‘Real Americans’ explores the pressure to be exceptional

Who are we? How do we decide what’s important to us – and become who we are? What’s a “real” American?

These are some of the questions Rachel Khong probes in “Real Americans,” her riveting, multi-generational saga about class, race, genetics, values, and ambition. “Real Americans” is Khong’s sophomore novel – following her heartwarming 2017 debut, “Goodbye, Vitamin”  – but it reads as if she skipped right to postdoc-level work. 

Khong is hardly the first writer to broach the subject of what it is to be or become American. But unlike, say, Anne Tyler, who wrote about assimilation and foreignness in her 2006 novel, “Digging to America,” Khong is primarily concerned with what she perceives as the American pressure to be exceptional. 

Khong’s novel, which spans three generations of two intertwined families, flags problematic attempts to shape and control identity through political, parental, personal, academic, and genetic manipulations. The Chens are geneticists who fled China in the late 1960s, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The Maiers are American-born heirs to a pharmaceutical fortune.  

The novel’s first section features the scientists’ daughter, Lily Chen. We meet her in 1999, during her senior year at New York University. An art history major, she has yet to find a driving passion like that of her parents. But she is haunted by her mother’s voice, constantly urging her to find meaning and excel. 

In the meantime, Lily struggles to make ends meet as an unpaid intern in the art department of an online travel magazine. At the company’s holiday party, her boss introduces her to his handsome blond nephew – and they immediately click. Matthew, enviably at home in his skin, works in private equity and can fly to Paris on a whim. Lily feels out of her depth but is too dazzled by glimpses of Matthew’s luxe life to turn away immediately. 

Without giving away too much, I can say that the second section of Khong’s three-part novel jumps ahead to 2021. It is narrated by Nick Chen, who has been raised by his devoted single mother on a small island off Seattle, where they live a bare-bones existence. Lily works at a low-paying job, but her life, unburdened by expectations, “was small, and rich, and entirely hers.” Teenage Nick expresses  frustration that he has no cellphone, computer, or PlayStation because of his mother’s “attempt to instill in me a sense of anti-materialism.” In order to play video games, he hangs out at his best friend’s house. This friend, puzzled by Nick’s blond hair and blue eyes, wonders if he was adopted, or the result of an IVF mixup. The boys get jobs at a local oyster farm to finance DNA tests. It’s the first of many secrets Nick withholds from his mother. 

“Real Americans” bogs down a bit during Nick’s overly long immersion in Ivy League college tours, undergraduate social hierarchies, and Yale’s Skull and Bones club, meant to highlight issues of class. (Khong is a Yale graduate.) Torn by conflicting emotions, Nick repeatedly shifts allegiances between various relatives and friends, as if he’s fiddling with hot and cold valves. Fortunately, the narrative regains its momentum in its moving final section, in which we finally hear from May, Lily’s mother. 

For more than half a century, May, in her determination to become a full-fledged American, has never spoken of her early years in China. Nor did she teach her daughter Chinese or cook Chinese food. But in a last-ditch attempt to connect with Lily, the old woman recounts her life story. It’s captivating.

May (formerly Mei) opens up about her impoverished childhood working in China’s rice paddies and the famine brought on by enforced communal farming and industrialization during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which began when she was 13. A scholarship to study biology at Peking University was her salvation.  

But May’s time in Peking, during which she met the love of her life, ended in 1966 with the Cultural Revolution, whose mandate was to “Destroy the four olds: ideas, customs, habits, and culture.” She describes the brutality of the Red Guards and confesses the regrettable decisions she made in order to flee China. Finally, she apologizes for her “indefensible” and “unforgivable” genomics experiments, which so upset Lily. 

Khong, who depicted older characters with such warmth in her first novel, brings a similar empathy to her portrayal of May – and indeed, to all her characters, even at their most pigheaded. In “Real Americans,” she makes a case for the importance of not just self-definition, but also compassion and a moral compass strong enough to resist a societal push to stand out at any cost.