The Real Rachel Khong

So forgive me for a minute while I talk contemporary politics. But for me, one of the especially horrifying things about the emerging fascist state that is contemporary America is the weaponizing of notions of belonging and legitimacy of citizenship. Who you are, where you're from, and your right to see yourself as part of a national story become loaded questions for everyone, not just immigrants and the children of immigrants.

Calling a novel real Americans, particularly as a Malaysian born America born to Chinese parents, feels like a direct challenge to this, and it's a challenge Rachel Kong is acutely aware of. She's very much an American. She moved there when she was only two, but her whole life growing up she faced reminders that real Americans looked a particular way. The gap between how we see ourselves and how others

see us is central to her latest novel. The characters in real Americans are constantly being misunderstood because of how they appear. The book follows three generations of Chinese Americans. Lily, the daughter of parents who fled China during the Cultural Revolution, who finds unexpected love in New York at the turn of the millennium, her son Nick, who grows up in the Pacific Northwest, wondering about the father he doesn't know, and May Lily's mother, a scientist whose choice is on

behalf of her family threatened to tear it apart. Spanning five decades, the book is an exploration of what makes us who we are, challenge to some of the most stubborn and corrosive myths that underpin the modern nation state. A dollop of what you might characterize as science fiction, a hint of what could even be magic, and a romantic heart. This is a lively and surprising book that embraces the contradictions of who we are and how well

we know the people we love. I'm Michael Williams, and this is Read This the show about the books we love and the stories behind them. 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.

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 how different people sort of react to quote unquote luck, and how that luck shapes them and shapes who they are.

around the simulation 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.

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 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 yourselfness 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.

account for. Yeah, you know that, and that seems to make 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.

I love what you just said. There the sort of disconnect between generations with 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.

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?

I 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.

you really love a book, it's a transformative experience. 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 were to love 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, you know, inflections and in Malaysian ways of speaking, and in America, I would 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 I've written.

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 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, as 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 that's what I want to do with my life.

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, there'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.

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, tricity 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 that's a tech slogan that we have because there's just this desire to innovate and 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 a question that I think I keep asking.

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 way of doing the same thing, which is coming up with an explanation for the circumstances that you've been able to wave through the book. They're another form of imposing a narrative on the inexplicable.

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.

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.

has almost like boundless want. 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 she her ambition is well placed there, and yet she comes up against these limits that are imposed on her.

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, this 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 the 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.

family in turmoil. You know exactly what that means. If you're a Succession fan and the novel is a lot of fun, you can find it and all the other books we've mentioned today at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate and review us. It helps a lot. Next week. I'm read this so I sit down with Australian literary heavyweight, two time Miles Franklin winner Alex Miller to discuss his latest novel, The Deal.