Y2K is looming, and Lily Chen, American daughter of Chinese emigrant parents, geneticists May and Charles, is interning for a media firm in NYC: that is, she’s going quickly broke with little sense of where her future might lead. Then she meets Matthew, the handsome and charming heir to a massive multinational firm, and his love offers her the hope of a new, easy life. Jump forward a couple of decades and Lily and Matthew are long divorced; their son, Nick, is a white-passing science student who’s grown up with Lily, never knowing either his father or his Chinese grandparents. When he finally tracks Matthew down, and his father turns out to be both approachable and grateful to make contact, Nick cuts himself off from the mother he feels betrayed him. Jump back several decades, now, to Mao’s China, and we see Lily’s mother growing up under the Cultural Revolution, longing to escape to America with her fiancé, Ping. Throw in a plot about eugenics, and how Nick’s career and family (and his family’s careers) have been shaped by the burgeoning field of genetic engineering, and you get Real Americans: a multi-generational saga about belonging, heritage, identity and dissent.
Narrative-wise, Real Americans leaps about in time, following first Lily, then Nick, May, and then Nick again, swapping between first and third person narrators, moving between New York, Florida, California, Beijing and Hong Kong, and filling in various gaps in the story as it goes, each generational thread exploring the complexities of racialised and class-based identities, tracing the fissures between language and appearance as its characters try to fit in as compliant Maoists, ambitious immigrants and employees. Khong uses her scientist-characters as a vehicle with which to explore heredity as a scientific, cultural and political phenomenon: Nick, the Chinese kid who’s the spitting image of his white American father; Lily, the child raised divorced from her Chinese heritage; May, seeking to distance herself from the horrors of her adolescence and the memory of all she had to give up in order to forge a better life for herself and her daughter. The book circles, then, around the idea and the ethics of manipulation: how far ought one to go to ensure a better life for oneself and one’s children; how can one know what is, in fact, better; and how does money and class come into this?
May’s section of the novel, detailing her life in China and her eventual flight, is the most narratively compelling; hers, too, is the place where most of the reader’s questions are answered. Lily’s section, while setting up the central intrigue (what happened to May in China; what will become of Matthew?), is fundamentally a poor-girl-meets-rich-boy jaunt; Nick’s is the bridge back to May. Nick himself is fundamentally dull: he’s the Ethical Character who will expose the wrongs and bring the others (plotlines, characters) together. May’s story, however, is threaded with real poignancy: her love for Ping, sketched with care and tender detail, is the heart of the novel, and it’s her fear that Lily will suffer that drives the fortunes of the other characters. The ensuing plot is an interesting one – the potentialities and threats inherent in genetic manipulation – but the practicalities are far-fetched (May’s solitary drug trials beggar credibility) and the exposition heavy-handed. In fact, there’s an inelegance to the narrative throughout, with the various narrators at pains to make sure the reader keeps up. There’s a recurrent sub-plot too, about the characters’ ability to step outside time, that joins Chinese mythology to the thematic concern about control and nature, but it’s not put to any great use (Nick gets to study more), and sits oddly in a novel that otherwise eschews any hint of magical realism.
Any Cop?: It’s a decent read, though a judicious editorial prune would not have gone astray. If you’re a fan of family sagas, you’ll find something to enjoy; the Chinese political aspect is gripping; the whole genetics-or-eugenics theme is a good one. This won’t make our top ten of the year, but it’ll have plenty of fans nonetheless.
Valerie O’Riordan
Bookmunch 