“The problem with beginnings is that there’s no such thing,” muses the narrator of Rachel Khong’s debut novel. Goodbye, Vitamin. “What’s a beginning if not an arbitrary entry point? You start when you’re born, I suppose, but it’s not like you know anything about that.”
The difficulty of delineating starting points also animates Khong’s new book, Real Americans, which begins at least four times: the book is divided into three short story-length sections, each told from the point of view of a different character, plus a prologue. Khong’s latest begins, for lack of a better term, with a short scene in Beijing in 1966 before jumping to 1999. In this first part, we meet Lily, one of the book’s three protagonists. While working as an unpaid intern at an online travel magazine in New York, she crosses paths with Matthew, a “very hot” asset manager who works in private equity.
They bond over the rather mundane fact that they were both born on Long Island and the more consequential fact that they vaguely knew each other when they were children. The art history student admits: “I wasn’t the type of person who aspired to shape a landscape. I just wanted to observe it.” Matthew is intrigued enough to propose, after just a few dates. After she loses her job, he transfers a thousand dollars into her bank account every week, no questions asked, and gives her a separate allowance to redecorate their condo. It is only when they are about to get married that Lily discovers that Matthew is the descendant of a blue-blooded family; he uses a different last name to deflect attention. After conceiving a child through IVF, she discovers a secret connection between Matthew’s parents and hers, which divides the family.
The book then shifts to 2021 and places us in the perspective of Nick, Lily’s son. This is by far the most laborious and prosaic section, giving us chapters and verses about Nick’s adolescence, his college connections, and his eventual employment at a foundation whose “many projects included vaccination campaigns, tackling health inequities, screening for in utero diseases,” and more. . The strongest moments are the early years, when we meet high-achieving teenagers who worry about their college admissions; his mother wants him to stay close to their home in Seattle, while he looks forward to enrolling in an Ivy League school on the East Coast. “I was self-centered without even knowing who I was or who I should be – a maddening combination,” he notes self-deprecatingly. Long separated from Matthew, Lily raised Nick by making him understand that his father wanted nothing to do with him. When Nick finally meets his father – after taking a DNA test – his life takes a fairly predictable turn. Money is an open sesame, opening the doors to universities, secret societies and the most prestigious jobs. But their accumulation transforms Nick into an automaton.
The third and most memorable part of the book is told largely from the point of view of May, Nick’s maternal grandmother. It will open in 2030 with May, now in her eighties, behind her grandson, who works in a “biotechnology start-up”. Nick had been led to believe – again by his mother – that his grandmother had died years ago, but after running into each other in a pharmacy, they gradually form a friendship and she reveals the story of his life. As a teenager “in the southern basin of the Yangtze River,” the “outspoken” May imbibed scientific knowledge and distinguished herself as a young scholar. The amount of research Khong did for this section alone, full of strange and delightful facts, could earn him an honorary doctorate from a university. In this section, Khong also masterfully evokes the atmosphere of Beijing at the time of the Cultural Revolution and the Four Plagues campaign. At school, May begins a romance with a fellow student named Ping; together, they “study the lotus and its repair mechanisms” and dream of fleeing together to the United States to become geneticists and escape the oppression of Mao’s China. Their dream does not come true – or only part of it comes true: after a short stay in Hong Kong, May manages to find a job in the United States, but her new life begins with the “wrong man”.
An element of fantasy permeates all three stories: May and her descendants possess the power to “keep time still.” At first, this power feels less like a voluntary effort and more like the onset of a panic attack. Going into more detail about what exactly is happening would spoil some of the fun of reading the last section; suffice it to say that the power that stops time has something to do with “an ancient lotus seed.” Like his grandmother before him, Nick learns to control this power and exploit it opportunistically by studying longer and more intensely than his classmates.
Many philosophical ideas are disseminated Real Americans, including the existence of free will and the ethics of modifying genomes to select for “favorable” hereditary traits and remove unfavorable ones. “What could we change in our lives? Could we steer the legacy in particular directions?” a character asks. Unfortunately, too many of these moral conundrums are expressed in the simple, straightforward manner of a scientific study. But the questions that animate May’s academic research double as animating questions for the novel. As unsubtle as they may be, these are also questions we will likely have to answer in the near future – at a time when polygenic screenings are becoming more common, people are extending their lives with elixirs, and beginnings are becoming increasingly difficult to remember.
Rhoda Feng is a New York-based freelance writer whose reviews have appeared in 4Columns, The Baffler, The White Review, The New Republic, Public Books, Village Voice, and others.
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