Genetic Engineering and the Ethics of Choosing a Child's Traits in Real Americans
The Thematic Claim: Control as a Form of Love, and Its Cost in Real Americans
In Real Americans, Rachel Khong uses genetic engineering not as a distant sci-fi premise but as a lens for examining a deeply human question: when love drives us to control another person's future, do we help them or harm them? The novel's central claim is that genetic intervention—even when motivated by the most loving intentions—constitutes a violation of personhood. It treats children as projects to be optimized rather than people to be loved, and its consequences are fundamentally unpredictable. May's confession that she only wanted her daughter's life to be better than her own captures the tragic irony at the heart of the novel: the desire to improve a child's life can become the very thing that damages it.
The First Experiment: Lily and Thomas
The theme first emerges in May's laboratory work. After discovering imprinting factors that can suppress one parent's genetic contribution, May begins asking dangerous questions: What if Thomas didn't have to inherit his mother's sadness? What if the genetic scales could be tipped? What if inheritance could be guided rather than left to the luck of the draw?
The motivation is understandable. Otto's wife Naomi has died by suicide, and he fears his children will inherit her depression. Thomas, even at four, already seemed like a sad child, perpetually disappointed. May sees in the therapy a way to spare both Thomas and her own daughter Lily from suffering.
But the novel immediately complicates this benevolent framing. May's ambitions are not purely altruistic. She admits that she often wondered if she would have been happier and more successful if she had been born in America, and that Lily could live her life but better. The therapy becomes a way for May to give herself a second chance through her daughter. This is the first contradiction the novel exposes: the line between wanting better for your child and wanting your child to be a corrected version of yourself is dangerously thin.
The results are catastrophic. Thomas dies by suicide at nineteen. Lily grows up to be so unlike her mother that she is practically a stranger. The therapy also damages Lily's reproductive system, requiring IVF to conceive. The experiment that was supposed to improve lives instead fractures them.
The Second Experiment: Nick
The second experiment occurs when Lily struggles to conceive. Otto proposes emphasizing Lily's genes, but May and Otto cannot be certain of the integrity of Lily's genome after the first therapy. So they edit Nick to take after his father Matthew, but without Matthew's mother's mental afflictions. This time, the therapy works far better than they imagined it could.
Nick is the novel's living proof of the technology's power. Otto tells him that he is living proof that outcomes can be changed for the better, that no one needs to suffer undesirable heritable diseases. And indeed, Nick is healthy, successful, and driven. But the novel refuses to let this success stand as a simple endorsement.
Nick's entire identity is shaped by a decision he never made. He learns that his existence was engineered—that his handedness, his temperament, his very genetic makeup were chosen for him. The novel shows how this knowledge destabilizes him. He has spent his life trying to prove his worth, driven by a shared need to be productive, to do good, to right some wrong. Is that drive his own, or was it programmed into him?
The Present-Day Industry
The third strand of the theme plays out in Nick's present-day work at Levi's biotech company. Here, the novel shows how the technology May pioneered has been commercialized and co-opted. At a party, Levi and other biotech CEOs discuss polygenic screening with alarming casualness. Levi argues that the technology exists and that if Americans don't use it, China will. Pax, a rival CEO, frames the choice in the language of American freedom: if Americans can choose where to live and work, why not choose health outcomes and physical attributes?
The conversation turns explicitly racist. Pax describes choosing to have a child who looks more like him than his Korean wife, comparing it to cosmetic surgery. Nick, who has been passing as white, breaks in to say that he is Chinese and that the CEO should be more careful about advertising his racism.
This scene reveals the novel's central anxiety about genetic engineering: the technology is not neutral. In the hands of wealthy, mostly white men, it becomes a tool for reinforcing existing hierarchies. The same impulse that led May to want her daughter to live her life but better becomes, in the corporate context, a way to select for whiteness, intelligence, and productivity.
Character Connections
May is the novel's most complex figure. She is both the architect of the genetic interventions and their most remorseful witness. Her confession to Nick is devastating: what she did was indefensible, selfish, foolish, dangerous. She acknowledges that the way she loved her daughter was different from the way Lily wanted to be loved. May's tragedy is that her love was real—she held Lily tightly, in an impossible attempt to communicate her love to every particle of her daughter's being—but it expressed itself through control rather than acceptance.
Lily is the subject who feels most betrayed. She swears to never speak to her mother again after learning the truth. Her entire life—her body, her choices, her relationship with Matthew—has been shaped by decisions made before she was born.
Nick occupies a middle position. He is the successful result, but the novel shows how that success is haunted. He is drawn to the same work his grandmother did, driven by the same compulsion to do good. The novel asks whether this is inheritance or programming—and whether the distinction even matters.
Otto is the co-conspirator who never fully reckons with what they did. He tells Nick that they had the best of intentions, that they wanted to eliminate genetic disease passed down by one parent. But his son is dead, and his justification rings hollow.
Symbol Connections
The lotus seed is the novel's most resonant symbol for the theme. It carries an encoded future and a legend of a wish that was never made. May steals it from the museum in Beijing, and later reflects that the seed granted her wish. She wished for time—not for Ping, not for love, but for more hours to work, to control, to shape outcomes. The seed represents the dangerous fantasy that the future can be held in one's hand and directed.
The grandfather clock in May's new home also connects to this theme. It chimes assertively every hour, marking the passage of the time May so desperately wants to control. Her wish for time is ultimately a wish for control—over her own life and, tragically, over her daughter's.
Complexity and Contradiction
The novel refuses to offer a simple verdict on genetic engineering. May's motives are genuinely loving. She wants to spare her daughter the suffering she herself endured. The therapy works—Nick is healthy and accomplished. But the novel insists that these facts do not justify the violation.
The central contradiction is that the technology's success is also its indictment. Nick's existence is proof that outcomes can be changed for the better. But Nick's life is not simply better—it is shaped, constrained, and haunted by the knowledge of what was done to him. The novel asks whether a life that is engineered can ever be fully one's own.
There is also a contradiction in the industry's rhetoric. Levi and Pax speak of freedom to choose and providing options, but the choices they envision are deeply shaped by racism and class privilege. The novel shows how the language of choice can mask the exercise of power.
Study Questions
1. Why does May decide to administer the gene therapy to Lily and Thomas, and what does this reveal about her motivations?
May's decision is driven by a combination of genuine compassion and personal ambition. She wants to spare Thomas from inheriting his mother's depression and to give Lily advantages she herself never had. But she also admits that she wanted Lily to live her life but better—to be a corrected version of herself. This reveals that her motivations are not purely altruistic; she is using her daughter to fulfill her own unrealized potential.
2. How does the novel complicate the idea that genetic engineering is a gift to children?
The novel shows that even when the therapy works, as it does with Nick, it constitutes a violation of personhood. Nick never consented to the intervention, and his identity is shaped by decisions made before his birth. The novel suggests that a life that is engineered cannot be fully one's own, regardless of how successful the outcome.
3. What role does the biotech industry play in the novel's critique of genetic engineering?
The industry scenes show how the technology has been commercialized and co-opted. Levi and Pax speak of freedom to choose and providing options, but their vision is shaped by racism and class privilege. Pax's casual discussion of choosing a child who looks more like him than his Korean wife reveals how the technology can reinforce existing hierarchies.
4. How does the lotus seed function as a symbol for the theme?
The lotus seed carries an encoded future and a legend of an unmade wish. May steals it and later reflects that it granted her wish for time. The seed represents the fantasy that the future can be controlled and directed—a fantasy that drives May's genetic experiments and ultimately leads to tragedy.
5. Does the novel offer any redemption for May, or does it insist on the unforgivability of her actions?
May herself insists on the unforgivability of what she did. She tells Nick that she does not seek her daughter's forgiveness because she understands that what she did was unforgivable. The novel does not offer easy redemption. But it does show May's genuine remorse and her recognition that the way she loved was different from the way Lily wanted to be loved. The tragedy is that her love was real, but it expressed itself through control rather than acceptance.