What Makes a Real American

What is a Real American? Who has the birthright over the United States? These simple questions have slowly emerged as seminal questions in contemporary American society although it has been prevalent for some time because of the diversity of races, ethnicities, and cultures in the United States. This was driven by the diaspora of people from different parts of the world to pursue the proverbial American Dream. The questions of what or who is a real American were amplified in recent years as traditionally white Americans – long the quintessence of the American identity – have become more assertive of what they perceived as their birth rights. Social media abounds with videos of “Karens” berating non-white Americans who speak other languages. Violence against Asian Americans has become widespread in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. White supremacy has become a buzzword.

With the WASPs becoming vocal, what constitutes a real American has become a prevalent discourse even within the realms of literature. In her sophomore novel, Real Americans, Rachel Khong takes on a different and interesting path in dissecting the question. The novel commences in 1999 in New York City and introduces Lily Chen. Lily was the daughter of two Chinese immigrant scientists. working as an unpaid intern in an enormous media company. She was barely scraping by, struggling to make ends meet. Her fortune started to change with a chance encounter with Matthew Maier, the scion and heir apparent of a wealthy pharmaceutical dynasty. Matthew was the epitome of a WASP-y aristocrat. He was working as an asset manager for a private equity firm. Despite being born on a silver spoon, Matthew tried to make it on his own and live independently of his family’s wealth and influence. To deflect attention, he uses a different surname.

“Year after year strollers grow more complicated, made of harder and harder plastic, cushioned to oblivion—as though babies could know or care. The complicated strollers are not for the babies, but for the parents themselves. They believe they’re making decisions—the decision to “start a family,” it is commonly said—when in actuality they control nothing, nothing but the stroller they choose, how much money they spend.”

~ Rachel Khong, Real Americans

Life took its natural course and the two of them fell in love. As they got to learn more about each other, they learn that they had connections, albeit ephemeral at best. Both were born on Long Island and, at one time, lived in the same community. They were bonded by the vague memory of them knowing each other as children. The landscape of Lily and Matthew’s budding romance was captured in the novel’s first part; it was divided into three parts. Their feelings for each other for real. The young couple eventually got married. However, some obstacles threatened to sow discord between them. From the onset, they struggled with cultural and racial differences. This was exacerbated by their socio-economic differences. It was not until before they got married that Lily learned about Matthew’s provenance. They managed to hurdle their differences and build their dreams of forming a family.

Despite their fervent desire to have a child, Lily struggled with conceiving a child. They were left with no recourse but to opt for in-vitro fertilization (IVF). The IVF was successful and Lily was able to safely give birth to a son. However, the son she gave birth to was not the one she expected, prompting Lily to question if indeed he was her son. Things got complicated when Lily unearthed secrets that connected Matthew’s parents and her own. The story then shifts to Nick’s perspective; Nick was Lily and Matthew’s son. The timeline jumps to 2021. Nick was already a teenager. Lily and Nick were now living in Washington. Palpably absent was Matthew. Fate, unfortunately, did not favor his parents. In the intervening period, his parents split. The reasons behind their separation were not immediately apparent. Lily raised her son on her own and Nick then grew up without knowing who his father is.

Nick was the typical teenager; after all, he was undergoing one of life’s most crucial stages. He was learning to navigate the world of adolescence. The intricacies of friendship, puberty, and experiencing first love converge with the complications of college applications. The earlier sections of the novel’s second part capture him contemplating which school he will apply to. His mother wanted him to stay close to their home in Seattle. Nick, however, had a different idea. He wanted to pursue applications to Ivy League schools. Initially, Nick did not want to establish any connections with his father. He was raised by Lily to understand that his father wanted nothing to do with him. However, with the prodding of his friend, he uploaded his DNA into an ancestry platform. The platform did not disappoint as it was able to connect, albeit clandestinely, Nick with his long-estranged father. It was no happy reunion but it predictably handed Nick the springboard to pursue an Ivy League education.

The novel’s last part leaps further into the future and again, the perspective shifts.. The year is 2030. May is Lily’s mother and Nick’s grandmother. She was now an octogenarian trailing her grandson who was now working with a biotechnology startup. Lily a geneticist born and raised in Mao Zedong’s China and her story takes the readers to the past. May recounts the treacherous journey she had to endure to cross the Pacific during one of modern China’s most turbulent periods, the Cultural Revolution. Born and raised “in the southern basin of “in the southern basin of the Yangtze River”, May had a voracious appetite for knowledge, immediately establishing herself as a young intellect. She fell in love with a fellow student, Ping, with who she shared the dream of moving to the United States to pursue their dreams of becoming geneticists and, in the process, escaping from the oppressive regime of Mao.

“They were fundamentalist in their beliefs. You couldn’t even find common conversational ground in talking about something neutral, like what we wished we could eat, because it would have seemed ungrateful. Food grew scarce again. The cafeteria served sweet potato leaves, dank and slimy, and steamed cornmeal buns you couldn’t look too closely at or you would find mold. If the Red Guards felt any hunger or suffering, they didn’t mention it. They seemed not to experience emotions in the same way the rest of us did. There was nothing they would talk with excitement about except for their love for Mao or the revolution.”

~ Rachel Khong, Real Americans

May managed to flee through Hong Kong but, as fate would have it, she had to restart her life with someone she referred to as a “wrong man.” Her knowledge proved to make a difference as her scientific discovery catapults her to posterity. Her story was the zenith of the American Dream. However, this was clouded by several mysteries that were soon unraveled as the story moved forward. These mysteries serve as the story’s backbone. One seminal question pertains to the fate of Matthew and Lily’s relationship. What forces contributed to the erosion of a seemingly fairy tale love story? Further, what are the chances of Nick becoming the spitting image of his father? Nick showed no traces of his mother’s Chinese heritage. There were also indelible connections that emerged and were in want of an answer.

These different mysteries swirl into a whirlpool of tenterhooks. They were, nevertheless, connected by several strands. One prominent strand concerns genetics. Khong shines the spotlight on genetics and genetic engineering, walking the readers through the intricacies of the science behind them. The discourse on genetic engineering has become prevalent in the contemporary as it entails the alteration of the DNA to conceive a genetically perfect individual. It is used to remove all forms of impurities that might have been passed down from one generation to another while passing down the best traits of the parents. It can also be used to address abnormalities detected in the baby before it enters the physical world. This technology ensures that only favorable traits are inherited by the baby, thus, ensuring the longevity of a lineage.

While the emergence of this technology is viewed by many as revolutionary, questions naturally have emerged. In particular, questions concerning the ethics behind the modification of genomes for “favorable” inheritable traits have lingered. The novel extensively probes this. In the case of May, her work once served as her salvation, her hope. It empowered her as her work provided her power over a person’s life even before his or her life began. She can peek into the future and modify it by controlling a person’s genome. However, her work was a wedge between her and her daughter. Nick, on the other hand, barely showed traces of his biracial origins. This allowed him to pass as white. Like his father, his whiteness automatically allowed him privileges that his mother and grandmother had to earn.

Beyond the intricacies of science, Real Americans is an evocative exploration of family dynamics. Khong navigated the labyrinth of parenthood, capturing the anxieties that have become synonymous with it. As parents, we only want the best for our children. We want to provide them with the best: an Ivy League education, the best-paying job, or even our best traits. We want to cultivate our children in a safe environment. However, this comes with the realization that even with our best efforts, we can never fully shield them from the realities of the world. There are times when our best intentions lead to a result that we did not expect or is opposite of our intention. No amount of science or hypothesizing can fully prepare us for the follies of parenthood. Nevertheless, we try our best to be there for our children.

“We were told what to want: Propaganda was universal. Especially in this country, where the propaganda was that there was none – we were free. But were we? When we were made to value certain lives more than others; when we were made, relentlessly, to want more? What if I had seen through it? What if I had understood that I already had enough?”

~ Rachel Khong, Real Americans

Where parenthood and family generations are concerned, the novel is also about breaking generational trauma. Each generation of the Chens faced a different challenge. But as they try to overcome these challenges, they also try to break the chain that shackles them to the ground. The newer generation made up for the deficits and lapses of the previous generation. Lily, for instance, tried to be there for her son. She tried to shower Nick with the affections she was not able to obtain from her parents; May was particularly distant from her daughter. However, Lily’s being affectionate to her son smothers him. This resulted in Nick being uncommunicative. Each generation’s good intentions, however, were undermined by secrets and selfish decisions. As the Chens tried to overcome their differences and bridge the gaps, on the backdrop, changes were taking place.

In her sophomore novel, Rachel Khong took on an ambitious project. On the surface, Real Americans masquerades as a work of historical fiction. The Chens’ stories were juxtaposed with the Cultural Revolution, the September 11 attacks, and other historical events that create a sense of time. Its core, however, is the intersection of family, science, and even culture. It navigates the intricacies of parenthood under the shadows of the American dream, ambitions, and cultural transitions. On the sly, the novel studies class and racial divides attached to the sense of being an outsider. It probes into several philosophical ideas about free will and, prominently, the ethics regarding genetic engineering. These are ideas that we will be grappling with not far into the future. With the growing sophisticated technology and the perpetual desire for a longer life, the novel raises important and timely questions. In its way, Real Americans, while predictable, is forward-looking. It is, overall, a compelling read

“When he held me I looked, instinctively, to our reflection. It was like pressing a bruise, wanting to see if the pain lingered. I wanted to see how contradictory we were, as a pair, the difference of our physical bodies: him blond, built, tall; me with my plain black hair and average height and face that didn’t look good, I believed, unless I wore makeup. It was a face that made people ask: Where are you from?”

~ Rachel Khong, Real Americans
Book Specs

Author: Rachel Khong
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 395
Genre: Literary

Synopsis

Real Americans begins in New York City on the precipice of Y2K, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew, who is everything she’s not: posted, confident, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Raised in Tampa, Lily is the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite their differences, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen feels like an outsider on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can’t shake the sense she’s hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the quest threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.

In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance – a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home. Real Americans examines the forces that roil our new century: Are we destined or made? And, if the latter, who gets to do the making?

About the Author

Rachel Khong was born in 1985 in Malaysia to a Malaysian Chinese family. Her family moved to the United States when she was two. She was raised in Rancho Cucamonga, California, and attended high school in nearby Diamond Bar, California. Khong then attended Yale University where she graduated with a degree in English in 2007. She received her Master in Fine Arts from the University of Florida in 2011.

Post-university, Khong moved to San Francisco and worked in the food service industry. While in college, she interned at McSweeney’s where she edited cookbooks after graduation. In 2011, she was offered by Chris Ying of Lucky Peach to be the magazine’s managing editor; she eventually became the magazine’s executive editor. In 2017, published her debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin. The novel won the 2017 California Book Award for First Fiction. It was also a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for First Fiction. In 2024, she published her sophomore novel, Real Americans. Her writing has appeared in publications such as American Short Fiction, Joyland, and The San Francisco Chronicle. With Lucky Peach, she also edited a called All About Eggs.

In 2018, Khong cofounded The Ruby, a co-working and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco’s Mission district. She is currently residing in San Francisco, California.