As the story goes, after the death of China’s first emperor in 210 B.C., Chen Sheng, a military captain, organized a motley band of soldiers in a revolt against the Qin dynasty and its harsh penal laws. Sheng was defeated, but he became known for his belief that one’s status is not intrinsic — that one can change, grow, transcend. “Are kings, generals and ministers merely born into their kind?” he asked, a rhetorical question that became a rallying cry about identity and self-determination.
That is the same kind of query that propels Rachel Khong’s new novel, “Real Americans,” which begins with a scene involving an enchanted lotus seed supposedly “carried to the first emperor of united China in the mouth of a dragon.” Part historical fiction and part family saga, the book homes in on this inquiry: Can we change who we fundamentally are, or who we were meant to be? Or, are we inevitable? What do we make, then, of those who come after us?
“Real Americans,” which comes after Khong’s 2017 debut, “Goodbye, Vitamin,” is a sprawling novel, divided into three sections, each told from a different generation of a Chinese American family. It opens in New York in 1999, with Lily, a poor, unpaid media intern, falling in love with Matthew, a “distractingly hot” WASP-y aristocrat (read: blue-eyed, blond, white and rich). After a complicated courtship that is buoyed by passion but unsettled by their class differences, they get married and have a son; then Lily learns that her family and Matthew’s family are secretly more intertwined than she thought.
Before we see how this discovery plays out, we jump to 2021. Matthew and Lily’s child, Nick, is now a teenager, plagued by the usual jitters that accompany adolescence: puberty, first love, college applications. He and Lily now live in Washington, but curiously absent from their life is Matthew, whom Nick does not know. An auspicious match on a DNA test brings him to clandestine encounters with his father, meetings that threaten to unravel Nick’s world because they prompt him to question what role, if any, Matthew should play in his life and force him to reckon with his mother’s shrouded past.
Then the story leaps forward again, now to 2030 from the perspective of Lily’s mother and Nick’s grandmother, a geneticist named May. She recounts the turbulent conditions she endured under Mao Zedong’s China, the difficult circumstances she overcame to escape to and survive in the United States and how one scientific discovery caroms through her posterity.
The story is full of family secrets and discoveries that could easily veer into melodrama, but Khong is a deft writer who grounds even the most sweeping themes and scenes. Her eye is especially attuned to the fickle markers of race and the illusion of the American dream. “Real Americans” — which covers more than 80 years, and touches on everything from the Cultural Revolution to Sept. 11 to the fight against affirmative action — is as much about being Asian in America as it is about the working class, the politically disenfranchised and the universal quest to understand the self.
As the novel unfolds, the story drops delicious mysteries that guide the reader: Why and how did Lily and Matthew’s fairy-tale relationship come to an end? How is Nick, who is mixed race, somehow a clone of Matthew who bears no resemblance to his Chinese American mother, Lily? And how and why is May familiar, perhaps too familiar, with Matthew’s father, a pharmaceutical executive? Khong has a gift for building suspense, crafting a story so compulsively bingeable that the pages essentially turn themselves.
That tension, however, is sometimes lost for banal sentences (“This was an artist’s task, he explained, to observe”). And Khong hammers the novel’s theme of who or what constitutes an American so bluntly and so repetitively — “I was as American as they came”; “We may look Chinese, but we have no loyalty to China. We want to be American” — that the writing can feel didactic.
Still, the novel’s ambition is admirable, and it’s easy to get lost in the unspoken truths between Lily, Nick and May as they try to knit themselves into a coherent whole. It appears to matter less, Khong suggests, what our environment or nationality is than the people, both chosen and biological, that we elect to surround ourselves with. “Aren’t we lucky?” she writes. “Our DNA encodes innumerable people, and yet it’s you and I who are here.” Indeed how lucky we readers are to be acquainted with these Americans, imagined and alive.
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