Rachel Khong’s most recent novel, Real Americans, is a multigenerational epic told in three parts—exploring family history, genetics, ethics, and culture. The novel begins as a fairly straightforward romance—set in Manhattan in 2001—between Lily, a young woman working at an uninspiring online magazine, who meets William, a charming and handsome asset manager. William sweeps Lily off her feet with his generous gifts and while Lily is somewhat concerned about how his immense family fortune (made in the pharmaceutical industry) will affect their relationship, the two quickly fall in love and get married. While William and Lily struggle to conceive initially, Lily eventually gives birth to a son with he help of IVF.
The novel then jumps forward to 2021, as Lily’s son Nico is graduating high school and beginning to understand his origins. He lives with his mom in Seattle on a remote island, and the identity of his father has been kept from him. It’s clear that Lily and William had a falling out over something serious, that also involves Lily’s parents who she no longer speaks to. Nico struggles to understand his mom’s reticence about her past, but as events bring him closer to his biological father, he begins to come closer to understanding the strange entanglements of his family. Nico, like many kids about to leave for college, is also in the midst of a bit of an identity crisis—Lily is Chinese but he is totally white-passing, looking almost identical to William and nothing like Lily. He feels alienated by his dual identity, and struggles to fit in with the young people around him, which is further exacerbated by his limited understanding of his family history. As Nico connects with his biological father, he begins to question Lily and her mothering, bringing him to another breaking point in the family dynamic.
The novel then completes its final time jump to 2030, as Nico’s grandmother and Lily’s mother May is living in the San Francisco area, an elderly woman coming to terms with the choices she’s made. May details her youth, raised in a small farming community in rural China before university opened her eyes to the wonders of science—which was quickly taken away from her by the increasingly authoritarian and anti-intellectual CCP led by chairman Mao. For May, her intelligence is her identity, it paved the road for her independence and allowed her to imagine a future outside her village—so when the opportunity arises for her to leave China, despite the huge emotional cost, she takes it and eventually ends up in the US working at a lab with her husband. May’s story, and the pivotal role she’s played in her daughter and grandson’s life is revealed, as the reader comes to understand why she chose to interfere in their lives and genes the way that she did.
The novel is a pseudo-mystery, in that the real sub-plot is hinted at nd then only revealed in the final chapters—but more importantly its an expertly crafted portrayal of what is passed through generations, and what a huge role science and ethics play in the making of the future. True visionaries imagine a world that has not yet arrived, and build the tools to move towards it—in Real Americans Rachel Khong has explored how visionaries are informed by their cultural heritage, and the intensely human survival instincts that inform progress. Khong’s family epic is rigorously imagined and expertly plotted, a truly unique novel that asks thoughtful questions about identity, science, and ethics.