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Summary and Reviews of Real Americans by Rachel Khong

Real Americans by Rachel Khong

Real Americans

A Novel

by Rachel Khong
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  • First Published:
  • Apr 30, 2024, 416 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

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?

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?

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Reviews

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Over the course of the book, we meet May, her daughter Lily, and her grandson Nick. May, who flees China's Cultural Revolution and the persecution of scientists and academics, is driven by a passion for understanding gene expression. As the title suggests, the book explores what it means to be a "real American." Each of the three main characters feels excluded in some way: one doesn't look the part; one looks the part but feels different from his peers; one's past life and language is just too different to be shared in current surroundings. Yet the individualism of all their behaviors seems undeniably American in contrast to family-oriented Confucian values, or the greater-whole social principles of Chinese Communism. Throughout the book lingers the question of one's future: fate, destiny, free will. If we really knew and understood our past, would we make the same decisions? How much of our lives can we change; are they destined, free will, or luck?..continued

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(Reviewed by Pei Chen).

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Beyond the Book



Chinese Science During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976)

May, the matriarch of Rachel Khong's Real Americans, is born into a poor rural Chinese family in the 1950s. Her fate is foretold by her mother's life: wake before dawn to cook breakfast, clean up after the men in the family, head to the rice paddies and toil until the time to head home to cook supper, rinse and repeat. It is backbreaking. Luckily for May, she possesses an academic gift and an intellectual curiosity that missed her elder brothers. She excels at the National Exam, testing into esteemed Peking University to study biology. Her tuition is sponsored by the state and she escapes rural poverty to become a glamorous urban student. "You look like the girl from the [propaganda] poster," May's young cousin says admiringly on her return...

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Read-Alikes

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