Hello writers, philosophers, biologists, geneticists, psychologists, and anthropologists!
This week’s Write-minded centers questions, and how questions guide writers, drive fiction, and unearth important stories. Guest Rachel Khong shares how the big and provocative question of who’s a “real American” informed her new novel and why she writes without an outline. We also talk about ambition and drive, why novelists have to grapple with people speculating what in their fiction is “real,” and much more.
Novels we love that ask the big questions:
Within Arm’s Reach by Ann Napolitano
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling
The Consequences by Manuel Muñoz
Partial transcript from the show
Grant: I’m Grant Faulkner and I’m with my co-host Brooke Warner, and Brooke, the reason I mentioned such a list of serious academic professions is because our guest today, Rachel Khong wrote this amazing novel, Real Americans, that begs the question of who we are and why we are the people we are, and she does this largely through this lens of who and what is a “real American,” except it’s much more than that. It’s one of those novels that is so of our times in the questions it addresses—and the way it addresses them. I say “the way it addresses them” because I worry that the title, because it’s provocative, could make them think this is a didactic novel, and it’s not that at all. It’s a novel that explores questions and is written with great curiosity and artistry. It’s also a big novel. Real Americans covers more than 80 years, and touches on everything from the Cultural Revolution in China to Sept. 11 to the fight against affirmative action. One of its central questions revolves around what it means to be Asian American in the largely white environments of America, but it’s also about class divides, the politically disenfranchised, and the question that has been with us since the beginning of time, the quest to understand the self.
Brooke: That and more—there are so many important issues in this novel. And, yes, it’s a big novel. I thought it was so interesting how Rachel intentionally set out to write a longer novel after her more slim and intimate first novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, because she wanted to write a story that readers could immerse themselves in. She brings up so many interesting topics, such as how powerful people and powerful systems essentially work to choose our lives, and then the role that parents and genetics play in who we are. You know, the word “America” tends to hold connotations of human agency, liberty, and self-fulfillment, so it’s interesting that she put those things in question in this novel. It poses the question of just how much agency we have, and what it means to have that agency.
Grant: Yeah, because as you said, America holds this promise of self-fulfillment, that the future can be anything you wish and that you, as an individual, can be anything you put your mind to, regardless of your background or upbringing. But that’s not exactly true, right, and part of that agency, that possibility of fulfillment, is determined by our own self-perception, and then the reasons we have that self-perception, that feeling of what our identity is. There’s this moment in the book that was very telling for me. One of the main characters, Lily, is at her future husband Matthew’s very expensive condo. Lily is an Asian American, and she’s also of a lower class than Matthew, who is white, and she catches a glimpse of the two of them together in one of the mirrors in this condo, and she says, “In our reflection, I saw an all-American man with a foreign woman, even though I was also all-American.” I had to pause at this point and think about how I have never had a moment like this. I’ve always felt like a “real American,” and I’ve always been made to feel that by others. The question, in fact, has never occurred to me personally. But Lily is fully American as well. She was actually born in America, raised American, yet she’s obviously internalized the way some other people have viewed her, so she’s still othered in her own culture.
Brooke: This scene really felt to me to be at the heart of so much of what the book gets into throughout all three of its parts. And just to give listeners an idea of those three parts, Real Americans follows Lily, the daughter of parents who fled China during the Cultural Revolution, who finds unexpected love in New York at the turn of the millennium; and then part two follows her son Nick, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest wondering about the father he doesn’t know—Matthew, the white, wealthy man you mentioned earlier; and then the third part is about May, Lily’s mother, a scientist who 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 then how one scientific discovery shapes the entire story. The novel feels like three linked novellas in some ways. It’s really amazing because somehow it’s historical fiction, a love story, a science fiction thriller, a fantasy novel, and a psychological drama all at once.
Grant: One of the things I liked about the novel is how it examines various types of American propaganda—especially the belief in achievement and exceptionalism, the idea that it’s so important to have a career and be ambitious. I say that because I was raised with that sensibility, those goals, and it’s something I’ve always questioned because ambition and achievement aren’t exactly the best answers to what makes a person happy. I certainly had to question this conventional American framework when I was raising my kids, and I can only hope I struck the right balance between guiding my kids to living out one’s ambitions and living out one’s happiness, and hoping that the two form themselves around each other. It’s not an easy thing, especially in this country. As a parent, I have to say that I love when a novel makes me reflect on what it means to be a good parent—which always entails the question, how much do I want to control and determine and how much do I let the randomness of the universe determine.
Brooke: The lineage of parental decision-making in this novel is fascinating. Lily questions her mother’s lack of interest in returning to visit China, the country in which her mother grew up, because she’s pregnant with her own son, and she wants to tell him something about where their family originated—more than her parents had ever told her. Later, though, after her son is born, Lily hides information and takes dramatic steps to isolate her son from key elements of his own origin story, including the identity of his father, all in the name of protecting her child. The anxieties of parenthood and the questions of how to make the world better and safe for your child weave their way through all of the drama, and how the best intentions often lead to bad results, of course. I thought it was interesting how each generation in this novel’s family is an only child, so that child gets intense focus—but despite that focus, Lily and Nick want more from their parents.
Grant: Yeah, I guess we always want more from our parents. Perhaps that’s universal, no matter how much they’ve given. I appreciated how Nick summed up the crux of being a parent when he says, “Why did parents perform all these un-repayable acts? Was it because they felt guilty for bringing us here in the first place?” There might be at least a smidgeon of that in all of our parenting—that is, we’d better make this life work out for our kids because we brought them into all of this. I was also just interested in how families are full of secrets in this novel, though, and I wondered what secrets there are in my family, and if I’ll ever find any of them out.
Brooke: Yeah, it’s interesting because the secret-keeping in Real Americans is intended to protect the child, but each secret comes with self-interest of course. I’m interested in hearing more secrets about just how this book was written, so we’ll be right back with Rachel Khong after this short break.
I don’t actually know how I would write novels without having community. Because a novel requires so much working alone, it requires being with your own thoughts, but it’s also just such a daily and yearly process that I think it requires companionship, it requires other people to be in this thing with you, and to talk with you about it, to commiserate with you, but also to celebrate your little wins and just believe in the validity of what you’re doing.
—Rachel Khong
This Week’s Book Trend:
Today’s #booktrend is fortunately a trend that’s been going on for a long time, sometimes behind the scenes, silently, but powerfully! And it’s the influence that Book Clubs have in shaping the book industry. Their impact on book sales, author popularity, and book discussions is stronger now than ever thanks to social media. Book Clubs create a sense of community and provide a platform for diverse perspectives on literary works and truly bring people together. So, long live Book Clubs! Are you a part of one? What's been your experience?
ABOUT RACHEL KHONG
Rachel Khong is the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, which won the 2017 California Book Award for First Fiction, and most recently of Real Americans. From 2011 to 2016, Rachel was the managing editor then executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine. In 2018, she founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco’s Mission district.