It’s often said that good luck is the result of good planning: you make your own. But is our luck in life ever entirely under our control? And how much luck, and planning, might be enough? Real Americans, Rachel Khong’s second novel, strikes directly at the heart of these questions. Its Chinese-American characters are brought into contact with fabulous wealth – a prototypical stroke of luck. But their resulting choices demonstrate how the obsessive pursuit of money and control can warp a life, and what it might take to reject this overabundance. At one point a Chinese geneticist named Mei, recently arrived in the US, reflects on the dual definitions of the word “fortune” as both luck and money. “Maybe there was an amount of money that was as unfortunate as poverty could be,” she thinks.
Each of the novel’s three parts tells a rags-to-riches story, tracing out fairytale trajectories that make it easy to inhale Real Americans even as Khong’s understated prose and eye for detail ground the narrative. In 1999, Lily Chen is an unpaid intern, the aimless daughter of ambitious immigrant parents, when she meets Matthew at a party in New York City. In short order, he gives her a flatscreen TV, takes her to dinner and whisks her to Paris in a whirlwind romance that culminates in a wedding and the birth of a child. Twenty-two years later, Lily’s son Nick grows up not knowing his father, and his search for Matthew reveals an inheritance he hadn’t bargained for. A final section leaps back in time to 1960s China, when Mei leaves behind a brutal farmer’s life for a job at a New York research lab and gives birth to Lily. This narrative time travel serves a dual purpose: Mei’s story offers answers to lingering mysteries in Lily and Nick’s lives, and illustrates the extent to which our lives are shaped even before we’re born – a further indication of how little we control our own luck.
The Chens may have access and proximity to money, but they’re not comfortable with it in the same manner as Matthew’s family, heirs to a pharmaceutical fortune. Their luck throughout the novel feels provisional, something that could be snatched away at any moment. Khong observes this pervasive sense of unbelonging with cutting precision, and perfectly captures the dislocation, insecurity and erasure that are facets of Asian-American life. Lily fixates on how she appears next to Matthew, in restaurants and in mirrors: “In our reflection, I saw an all-American man with a foreign woman, even though I was also all-American.” Nick, who’s half-Chinese, constantly refers to Matthew’s other son as his “real” son. When you live on the periphery, even your existence is a matter of doubt.
But perhaps, Khong suggests, it’s from the periphery that one can best see the whole. At the core of Real Americans is a critique of the peculiarly American obsession with money and choice, which, thanks to a subplot involving genetic engineering, is ultimately equated with a need to control the randomness of reality itself. The novel’s biotech CEOs pay lip service to the notion of equal opportunity, but ignore the inequalities that rob people of real options. It’s telling that all three main characters give money to homeless people on separate occasions. “In the act of giving I conceded that I had more than I needed, and someone had far less than they did,” Lily thinks, faced with a beggar. “It shattered the illusion of my own free will – that I had made choices, and those choices had resulted in my life.” Forget the American dream, Khong seems to say. This is American reality.
As righteous as this message is, its presence in every fold and gesture of Real Americans can make the story feel somewhat static. The novel’s real beauty lies in its amazement at the sheer luck of being alive. “Our DNA encodes for innumerable possible people,” Mei thinks, “and yet it’s you and I who are here – winners in a stupefying lottery.” Awe at the details of reality sparkles throughout the novel: the tiny miracles of oyster biology; a meal of lamb and lentils served with a soft egg, the yolk “better than any sauce”. The world as it is, rich with meaning – surely, Khong seems to say, that’s enough.
• Real Americans by Rachel Khong is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
