Rachel Khong’s irresistible puzzle of a second novel suggests it is a mistake to think we can force complex, nature-nurture identities in a chosen direction.
What makes Americans “real”? Is it our competitive drive? Our craving for wealth and status? Our insatiable quest for scientific advancement? Or is it — inevitably — the color of our skin and eyes? This concern spirals quietly, like a double helix, through Rachel Khong’s enigmatic second novel, “Real Americans.” The thing is, the story opens not in the United States but in China, where we’re plunged briefly into the Cultural Revolution.
“We would study how the lotus understood time. Understood is not the right word — it’s a human word. How did a lotus know to open in the day and recede into water at night? I say know — again, the wrong word. Understanding, knowledge — it was what we wanted, not the lotus, which only did what it did without our human anxieties.” Those pesky human anxieties will not cooperate.
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