What is coded into our blood, passed down by the generations that came before? In Rachel Khong’s second novel, “Real Americans,” betrayals burrow down into the marrow.
Using the lens of one family, Khong examines our collective impulse to claim a place in this voracious and forgetful culture. Here, unlike the constellation of rueful scenes, diaristic observations and quirky dialogue that made up her debut, “Goodbye, Vitamin,” Khong structures the story into a heroic triptych. Ranging from communist China to corporate America, “Real Americans” reaches for big questions as it portrays three matrilineal generations.
After a museum heist prologue during the 1966 Cultural Revolution in Beijing, Part I concerns itself with Lily, the unmoored daughter of Chinese immigrant scientists, in 1999 New York. She is just one of the closely observed characters with a symbolic history that Khong uses to interrogate who controls inheritance, whether stories, genetics, culture, ambition or money.
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Buried under student loans during the dot-com bust, Lily has been curating travel photo galleries for an unpaid internship when she meets Matthew. The young White scion of a pharmaceutical empire, he courts and weds the beautiful, reticent Lily, thereby transforming her prospects.
There is a falsified quality to the novel’s central conceit: One holiday party and a spontaneous trip to Paris later, Lily transforms into the romantic power broker and Matthew, the besotted. Raised by a disappointed woman who “had always longed for more,” Lily cross-examines her impulse toward interracial love. Seeing her and Matthew’s reflection in the mirror “was like pressing a bruise, wanting to see if the pain lingered.” Disturbed by the trend she sees among Asian female friends who date White men, Lily resists becoming what could be perceived as a trophy wife.
Ultimately, she becomes a single mother instead, living on a Pacific Northwest island teeming with evergreens. We never learn whether she regrets the choices that placed her in relative isolation, because her character is flattened by the self-interested narration of her son, Nick, who takes over in Part II. Nick’s most interesting quality is that he looks just like the handsome, rich White dad he never knew. Marred by having no true insight into his parents’ motivations, Nick “was distant, incapable of intimacy, closed off,” though, in his mind, “it felt like the opposite: There was so much inside me it was overwhelming.”
Nick’s predilection for stonewalling is revealed to be part of a sinister structure endemic to cultural assimilation. Encouraged by his overly interested best friend in high school, Nick uploads his DNA into an ancestry platform and reconnects with his estranged father, whose surname and credit card provide a springboard for Nick to ascend from the hard-fought middle class of his single mother to upper class with an Ivy League education.
There will be no student loans to burden Nick’s choices; the only readerly question in the face of his privilege is how much of his subsequent impact on the world is attributable to oblique self-loathing. Where to find sympathy for the pathos of the rich? Needing to prove oneself never ends, it seems. In that, “Real Americans” is spot on.
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The people of this book endure tragedies, from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the ideological fervor of the Red Guard, but it is often their own self-conception that seems most hazardous to their well-being. Lily’s fraught relationship with her mother, May, for instance, stems from the woman’s stony ambition and deep yearnings.
Drawing upon near-term application of gene editing that hearkens to CRISPR, “Real Americans” pairs plausible (read: dystopian) science fiction with a heritable, fantastical stoppage of time that seems to mimic the extravagance of choices that Americans are posited as having in this novel.
“All the time in the world — it has the ring of luxury,” Lily thinks at one point. “But considering every option, feeling the past and imagining the future at the same time — it was a burden.”
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As we discover in Part III, May is a scientist who is estranged from Lily for good reason. As a mother, May is a nightmare. As a character, she is gold. To negotiate her girlhood freedom, she studies hard enough to advocate for her escape from home into an academic environment that makes her prey to Mao’s anti-intellectual campaigns of pain and punishment.
A determined and calculating survivor who is self-indicting in retrospect, May fights for what can be hers, given the constraints of her existence. She is conditioned by her oppressive birth family to believe that “each person was allowed only a bit of ease. There was a limit to fulfilled desire in a life.” Only later does she realize that “life lay in the interruptions — that I had been wrong about life, entirely.”
Well written and perceptive, if predictable, about issues of power, money and class, Khong’s sophomore book covers so much ground over three continents and 50 years that by the very nature of its epic sweep, it cannot have the crackling energy and page-level panache that characterized her wry, episodic debut.
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In this big, market-friendly novel, the characters feel designed and polished for a broad sensibility. But, like Kong Tee, an artist who mentored May throughout her childhood within a harsh patriarchy, Khong affirms that it is “an artist’s work to be attuned to everything,” particularly small moments. Whether filtered through Lily, Nick or May, who observes that “Americans wore uncomplicated expressions,” Khong shines with keen insights into how we access our personalities through the cultures made available by circumstance.
“As an American child, I had been told I was exceptional,” Lily thinks. “And here, maybe, I might have simply existed, part of the fabric of something larger, and been content.”
Kristen Millares Young is a journalist, essayist and author of the prizewinning novel “Subduction.”
Real Americans
By Rachel Khong
Knopf. 416 pp. $29
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