"An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family, and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures?"-- - (Baker & Taylor)
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • READ WITH JENNA’S MAY BOOK CLUB PICK • From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures?
"Mesmerizing"—Brit Bennett • "A page turner.”—Ha Jin • “Gorgeous, heartfelt, soaring, philosophical and deft"—Andrew Sean Greer • "Traverses time with verve and feeling."—Raven Leilani
Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.
In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged 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 journey 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.
Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made? And if we are made, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome? - (Random House, Inc.)
RACHEL KHONG is the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR; O, The Oprah Magazine; Vogue; and Esquire. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Cut, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and Tin House. In 2018, she founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco’s Mission District. She lives in California. - (Random House, Inc.)
BEIJING, 1966
She isn’t afraid, but he is. They stand, in the darkness, before a glass case of old things. A Ming dynasty inkstone. A chrysanthemum carved from horn. A Song painting stamped with ruby-red collector’s seals. And on a silk pillow, so slight it could be missed: an ancient lotus seed with a legend behind it.
The story goes like this: One night, long ago, a dragon emerged from the sky and dropped this seed into the emperor’s open hand. His advisors huddled near to examine it. What fortune! they remarked. This seed would grant the emperor his greatest wish. Unfortunately, he died that night, while contemplating his options. He might have asked for immortality.
She takes a hammer from her knapsack. With all her strength, she strikes the glass. It makes a beautifully clear sound as it shatters. Quickly, the two get to work, securing the relics. It is an attempt to spare them from the Red Guards’ destruction—an act of protest, small, against a movement she’s no match for.
The seed is unspectacular, so old it resembles a stone. Yet she’s aware it contains an entire future: roots, stems, leaves, blooms, to seeds once more—encoded, like she is. Her heart pumps blood, her lungs take in air, she sleeps, wakes, eats, excretes. Will her life be long or short? What has she chosen, she wonders, and what has chosen her? She likes the fragrance of gardenias, but not the scent of lipstick. She doesn’t mind the rain. She is in love, which feels, to her, at once easy and hard, elemental and ungraspable—like vanishing and eternity at the same time. She wants to ask of every person she meets: Is it this way for you?
“Hurry,” her companion says.
A door slams, loudly. Someone is here. The footsteps draw closer. They flee.
Outside, she opens her fist. On her bleeding palm rests a stolen seed. The story is fiction. And yet: Why shouldn’t the wish be hers?
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* In 1999, New York City college student Lily is scraping by with an unpaid internship when she meets the impossibly handsome, unfathomably wealthy Matthew. She abruptly cuts off their romance when their class differences overwhelm her, but fate intervenes. They marry and have a son, who appears to have none of Lily's Chinese American heritage, looking like blond-haired, blue-eyed Matthew. Narrating the novel's second part, teenage Nick doesn't know his father's identity or why he isn't in their lives, and, pushed by his best friend, endeavors to find out. The book's final and most staggering third is voiced by May, the scientist mother Lily has been estranged from since a shocking revelation following Nick's birth. And so readers learn what Lily may never: the story of May's life, beginning in a rural Chinese rice farm, surviving famine and worse, and achieving her goal of attending university in Beijing until Mao's Cultural Revolution forced her to make an impossible choice. While in many ways a far cry from Khong's wonderfully spare debut, Goodbye Vitamin (2017), this plot-rich, spiraling, multigenerational epic possesses the same heartrending humanity and deceptively subtle portrayal of characters' unseen depths—so impossible to relate, so essential to everything. As in life, the love is in the details. Copyright 2024 Booklist Reviews.
Library Journal Reviews
Opposites Matthew and Lily meet and fall in love, but years later Lily's son goes looking for the biological father he never knew. Khong's previous novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, was named a best book of the year by multiple media outlets and is in development for a feature film. Prepub Alert. Copyright 2023 Library Journal
Copyright 2023 Library Journal.
