Real Americans by Rachel Khong

Amy       

family drama

Lily and Matthew come from two different worlds. Lily, the only child of Chinese immigrants, is an unpaid intern barely surviving on several part-time jobs. Matthew was raised with more money than he knows what to do with thanks to a successful pharmaceutical family business. Despite their many differences, Lily and Matthew connect and fall in love. Little do they know that their similarities could break them apart.

Real Americans is, overall, an interesting family drama which mostly held my interest. However, the pace tended to slow down frequently. To its benefit, sometimes the change in narrator perspective helped renew my interest. The story is told in three parts, each reflecting a different generation and the perspective of a new person. The first part of this novel read like a romance novel, centered around the budding relationship of two people from Lily’s perspective. I don’t want to give away the perspectives for the last two parts because it’s more fun if you encounter them while reading. But all perspectives were from related family members.

Rachel Khong put lots of emphasis on time and luck. Some examples I can give without spoilers are people being in the same place at the same time by chance, coincidences, fate, things viewed as “lucky” like four-leaf clovers, gifts viewed as being “unlucky”, predetermining an ideal home and then living there, and lucky guesses. I appreciated the format she crafted for this novel. Well done.

Sadly, reading about 1960s and 1970s China, the political landscape felt a little too relatable to our current political direction in America.

The narrators, Louisa Zhu, Eric Yang, and Eunice Wong all did good jobs with their sections. I was actually thrown a little when, apparently, Wong was able to change her voice to sound so much like Zhu that I thought there had been a narrator switch in the middle of Part 3. Too bad she couldn’t sound like Yang. :) I’ll give the three of them A-.  At times, they all, especially Yang, could sound robotic/bored. Although, to be fair, I think the material in those sections was usually kind of boring.