Hi there, It's Ruby Jones and welcome back to another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast, hosted by editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia and around the world. In this episode, we're going to hear from American author Rachel Kong, whose latest book is Real Americans.
It follows the lives of three generations of Chinese Americans and explores themes of identity and what it means to belong to a family, to a culture, and to a nation. As always, I'm joined by Michael to tell me a little bit more about the episode. Hi Michael, how are.
You, Ruby Jones? I am fine. Always a pleasure to talk to you. Bet I think you would agree as someone who hosts a daily news podcast, the world has gone to hell in a handbasket and it's a big grim. It feels a bit funny doing a weekly podcast that concerns itself with books, because you know, I don't see good books as escapism. They engage with the world we're in.
But sometimes it's hard not to want to use a book to kind of freeze time and push the political situation to arm's length and not think about the various
ways in which the world is a bit terrifying. But one of the ways in which it is bear with me, fritick I promise this connects to this week's episode is the way in which questions are belonging are being weaponized at the moment across the Western world, in particular, the ways in which citizenship, identity, these kind of elements become tools with which to kind of alienate people and to deny them basic rights. And it's in that context that
a phrase like real American seems incredibly charged. So it's funny this week that we're talking about a book called Real Americans that both engages with those ideas about who belongs, about what a real American looks like, what it is, but at the same time goes into other elements that take it away from that kind of grounded context. There's
elements of magic or realism, elements of science fiction. It's the latest book from American writer Rachel Kong, and growing up as a Malaysian born American with Chinese parents, she's acutely aware of how politically charged it is. It's a funny tension, but kind of one that I've really enjoyed reading.
M Yeah, okay, Well tell me a bit more about real Americans. What happens in the novel and why did it resonate with you?
Yeah? So, Kong's a wonderful writer, as anyone who's read her before would attest. But this new book looks at three generations of Chinese Americans. There's Lily, who's the daughter of parents who fled China during the Cultural Revolution, and she finds unexpected love in New York at the turn of the millennium. Then you have her son Nick, who grows up in the Pacific Northwest, wondering about a father
he doesn't know. And finally May Lily's mother, a scientist whose choices on behalf of her family threatened to tear it apart. The whole thing spans five decades. It doesn't happen in a linear order, and it's this exploration of what makes us who we are, and you know, that's what resonated with me. It's a challenge to some of those really stubborn and corrosive myths that seem to underpin the modern nation state. It's about the gap between how
we see ourselves and how others see us. And look, frankly, I'm a sucker for this kind of blending of genre too. It's not heavy handed, but you know, there's a little bit of what you could call science fiction, there's a hint of what could be magic realism, and a deeply romantic heart. It's lively, it's surprising, and it really embraces the contradictions of who we are and how well we know the people we love. I really love this one.
Rubit coming up in just a moment, the real Rachel Kong.
One of the driving forces in Real Americans is the idea of luck. Who has it and what does it mean for a person's life. So I began my conversation with Rachel asking what luck means to her.
That's an amazing question to start with. I mean, luck is I think really at the core of this book this question of what creates our lives? Essentially? Is it luck? Is it chance? Is it the actions that we take? Is it free will? Right? And that's just a question that I've thought about for all my life, I think, I think especially because I come from an immigrant family and I've always had this question in my head of what if my life were different. What if my parents
had not come to America from Malaysia. What if I hadn't had the childhood that I had. What would my life be like? Would I be a writer? Would I be someone completely different? I think throughout all our lives, you know, we're sort of touched very differently by luck, and some people we sort of think of as luckier than others. But I don't know. I think I was just interested in in how different people sort of react to quote unquote luck and how that luck shapes them and shaps who they are.
I think it's such a fascinating set of ideas and the ways in which it intersects. I think you're right. I think it's an essential part of immigrant stories and immigrant storytelling, but also the ways in which it intersects with ideas of entitlement and fairness and what we're owed
and what we have to make for ourselves. So often in migrant stories, so often in the narrative around multiculturalism, around assimilation, around those things, is this idea that gratitude should play a past, that the good migrant is grateful for the opportunities that have been afforded them, rather than have worked for themselves, or that luck has played a part, and the intersection of all those things I think is fascinating.
I think it's so interesting because the immigrant story and this sort of American story, those stories really interesting in a lot of ways. And that's something that I wanted to explore in the book. And I think one of the ways in which they intersect is sort of in this idea of like luck and agency. There is, of course, what you've said, you know, immigrants, we have to feel grateful, right, The grateful immigrant is sort of this trope, and for
a good reason, you know. I think that that was a refrain that I sort of heard growing up to you know, my parents would say, we made so many sacrifices for you to be here. Therefore, like, you make something of your life, do better than we did, and and that's a lot of pressure. And I think in the American story, there's this sort of belief that, you know, despite your luck, you can make anything you want of
your own life. You know, there's this very like pull yourself up by the bootstraps mentality in the sort of American narrative and probably just the Western narrative to be quite honest, but it's this idea that it doesn't matter who you were born, as you know, what your station in life is, you can get out of that, you
can make something better of your circumstances. And I think that's of course something that that gives hope, right, And I'm glad that I was raised with like this sort of idea that I that I could be anything, and that I could, you know, even if I was unlucky in certain ways, I could still create my life in
other ways. But I think also that sort of a belief in like, uh, this like do it your selfness to a degree that was a little bit I don't know if toxic is the right word, but it almost like dismisses the fact that we do come from different places and stations and with you know, on very unequal footing, right, and that we are not entirely responsible or to blame for what we have made of ourselves or not made of ourselves.
You know, I think that's sort of try. I think it's something I thought about a lot writing this book, is the ways in which notions of luck or fortune are partly the imposition of a narrative on stuff that we can't account for, you know, that, and that seems to me particularly acute or one of the things about this book is it follows three generations of the one family, and one of the things you do so well in it is capture that kind of incomprehension between the different
generations towards each other, that kind of failure to see clearly the nature of the story that your parents, your grandparents might have experienced for themselves. And we kind of put a narrative of luck or fortune on things. It's kind of retroactive thing that's imposed sometimes rather than organically springing out of the lived experience.
Yeah, and I think luck is so cultural also, right, you know, something that one culture might consider lucky another might not. I mean, certain things transcend that. I mean, I think in most it's a good thing to have more money than less money, or to have good health and things like that. But I think that, Yeah, I
love what you just said there. The sort of disconnect between generations was something that I was so interested in that I'm still so interested in the fact that we can try our best to understand what it might be like to be a parent or our child, and yet it's almost impossible right to sort of fully immerse yourself into the perspective of another person. I think the novel form is how we get the closest to that, right, Like we're able to sort of place ourselves into these
different perspectives, these different bodies. But short of that, it's you know, you could interview your parents for days and still probably not understand what it means to have their lived experience and what it means to have their exact perspective.
And I would understand my father less after interviewing him for a couple of days before it. You know, Yeah, I've read interviews with you where you're main clear that you're not a big plan at going into your books, and so I'm interested in the moments at which those themes really started to come to the foreground. You began with Lily in her story.
I did begin with Lily and her story, and I wrote each of these characters in the order that they appear in the book, which I think is a little bit counterintuitive because it's not chronological necessarily. You know, we get the oldest character story kind of in the very last section. Yeah, the question of realness is such an interesting one, and I think that it came from a very personal place for me. Yeah, yeah, that question of am I a real American? Has has come up, you know,
at times in my past. And you know, I'm sort of as an immigrant between these two places, right, Like I feel more American than I feel like I'm anything else, honestly, because culturally it's who I am. When I go back to where my parents came from, which is Malaysia, I feel like a complete outsider, right. I don't really belong I don't speak the language. I can enjoy the food, but I stick out like a sore thumb. I'm not really like at home there, even if I enjoy it.
And I think just this feeling of being in between these two places was really something that is very I think deep within this book, I think each of the characters struggles with belonging in one way or another and struggles with this question of am I am I real enough?
Am I fitting into this category well enough? And it's not even about necessarily wanting to I don't know, like be part of a group necessarily, But it's more about wanting to be part of a story, right and wanting to be part of again, this sense of belonging a community. And I think that's what a lot of the characters are searching for.
What's the relationship for you between that kind of personal exploration and becoming a writer, that kind of anxiety about belonging and that desire to capture and articulate the world.
I have been thinking about this recently a lot. I think I have been wondering why I write at all. And I think there's a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones I think is that writing is where I get to have the deepest conversations I ever get to have, you know. And I think I was realizing this just the other day, because you know, when you really love a book, it's it's a transformative experience.
It's it's this experience that has no language that you could really say to express how much you know a
book means to you. So if I if I were to love a book and then meet the author and tell them I loved your book, like that would not even begin to capture what it meant, right Like, it's there's there's something that's just it's lost in the words themselves, right Like, I feel like, yeah, the reading experience itself, and the experience both for the writer and then for the reader, Like that's where this really deep communication happens, and that's where it's possible to, you know, say this
is what it's like for me, Is it like is it like this for you? I think I actually became a writer because I felt sort of afraid to like speak. Honestly, I was a very shy kid, and because I had learned English from my Malaysian parents, I had sort of Malaysian uh you know, in flights and Malaysian ways of speaking. And in America, I was just all the kids, you know, didn't know what I was saying necessarily or wanted to make fun of me for the ways that I said
certain things. And so I think I found in writing a way to communicate like the most perfectly, you know, and sort of the most unassailably and you know, the most perfectly. And I think that, of course that's not totally true, right, there's still like miscommunication within writing itself. But I think that that's where it began for me, just this desire to like craft something and say, Okay, this is what I mean to say, and here please
receive it. I mean, I find it so interesting that you know, I've written the one book that I've written, but when a reader reads it, they're creating a completely different book, you know. I'm sort of enlisting their imagination, enlisting their backgrounds, their perspectives, their questions, and it sort of fuses into this like hybrid thing, and then it
becomes its own like creation. And I think that's so interesting that it's not that I just have one book that is out there, but there are so many books that become created every time somebody reads the book that I've written.
So then, how different was that experience of doing it a second time around? You know, but with an actual pre existing idea about who that Rada might be, that platonic ideal of the rada, you admit them, You'd rapturous reviews and awards and I'm sure endless fan mail from raders. How does book two then feel different to sit down and write.
I think that does make it a little bit scary, because with the first book, it was very much a secret. I didn't tell most of the people in my life because I felt a sort of shame around it, around the fact that I was writing a novel at all. With the With the second novel, there is a bit more of an expectation. People know that you're a writer.
You've announced that to everybody, and so I think I felt I wouldn't say stuck, but it just felt like I often had the I don't know, I had these like voices in my head that would I have these voices already, right, the voices that tell you like, oh, you're not good enough, that you're not that this book
is not up to par or whatever it is. And I think that once, once you release writing into the world, those voices become just like multiplied by a lot, and it's a great effort to sort of come back to yourself and to shut them out a little bit, to
go back to your question of realness. Actually, and something that you've said reminded me that you know, I write in part because I'm trying to figure out what I actually care about, what I'm thinking about, what questions I have I've said, and to sort of get to this
like genuine version of myself. But I think it's really difficult to get there just living as we do, like in the Internet age, right when we have emails constantly, we have social media and the Internet and just lots of people and companies vuying for our attention, telling us what to buy, what to look at, what you read next, whatever it is, right, there's just so many forces that are sort of pulling at our attention, and it's a real challenge to actually just sit with yourself and to
sort of be in that silence and to think, Okay, what do I actually care about? What do I want to spend my hours doing? And it's deeply uncomfortable, honestly, like I think writing people find it hard because it's kind of unpleasant to sit with yourself. We find all these ways to not have to do that, you know. But I think that if you can move past the discomfort, it's so rewarding and that's what I want to do with my life.
When we return, Rachel reveals why magic and science might just be one and the same, not just in a narrative, but in the creation of a narrative. We'll be right back. Each of the three characters in real Americans share a common experience. Throughout the novel, Time stops freezes at different points, and yet our three protagonists are able to move through the stillness. It's an element of the narrative that raises many many questions. Can these pauses be explained by science,
or is there something more mysterious at work here? As a kind of extension of that question about luck and fortune versus circumstance, endeavor, whatever's another perhaps unhelpful binary, I want you to help me unpick. And that's between science and magic and the relationship between those two ideas.
So this book for many years was just about science. There was a scientist character, and at the same time, there was a strange thing that happened was happening with all three of the characters, where they experienced time in a strange way. And I didn't know why that was happening to all of the characters, but I knew that it was. I mean, that was the very first page that I that I wrote, was Lily wakes up and for some reason, the time on the clock isn't changing.
And so I tried for many years to figure out a scientific explanation for that, to figure out why this thing was happening to all of these characters. And and I think writing is a little bit like magic too, right, It's a very scientific thing, and that it comes from your brain, and it's this like solid thing. We're not solid but squishy, I guess it's a physical thing. There's things that are actually happening. There's you know, electricity happening
in there. But writing can often feel like magic when when you're doing it and you know, maybe our idea comes out of somewhere, or you start with this thought that maybe the characters have this time issue, and then years later you realize it's because of something more magical
and not necessarily something scientific. For me, the scientific worldview has so much to do with this Western worldview that we can understand everything and that we can just given enough time and resources and money or whatever, we can figure everything out. I mean, there's a sort of hubrisk to science today and to and to technology, right, Like there's that that slogan like move fast and break things.
I don't remember which company, but you know that's a tech slogan that we have because there's just this desire to innovate and this perspective that these men in power can solve everything, right, And I was really interested in a different kind of perspective. There's this fundamental mystery to the world itself, and I think that's something that I was interested in just exploring. I guess, like the fundamental mystery to what it means to be a human being,
and why are we all here? I have no idea, to be quite honest. And that's that's a question that I think I keep asking.
It's a question you ask in really wonderful and interesting ways in real Americans, but also in ways it seemed to me to mirror the creative process, the process of writing a novel, you know, the questions about predeterminism, about how much kind of control we have over our own lives, of the choices we make and the ripple effects that come out of them, And when dealing with science or
magic in a book. They're both different ways of doing the same thing, which is coming up with an explanation for the circumstances that you've been able to weave through the book. They're another form of imposing a narrative on the inexplicable.
Yeah, I love that. I don't think anyone has ever said that to me, but I love that framing of it. And I think something that you've said earlier too has stuck with me, just about the fact that a lot of these narratives in the book are sort of imposed after the fact, right. I think I think of that for May in particular she's less I would say, like in the muck of life. When she's recounting the story, she's able to sort of shape the way that she
is sharing her particular story. And it's an impulse that I have always resisted, which I think is a little bit weird for a writer to say. You know, writers are often the people that sit around the campfire and they're good at spinning long yarns and like making you know, just like sort of engaging you. And I have never felt like that kind of personality, And to me, I think I've always just felt a little bit at a remove, you know, when it comes to narratives, which is so
strange I think for a writer to say. And yet I think that's why I have written the books that I've written, you know. I think there's a little bit of this mistrust of narratives and wanting to poke at them a little bit and wanting to when they're employed, to sort of turn around and say, well, yeah, are we going to keep going with this?
You know?
Like I think I was interested in the introduction but also disruption of these narratives that we.
All know part of the thing that so defines that constructive narrative that is the concept of americanness is about the nature of want and the expression of wants. You know, the things that you can aspire to, the things that you can reasonably expect for yourself, the things you strive for. And it's a kind of fact that it's really acutely illustrated through the cross generational thing and the ways in which three generations in the one family might want different
things for themselves. Or I have different ideas about what belonging and satisfaction might look like.
I love what you've said there that the characters they want different things. I think depending on who they are, they feel permitted to want different things. Right, they're sort of a self well not necessarily self imposed, but there are limits on what these characters desire for themselves. And I'm reminded of what we were talking about in terms of the immigrant and the American story intersecting. And I think May is a character in the book who has
almost like boundless one. She has really deep ambitions. She wants a lot of things, and it's almost out of place, you know, in the country that she grew up in. It's only in America that she gets to really pursue those dreams, although you know she comes against limitations. You know, in this place that alleges to be about opportunities for
everybody and a place where you can do anything. I think her ambition is well placed there, and yet she comes up against these limits that are imposed on her.
Lastly, from the way you describe it, the strange familial trait of being able to stop time is an idea that came to you before the reasons why or the reason and is of it became clear to you. And I'm curious is that you know, like I'm a parent of smallish children who like nothing more than like, which super power would you want? How would you know? What magic? Would you? Why?
Time? Why?
Is there something beguiling and interesting to you about the idea of being able to manipulate it or play with time?
Time is something that I also think of, something that's so like the sort of time scarcity is such an American belief that I've been raised in. Or maybe it's just capitalist, I guess like this like sort of capitalist belief in this need to make good use of your time, not to waste time, to spend it wisely, things like that, I mean, we even talk about it in these terms.
And I think time is one of those American narratives that I was raised with, right that there's a correct usage of time and that you shouldn't you shouldn't be wasting it. And I think it was a pressure that I felt as I was writing the book itself, right like, oh, that should be going faster. I need to be writing faster. And I think that that's why that emerged for me, as this this thing that kept happening to the characters.
It was something sort of, you know, that was beyond my own like conscious understanding, but it was something that was there because it's been there sort of throughout my upbringing. And I think in writing this book, I realized that, yeah, writing isn't about speed, you know, Like the point isn't to write a book as fast as I can possibly write it. The point is deepening thoughts and coming back to a text day over day, in part because you come to it as a different person each time. You know,
you're slightly changed. And the person that I am, you know now sitting here with you, is so different from the person that I was when I began the book. And I think a novel, especially for me as a writer. It helps me sort of work through thoughts that I have, questions that I have, and then it sort of documents my evolving views. It helps me figure out what I'm even thinking or what my answers to certain questions are, even though they might shift. I guess writing a novel
is a deeply inefficient use of one's time. You know, often I would I would write a page out and then the next day I would sit down and realize, oh, this is all actually terrible and I need to delete it all. It's one of the most inefficient things you could do with your time, and within capitalism, it's not something that you know is logical or productive or any of those things. And so I think because of that,
I think it's it's a good thing to do. Like we should all, you know, find ways to sort of resist that that sort of imposition on us that we just need to be cogs in this capitalist machine. I think it matters that we waste time and we think about things for a long time.
Well, I for one, am colossally grateful that you've given over to those inefficiencies and the logical ways to spend your time, and look forward to you continuing to do so for many years to come. Many thanks for joining us.
Thank you so much. This is such a pleasure.
Rachel Kong's Real Americans is available at all Good bookstores.
Thank you so much for listening to another special episode of Read This. As always, if you want to dive further into Read This, you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts. There are more than seventy episodes in the archive for you to enjoy. See you next week.