Real Americans is one of those critically acclaimed books that has been recently published, reviewed and recommended by all major media outlets such as the New York Times and NPR, as well as selected to be on the highly regarded “Read with Jenna” book list. It is a follow-up to the author’s debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, which also received widespread acclaim when it was published in 2017. While Goodbye, Vitamin did not come to my attention for some reason, Real Americans did and I put it on my reading list, as the story seemed very interesting, spanning three generations of a Chinese family in the US. The author has an Asian background, so it also promised to be authentic. I definitely wanted to give it a try.

When I finally got the book from my local library and started reading it, I was amazed at the quality of the writing. It had been a few months since I had read anything that was worth writing about, and I was happy to finally have found something good. However, after about seven or eight chapters — far beyond the point I normally abandon a book if it is not gripping me — I almost gave up on it as it seemed to be rehashing a familiar romantic trope — that of a regular, financially-struggling young girl being swept off her feet by a Greek-God-looking, fabulously wealthy guy who, for some reason, falls deeply in love with her and marries her. I would have expected this from a cheesy romance novel but not from such a highly rated book.

It is entirely to the book’s credit that I continued to read it despite wanting to abandon it. And I am glad I did. But once I got over that part (although I don’t know why the guy couldn’t have been less of a hunk and more ordinary-looking), I found that there was a lot more to the story. The young girl being swept off her feet is Lily Chen, born in the US to Chinese parents who emigrated to the US to escape from Mao’s Communist resolution, and the young man she falls in love with and marries is Matthew, who, with his blond hair and blue eyes, is as white as they come. They have a baby boy, Nick, and then, all of a sudden, Lily leaves Matthew from their home in New York City and disappears, taking Nick with her.

It turns out that Lily has discovered that her mother, a scientist doing DNA research, colluded with Matthew’s father, whose pharmaceutical company had been funding her research, to change Lily’s genetic makeup in a specific way — suppressing the genetic traits of one parent so that the child inherits the genetic traits only of the other parent. In addition to Lucy, they also did this experiment on her baby in-utero, suppressing Lily’s traits, so that Nick looks completely like the blond-haired, blue-eyed Matthew and does not have any of Lily’s Asian features at all. While Matthew had no knowledge of this experiment, he refuses to leave his family once he learns about it from Lily, so she leaves without him.

The story then fast-forwards to 20 years to focus on Nick and his life as a young adult, first in high school where he goes through the usual dating experiences and the stress of college applications, and then in college, with dorms, classes, roommates, parties, and more dating. After Lily leaves her home in New York, she takes Nick to live in an island town close to Seattle, where he grows up with no father. He eventually finds Matthew through a DNA test his best friend urges him to take, and he goes on to maintain a relationship with his father for some years, also taking advantage of his offer to pay for his college education in Yale, where he gets in despite having less-than-stellar credentials but because he uses his father’s family’s well-known last name. I found this part of the novel especially compelling as it seemed to me to capture the confusions, the upheavals, the intense emotions, and the angst of young adulthood to a tee.

The last part of the book goes back in time to tell the story of Lily’s mother, May, of her childhood and youth growing up in China, her interest in science and in genetics, in particular, which she is able to study at Peking University, her escape from China to the US with her mentor who she ends up marrying and having Lily with, her early days in the US with her attempts to fit in and learn the language, and how she gradually establishes herself as a scientist in a research lab where she eventually develops the genetic experiment that she first performs on Lily and then on Nick before he was born.  She eventually reconnects with Nick once he graduates and is working in San Francisco (in a biotech startup), and through him, she finally also reconciles with Lily by the end of the book.

We are now in the age of gene-editing with CRISPR technology, so the genetic experimentation that is the main plot point of Real Americans is not that far-fetched, and I thought it made for an interesting story. However, to me, it was really the quality of the writing that made the book stand out, compelling me to keep reading it even after being put off by the initial faux pas. The critical acclaim it has received is very well deserved.

Real Americans
Author: Rachel Khong
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: April 2024

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Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.