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Real Americans by Rachel Khong
Read along with the PBS Books Readers Club this May for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. We’ll dive into Real Americans, the highly anticipated novel by Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin. Rachel Khong joins the PBS Books Readers Club to discuss this sweeping family drama that tells the story of three generations of Chinese Americans, raising questions about identity and what it means to be Real Americans.
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 it provides answers.