has their Asian family name gone?
“The names were all there before her. But she’d never seen it from Sian’s perspective. She’d never taken a critical look at the names listed and considered what they pointed to. It seemed like such a strange way to think about your own family.”
It’s a catalyst that starts a new conversation for the sisters, and it’s an important one. If it had arrived earlier in the story, MinOn may have had more opportunity to explore this with the reader and unpack the nuanced complexities it raises for the family in contemporary Australia, bringing us more firmly to a conclusion that as it stands feels a little vague. Or perhaps this was intentional, a way to encourage the question in the reader - as it certainly did in me - to explore on our own terms.
First Name Second Name is an inventive exploration of the migrant journey in Australia. I loved the way MinOn begins to pull the threads of the family together from across the globe and the deep exploration of complex identities for those whose past, present, and future exist across multiple cultures. It forms a knot, much like the one MinOn references on the final page, a Pan Chang knot: “A knot with no beginning. A knot with no apparent end.”
Elaine Chennatt is a writer, educator and psychology student currently residing in nipaluna. She has a special interest in bibliotherapy (how we use literature to make sense of our lives) and is endlessly curious about the creative philosophies of others. She lives with her husband and two bossy dachshunds on the not-so-sunny side of the river (IYKYK). Find her online at wordswithelaine.com.
