In late 2016, Rachel Khong began writing a short story.
She soon realized that it would become something longer. What started out as a love story would ultimately evolve into a multi-generational saga that brings together wealth, power and family secrets with cutting-edge medical technology.
“Real Americans” is just out now in bookstores.
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“Because of the times that we were living in, the times that we’re still living through, I was thinking a lot about these themes that eventually wound up in the book itself, things like power and identity and privilege and immigration,” says Khong by phone from her home in Los Angeles.
Khong, the award-winning author of “Goodbye, Vitamin,” had been reading about gene editing and genetics. In the early stages, though, she thought that her second novel would be about the eugenics movement of the early 20th century.
“It was something that was commonly accepted as good for society and good for human beings to sort of breed better human beings,” she says of the now-discredited pseudoscience known as eugenics. “It was legitimized by science and all of these wealthy families donated to that research. They funded that research. People like the Carnegies. There was a huge eugenics lab on Long Island, Cold Spring Harbor.”
Instead, “Real Americans” begins right before the turn of the millennium and takes readers into a not-so-distant future, with a dip back into the mid-to-late 20th century. It’s a contemporary story rooted in real scientific advances that will ring eerily familiar to anyone who has read about companies like the fertility startup Orchid, which can scan embryos for possible genetic maladies.
“Real Americans” also mirrors the problems surrounding other 21st-century advances; readers might recognize parallels to their own concerns about social media, AI and other technologies as they read it.
“The theme of agency is so huge in this book,” says Khong. “What do powerful people and powerful systems choose for our lives, our individual lives as members of a society? It’s also about what parents choose for their children.”
One of the book’s major questions, Khong says, is “How much should we decide for other people?” In “Real Americans,” it’s parents largely making life-altering decisions for their children and how those decisions impact two families now connected by a twist of fate.
“I think that parents are always, hopefully, doing the best that they can for their kids. They’re making decisions based on what they think is the right decision, but it’s sort of impossible to know what the right decision is because everybody has limited perspective,” says Khong. “You don’t have all the information about who this child is going to be or what they actually need.”
A contemporary parallel might be former child influencers who are now young adults and have brought to light the downside of growing up in front of a global audience online. “I think that’s probably part of why I was thinking about that in this book,” says Khong. “I think that parents obviously have so much power and control over kids’ lives.”
Another parallel, one that many might find relatable, is the control that tech companies have over much of our society. “I think a lot about how decisions have been made for us, especially regarding technology, that we didn’t really consent to, a big version of the kids not saying OK to their parents putting them online,” says Khong. “We didn’t really say OK to the fact that we would be basically voluntarily producing content for these social media networks.”
She continues, “Really, so many people are addicted now. It wasn’t something that we all had a conversation about and decided that this is the way that we want to be changed as human beings.”
“Real Americans,” however, isn’t so much about the technology we use to communicate as it is about advances in gene editing that could lead humanity down a similarly murky, ethical path.
“It’s so advanced already and there’s a lot that we’re going to be able to choose for our future children. I think that it’s important to have those conversations,” says Khong. “What are we going to value about being a human being? It can’t just be a homogenous ideal that we have in mind.”
That’s the quandary. Should the same technology that can be used to detect deadly diseases also be used to decide a child’s physical appearance, abilities and, possibly, their future?
“I think that diversity is so important and we pay a lot of lip service to it in this country, but it doesn’t play out in practice,” says Khong. “In practice, people would still change the way that they look. I think that’s something that’s a problem.”
Says Khong, “There are all of these ways in which humans are different and that’s OK and I think it should be celebrated.”
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