“Every book I’d read led me further away from her, from the life we once shared.”
Rachel Khong’s Real Americans (Knopf 2024) is a beautiful but frustrating novel, frustrating because of the missing parts. Divided into three sections, into three generations, the novel halts every time it starts to dig into the meat of the matter. It is heavy with potential, but those story lines slam shut in favor of starting all over with someone else and some other, but related, moral dilemma. At its heart, the novel is about gene editing, including prenatal, and the bioethical issues that stem from it, but discussions of gene editing are cursory at best. The writing is beautiful, but it is fragmented and sometimes forced. Just give me May’s story. And all of it.
Lily is the American-born daughter of two geneticists. Her parents had fled China, but they never talked about it. She was raised “American” – eating American food and speaking only English. The novel opens with her as an unpaid intern, trying to make it in New York. Kismet has her meet Matthew, gorgeous and lucky, at a company party. In time, she learns he is Matthew Maier of Maier Pharmaceuticals. She learns they have shared childhood experiences of living in the same area. Kismet indeed. They get married, struggle with pregnancy, and eventually welcome baby Nico. The section slams shut when we learn that not only had her parents known his before she was born; she’d been “treated” by his father.
The next section follows Nico, now Nick, in high school. Nico does not appear even a smidge Chinese. His father, Matthew, is an unnamed and empty figure. This is one of the more unbelievable parts of this story – that with all the money and all the “scientific data” in Nico, they’d let him go. He’s been told his grandparents are dead. A DNA test leads him to the Maiers and the truth, and they hide their relationship from Lily. Nick leaves the west coast for college on the east, hoping to study biology, seemingly the perfect heir to the Maier empire. He is the exact image of his father, who was the exact image of his father. Unlike Matthew’s other son, Nick has work ethic and a powerful drive reminiscent of his grandmother. This section hurtles forward, covering a lot of time and information in a brief space, before we find Nick reconnecting with his mother’s mother, the woman he thought was dead.
We finally then get May’s version of events, which starts in the southern basin of the Yangtze River when she’s a young girl. Here is where the novel finds its heart in the story of young girl who advances to college, despite the cards she’s been dealt, and who ultimately flees China by making a choice of survival over love. Her passion and drive in her study of genetics secures her employment and a life in the US. Science is her first love, evidenced in everything she does. But once again, we have huge gaping holes – what happened after Lily learned what her mother did. What happened in the years between the end of Lily’s section and the start of Nick’s? And where is the clear battle between science and maternal instincts? Whispers. Cursory statements. Missing pieces.
I wanted more.
A Girl Named Tommi 