Identity and Belonging Across Generations in Rachel Khong's Real Americans
The Thematic Claim
In Real Americans, Rachel Khong traces a single urgent question across three generations: can identity be inherited, or must it be built? The novel's answer is deliberately uncomfortable. Identity is neither purely genetic nor purely chosen—it is a negotiation between what we are given and what we make of it, conducted under conditions we rarely control. Each generation in the May–Lily–Nick line attempts to resolve this tension differently: May tries to control her daughter's genetic inheritance; Lily tries to understand her parents' past; Nick tries to locate himself through DNA and place. None fully succeeds, and the novel's power lies in showing how these attempts—however loving or well-intentioned—create new forms of distance even as they seek connection.
May: The Wish to Rewrite Inheritance
The novel opens in Beijing in 1966, with May and her companion Ping breaking into a glass case of ancient relics. Among the objects is a lotus seed with a legend: a dragon dropped it into an emperor's hand, and it would grant his greatest wish—but he died that night while contemplating his options. May reflects that the seed contains an entire future—roots, stems, leaves, blooms, to seeds once more—encoded, like she is. The seed becomes her symbol of the desire to control what comes next. She swallows it, telling herself the story is fiction, but asking: Why shouldn't the wish be hers?
What May wishes for, we learn later, is time. She tells us she was ashamed to have chosen this over Ping, but it was her truer wish. The wish for time is also a wish to escape the constraints of her circumstances—the Cultural Revolution that has turned her world violent and unrecognizable. She witnesses Lanlan, a girl who loaned her clothing like a sister would, dragged through the streets and punished as a capitalist roader. May asks herself: Could this be who they—we—really were? The question cuts both ways: the mob's cruelty reveals something about human nature, but May's own silence and helplessness reveal something about herself.
This is the first articulation of the novel's central tension: identity is shaped by forces larger than the individual, but the individual still must answer for who they become. May's response is to try to seize control. Her scientific career becomes an extension of this impulse. She works on imprinting factors, seeking to guide inheritance—to make it less about the luck of the draw. When she treats her daughter Lily with a gene therapy that suppresses Charles's genetic contribution, she frames it as a gift: Lily could live my life, but better. It was, she says, like giving myself a second chance.
The irony is devastating. May's attempt to give Lily a better life—to erase the genetic inheritance she sees as limiting—creates the very distance that defines their relationship. Lily grows up so unlike her mother that she is practically a stranger. The mother who wanted to control her daughter's future ends up unable to communicate with her in the present. May reflects that she hadn't realized how insurmountable the difficulty of communicating would be between an American child and a Chinese mother.
Lily: The In-Between
Lily's experience of identity is defined by being caught between worlds. In America, she is seen as Chinese; in China, she is seen as American. Visiting Beijing as an adult, she observes that nothing indicated she was American until she opened her mouth, and then there was invariably disappointment—even scorn—that she couldn't say what she wanted with her Chinese face. She visits Peking University hoping to feel a connection to her parents' past, but the buildings have been renovated and the photos destroyed. She had hoped to feel some kind of connection to her parents there but struggled to.
Lily's search for belonging is also a search for understanding. She discovers a photograph of her mother with Ping—not her father—and a letter that asks what lengths she went to to achieve what she wanted, and who else she harmed along the way. The letter forces Lily to confront the possibility that her mother's choices—including the genetic manipulation—were not simply loving but also ruthless. Identity, the novel suggests, is not just about who you are but about what was done to make you who you are.
Lily's own parenting of Nick reflects a different approach. She is described as an outsider who could see what was invisible to everyone in the middle. She doesn't try to control Nick's identity; she tries to protect him from the weight of her own. But the novel shows that this protection is also a form of distance. Nick reflects that he didn't want his life to resemble hers, and wonders if loneliness was in their genetic makeup—that no matter what he did or who he met, he would always be alone.
Nick: The Search for a Self
Nick's generation approaches identity through the tools of the present: DNA testing, geography, work. He and his friend Timothy order genetic testing kits, hoping for revelation. The results are anticlimactic: Nick is German, English, and a tiny bit Swedish, and 50 percent Chinese. The predictions about his appearance are entirely wrong—the test predicts brown hair and brown eyes, but Nick is blond with blue eyes. The scene is comic but pointed: genetic identity, the novel suggests, is not the same as lived identity. Knowing your percentages doesn't tell you who you are.
Nick's work at the oyster farm offers a more resonant metaphor. He learns that an oyster formed itself from its environment, pulling calcium carbonate out of the ocean to create its own shell. The oyster doesn't choose its environment, but it builds itself from what it finds there. This is the novel's most hopeful image of identity: not inheritance, not choice, but a kind of responsive construction—taking what the world offers and making something of it.
Nick's relationship with his grandmother May, in the novel's final sections, suggests a possible resolution. May asks Nick to write a letter to Lily expressing that being her mother was her greatest luck. The request is an acknowledgment of failure and an attempt at repair. May also reflects on language: Chinese exists in the present tense, she observes, while English made it easy to live in hope of the future. The observation captures the novel's central tension between presence and aspiration—between being who you are and becoming who you want to be.
Symbols and Their Meanings
The lotus seed is the novel's central symbol of inheritance and control. It contains a future, but its future depends on conditions no one can fully predict. May swallows it, hoping to control her own fate, but the wish she makes for time comes at the cost of connection.
The jade bracelet belongs to May's mother, whose color has faded to nearly white—a sign of ill health. Jade is supposed to protect its wearer, but the bracelet's fading suggests the limits of protection. The mother's love is expressed not through words but through action—defending May's studies, scolding her harshly. The bracelet connects the generations even as it signals what is being lost.
The oyster is Nick's symbol. It builds its shell from its environment, suggesting that identity is a process of incorporation rather than inheritance. But the oyster is also farmed—shaped by human intervention, its shells chipped with baseball bats to grow in a desired shape. The image is ambivalent: we are shaped by our environments, but also by those who shape our environments.
The silk dress appears in Lily's donation bag—two identical dresses, one black, one blue, that Lily has never seen her mother wear. The dresses suggest a life her mother kept hidden, an identity that was never fully shared. They are a reminder that every generation carries secrets that shape the next.
Complexity and Contradiction
The novel refuses a simple resolution. May's genetic manipulation of Lily is presented as both an act of love and an act of violation. Lily's distance from her mother is both a failure of communication and a necessary separation. Nick's DNA test reveals nothing meaningful, yet his search for identity is not dismissed—it is part of the human need to know where we come from.
The deepest contradiction is May's own. She wanted to give Lily a better life by controlling her inheritance, but the result was a daughter who felt like a stranger. She wanted time, and she got it—but the time she gained was spent in regret. The novel's final image, of May asking Nick to write a letter expressing her love, suggests that the only inheritance we can truly pass on is acknowledgment—the willingness to say, imperfectly, what we feel.
Study Questions
1. How does the lotus seed function as a symbol of both inheritance and control?
The lotus seed contains an encoded future—roots, stems, leaves, blooms, and seeds once more—but its future depends on conditions no one can predict. May swallows it, hoping to control her fate, but her wish for time comes at the cost of connection. The seed represents the novel's central tension: we inherit possibilities, but we cannot control how they unfold.
2. Why does May's genetic manipulation of Lily fail to achieve her goal?
May wanted Lily to live her life but better—to accomplish more than she had. But the manipulation created distance rather than closeness. Lily grew up so unlike her mother that she was practically a stranger. The novel suggests that identity cannot be engineered; it must be lived. May's attempt to control inheritance undermined the very connection she sought.
3. How does Lily's experience of being in-between shape her identity?
Lily is seen as Chinese in America and American in China. Her visit to Peking University fails to produce the connection she hoped for. Lily's identity is defined by absence—the absence of a past she can access, the absence of a culture she fully belongs to. She exists in the gap between two worlds, belonging fully to neither.
4. What does Nick's DNA test reveal about the limits of genetic identity?
The test reveals Nick is German, English, and a tiny bit Swedish, and 50 percent Chinese, but the predictions about his appearance are entirely wrong. The scene suggests that genetic percentages don't tell you who you are. Identity is not reducible to ancestry; it is built through relationships, place, and experience.
5. How does the oyster metaphor complicate the novel's view of identity?
The oyster formed itself from its environment, pulling calcium carbonate out of the ocean to create its own shell. This suggests identity is a process of incorporation—taking what the world offers and building something from it. But the oyster is also farmed, its shells chipped to grow in a desired shape. The image is ambivalent: we are shaped by our environments, but also by those who shape our environments.