First Name Second Name

To begin a book with the death of its protagonist is brave, but Steve MinOn’s gamble pays off brilliantly in his stunning debut novel, First Name Second Name. Defying categorisation into any one genre, MinOn blends modern and historical fiction with supernatural aspects, and reworks elements from his own family history of migration from China and Scotland during the gold rush.

Overcome by a sudden conviction in a moment of lucidity, the dying Stephen charges his sisters with the sacred task of transporting his body back to the town of his birth in Far North Queensland. Upon realising that this final wish will not be granted, his body comes to and begins the treacherous journey on foot. This re-animated corpse, a jiāngshī, still bearing the mortuary tag on his big toe, traverses the landscape and his own ancestry, as the narrative alternates chapters from Stephen’s perspective with that of his family.

While the jumps between perspectives could feel sudden or abrupt in the hands of a less skilled writer, MinOn uses each ancestor to weave a web that reveals the origins of his protagonist’s desires, comforts, weaknesses and motivations. As Stephen marches 1,000 kilometres across the outback, compelled to return to his birthplace, his journey mirrors that of his forebears in their travels to and across Australia, and their own yearning for the lands of their birth.

This modern iteration of the Chinese jiāngshī grapples with the most fundamental of human fixations – legacy, family and the meaning of home – while starkly contrasting those timeless needs with Stephen’s personal quest for intersectional identity, community and connection as a gay Chinese-Australian man in the 21st century. Lyrical, vulnerable, existential and often extremely funny, First Name Second Name heralds the arrival of a powerful new voice in Australian literature, and I, for one, can’t wait to see what Steve MinOn writes next.