There is a point in Rachel Khong’s sophomore novel, Real Americans, when one of the main characters, Lily, questions her mother’s lack of interest in returning to visit China, the country in which her mother grew up. Pregnant with her own son, Lily thinks, “I wanted to be able to tell my son something about where we’d originated—more than my parents had ever told me.” Later, though, after her son is born, Lily is not so forthcoming with details from their past. In fact, she takes dramatic steps to isolate her son from key elements of his own origin story, including the identity of his father, all in the name of protecting her child. Parent-child relationships and the choices that shape a child’s identity are at the heart of Khong’s emotionally complex novel. Real Americans takes a compassionate and clear-eyed look at the lengths parents will go for their children, the secrets they keep, and the reverberating consequences.
Real Americans spans three generations and progresses in three parts, each told from the perspective of a different character. After a brief prologue introduces a bit of magic—an ancient seed and a legend that it grants a person’s greatest wish—to an otherwise science-focused story, the first part of the narrative commences in 1999 New York. Lily, the daughter of Chinese immigrant scientists, navigates the complexities of working in New York City through the volatility of 9/11. Lily meets Matthew, the wealthy golden-boy son of a pharmaceutical executive, and to her surprise, they fall in love.
The second part of the story continues from the perspective of Lily’s son, Nick. The year is 2021, the place, Puget Sound, an entire country-length away from where Lily and Matthew once lived. Nick wonders about his identity: “Why didn’t I look at all Chinese? My hair was blond, and my eyes were blue, and I didn’t resemble my mother at all. But genetics could be weird.” The narrative follows him as he graduates high school and seeks out a relationship with his father.
Finally, the perspective shifts to Lily’s mother, May. May recounts her youth in the southern basin of the Yangtze River, which she leaves for Beijing in 1965 to become a scientist, only to find herself immersed in the harrowing reality of rule under Mao Zedong. May eventually lands in the United States, where she meets people and makes decisions during the course of her work as a geneticist that will alter her family’s lives forever. While the setting is San Francisco in 2030, much of May’s story takes place in the past and serves the purpose of answering open questions from the first two parts of the book: Why does Nick look identical to his father, with no resemblance to Lily? What caused Lily to stop talking to May entirely? Even if the novel structurally begins with Lily’s perspective, it becomes clear that the familial story always started with May. There is a sense of catharsis that May—a scientist whose work in the field of genetics once empowered her to make decisions about people’s lives before those lives even began—is the one whose story concludes the novel. May, who had the power to peek into the future and alter it, is the one left to summarize her findings.
Real Americans captures the anxieties of parenthood—how can I make the world better for my child, how can I make my child safer from the world?—and recognizes the impossibility of offering impenetrable protection. The novel explores how even the best of intentions can lead to unintended results; no matter how scientific the process, a hypothesis can’t account for all the potentialities of human existence, especially when one’s children are involved.
The main parent-child relationships—Lily and Nick, May and Lily—are further intensified by the fact that there are no siblings to diffuse the force of each mother’s attention and focus. Both Lily and Nick carry the weight of their parents’ dreams for them, yet both find themselves wanting more from their mothers in the way of information about the past. Even so, they are aware of the obligations their mere existence places on their parents. Nick ponders the debts children owe their parents: “Why did parents perform all these un-repayable acts? Was it because they felt guilty for bringing us here in the first place?” There is a tension between each child’s desire for knowledge—Nick for his father’s identity and history, Lily for the story of her mother’s past—and the parent’s desire to keep secrets. Stretched to a certain point, the tension prompts the reader to wonder who the parents are really protecting. The secret-keeping in Real Americans appears intended to protect the child, but each secret also carries its own form of self-protection.
At times, the novel dips its toe in the fantastical without losing balance from its foundation in the science of DNA sequences and gene editing: each of the three protagonists at some point experiences the phenomenon of being able to stop and manipulate time. There is something poignant about the parallel between an experience that cannot be explained by science and the experience of parenthood, and Real Americans probes at the tension between science and magic. Experiments can be delicate, after all. Scientists can quantify the data, set controls, isolate variables, and analyze findings as much as they want, but at the end of the day there may still be things they don’t understand or can’t explain. Much the same as parenthood.
Khong’s novel is about making decisions in the best interest of one’s children (to the extent those interests are clear and ascertainable, which, of course, is the issue, isn’t it?). It is about wanting a better life for them without having complete knowledge of what better might mean, what those consequences could be. In a world where nearly everything is out of your control, you cling tightly to those decisions that are available to you, if only for the illusion that you can be in charge of something. If you can be in charge of your children’s future, perhaps that can allow you to control some part of your own.
FICTION
Real Americans
By Rachel Khong
Knopf Publishing Group
Published April 30, 2024
