Real Americans

Not what I expected but an enjoyable read with characters I really felt for.

Memorable Quotes

Quotes that I earmarked while reading.

We were told what to want: Propaganda was universal. Especially in this country, where the propaganda was that there was none - we were free. But were we? When we were made to value certain lives more than others; when we were made, relentlessly, to want more? What if I had seen through it? What if I had understood that I already had enough?

Of course she was interrupting. As people we interrupted one another’s lives—that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up like me: living life without interruption, totally alone.

I’d thought transporting me to another setting was all that was needed to render me normal. I’d failed to consider that I might be the same person here.

In the act of giving I conceded that I had more than I needed, and someone had far less than they did. It was for no real reason, it wasn’t fair. It shattered the illusion of my own free will - that I had made choices, and those choices had resulted in my life.

Time passes, indifferent to me. So much of my life I have let slip by, because I have not attended to it. All this while, instead of seeking more time, I could have been paying attention.

Synopsis

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 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 so, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?

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?