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.
