Real Americans

Real Americans (2024) is Chinese American author Rachel Khong’s second novel. Khong’s first novel, Goodbye Vitamin (2017), was both a commercial and critical success and established her as an important new voice within Asian American literature. Real Americans is a polyvocal narrative that spans continents, generations, and decades to tell the story of May, Lily, and Nick Chen. It examines the impact of Mao’s Cultural Revolution on Chinese scientists and depicts the struggles of both first- and second-generation Chinese American immigrants. The novel uses a discussion of the ethics of gene editing to explore themes related to class and belonging, immigration, race and identity, and fraught family dynamics. Real Americans was an instant New York Times bestseller upon publication.

This guide refers to the 2024 hardcover edition published by Alfred A. Knopf.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide include discussions of suicide, depression, drug overdose, sexual assault, violence, and racism.

Plot Summary

Real Americans is divided into three sections, each with its own narrator. The first section details the college and post-graduate experiences of Lily Chen, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. The second section is narrated by Lily’s son, Nick, and the third section looks back in time to tell Lily’s mother May’s immigration story.

The novel opens with an introduction to Lily. She is an art history major with few post-college job prospects, and she has an unpaid internship at a large media corporation. At the company’s Christmas party, her boss introduces her to his nephew, Matthew Maier, and there is instant chemistry between the two. Matthew asks her out after the party, and their first date is a lavish dinner at a restaurant that Lily could never afford on her own. Lily genuinely likes Matthew, but she is also a little starstruck by his obvious affluence. At dinner, he invites her on an impromptu trip to Paris, and the two leave for the airport as soon as they finish their meal.

In the next months, their relationship blossoms. Despite their racial and class differences, they share much in common, and Lily has high hopes for a future together. Those hopes are dashed when Lily realizes that Matthew is hesitant to introduce her to his family. Feeling judged for her lack of inherited wealth and familial connections, Lily calls the relationship off. She continues her unpaid work, takes a series of odd jobs, befriends a pair of Asian women she meets at a fitness class, and gets a paid position at the company after her internship. After running into Matthew at another company party, the two resume their relationship.

Lily moves in with Matthew, meets his family, and stops working. When Matthew proposes, she accepts. After some difficulty (Lily has a rare genetic disorder that makes carrying a pregnancy to term nearly impossible), they conceive a child using in vitro fertilization (IVF). Their son, Nico, is born premature while Lily accompanies Matthew on a work trip to China. There, Lily meets Ping, one of her mother’s former colleagues from Peking University. Lily’s relationship with her mother, May, has always been strained, and Ping leaves her with more questions than answers about May’s life in China. Nico is born with his father’s blue eyes and blonde hair, and both Lily and May are troubled by how little he resembles the Chinese side of his family.

Nico, who now goes by Nick, is the narrator in the novel’s second section. He and Lily live on a small, remote island off the coast of Washington State. Nick is in high school and, along with his friend Timothy, dreams of leaving their tiny community to attend college on the East Coast. Lily raised Nick on her own, and he knows nothing about his father except that, according to Lily, he wants nothing to do with his son. Nick does not resemble his mother at all and sometimes doubts that she is his birth parent. At Timothy’s suggestion, he takes a DNA test that confirms that he is half Chinese. Through the testing company’s database, he locates his father.

Nick and Matthew begin a tentative relationship, and Matthew helps Nick apply to schools on the East Coast. Nick keeps this a secret from his mother, hiding that Matthew is financing his applications (and will also pay for college) and that he used Matthew’s last name instead of his own. Matthew’s family is prominent in both scientific research and philanthropic communities, and using his name has the potential to open doors for Nick.

Both Nick and Timothy end up at Yale, and Nick initially continues his relationship with Matthew. He meets his family, and the two appear to be developing a close bond. However, college brings a series of changes to Nick’s life. He and Timothy drift apart, and ultimately, Nick decides that he cannot continue his relationship with Matthew. Matthew has another son, a troubled young man whom Nick worries will always be his father’s “real” child. Matthew also reveals that his parents had a connection with Nick’s maternal grandparents: They gave Nick’s mother an experimental genetic treatment that resulted in her infertility. Nick decides to strike out on his own, without his father.

Part 3 is narrated by Lily’s mother, May, and it fills in several missing pieces of the story. Born into a farming family in rural China, she manages to obtain a position at Peking University based on her high intelligence and superlative test scores. Her time in school overlaps with Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and she and many of her fellow students are subjected to denunciations and persecution. She and her boyfriend, Ping, are ultimately shipped out to the country to perform agricultural work, and they both desperately want to immigrate to the United States to continue the genetic research they began at their university. After promising Ping to try a daring escape by swimming up the river together, May instead chooses to leave with another student, Wen, whose escape plan seems sounder.

They settle first in Hong Kong, where Wen is happy but May is not. She still loves Ping, and although Wen actively pursues her, it takes her a long time to agree to a romantic relationship. Ultimately, the two marry and are then presented with an opportunity to leave for the United States. At long last, May’s dream has come true, and she tries not to think of how much happier she would be immigrating with Ping. In the United States, she and Wen, who changes his name to Charles, are ultimately put in charge of their own lab. There, May begins working on a series of genetic experiments with Otto Maier (Matthew’s father) meant to alter the genetics of children so that they inherit more of one parent’s DNA than the other. Otto and May experiment on their own children, and the results are not what they hoped.

Flashing forward to the present, May is living alone in San Francisco, where Nick is now employed at a biotech startup. The two strike up a relationship. Her daughter, Lily, who by now knows the full story of May and Otto’s research, no longer speaks to her. Charles has since died, and Lily also leads a solitary existence. Nick’s startup needs new financial backers, and he is surprised to learn that the primary potential donor is his father, Matthew. They have been estranged for years at this point, and Nick is not happy to see him. However, when Nick finds out that his company plans to engage in ethically dubious gene editing, he enlists Matthew’s help. Matthew buys the company and dissolves it to help Nick prevent its gene-editing project. May becomes seriously ill, and as Nick sits beside her during her final hours, Lily walks through the door. At long last, she has forgiven her mother.