Rachel Khong on Real Americans, Food, and Identity

KUpon knocking on the front door, it’s already clear that this is one of those dreamy California artist homes, with its rich green paint and large windows brightening up a quiet street. Inside there are flowers on the bathroom shelf, music playing in the background. And the kitchen! A jar of fresh coriander sprigs on the table. The sea green backsplash, warm wood cabinets, and hanging wires from a pothos over the sink. It’s a hostile, blustery early spring day in Los Angeles, but everything here is inviting, especially its inhabitants: author and food journalist Rachel Khong and a sweet brown cat she and her husband call Bunny.

I was warned about this. A mutual friend told me about Khong’s cozy office, filled with books; about the persimmon outside; about, above all, what happens in this kitchen: “She will win you over with her delicious things”. Tonight I’m here to talk to Khong about her second novel, Real Americans, while preparing a dinner she planned for us: mapo tofu with pork and mushrooms, smashed cucumber salad and rice.

This marriage of food and fiction is only fitting for a writer whose career has been defined by both. Khong, 38, started in food service and later appeared in food media, one of the first employees of Lucky Peach magazine under the leadership of celebrity chef David Chang and his partner Chris Ying. After the magazine closed in 2017, she founded Ruby, a co-working space for women and non-binary creatives in San Francisco, making food and drink programming a crucial element.

For all these reasons, those who know Khong’s work tend to come to his fiction with certain expectations. For some, her 2017 debut novel Goodbye, vitamin, about a young woman caring for her father after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, was full of food. For others, it wasn’t enough. Real Americans will inspire the same response.

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On the surface – and deep down – the book has nothing to do with cooking or dining; is a multigenerational family saga that traces the lives of a mother, a son and a grandmother through a story that begins in China during the Cultural Revolution and reaches into the future, although not in that order. Khong layers the lives of his characters to challenge how well we can really know ourselves. The book asks who can be American and calls for deeper compassion. Also, in my experience, it can leave the reader very hungry.

“There’s not much food, right? I think we can agree on that,” says Khong when I broach the subject. My mind immediately fills with images she conjured on the page: a teenager peering warily at the shell of his first oyster, a man chewing dried chicken. A scene in the fanciest restaurant a 20-something has ever visited, her date sliding the rest of her buttery venison across the table for her.

We looked at each other and laughed. “Ah,” says Khong. “Do you think there is a lot?”

Khong, who was born ethnic Chinese parents in Malaysia who moved to the US when he was 2, grew up with an “uncomplicated” love for food. Her family had dinner together every night, usually homemade Chinese or Malay dishes that her mother prepared. It wasn’t just the food that served as an example for Khong: “She’s also a happy cook – it wasn’t drudgery for her,” she says.

Now, for Khong herself, preparing dinner at the end of the day is an important ritual. After moving from San Francisco to Los Angeles less than a year ago, for the first time she is working as a writer full-time without the structure of her previous workplaces. “There’s something uncomfortable about writing something that’s all yours and no one expects,” she says. “You’re looking around, like, Who gave you permission?” To cope with her new amorphous schedule, she began creating routines to create a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. Typically, she goes for a walk in the morning—the only safe time to avoid baking in the Southern California sun—and then writes for two to four hours. The rest of the afternoon seems to disappear, so come dinner time, there’s comfort in doing something so concrete. “Cooking is always rewarding – there’s nothing like writing 1,000 words and feeling like I need to delete them all,” she says. “You can’t ruin things so much that they’re inedible.” (Well, maybe she it cannot.)

Tonight, she puts me to work first peeling ginger, handing me a thin spoon she bought in Thailand, her favorite tool for the job. She places a radish-shaped timer, a souvenir from Japan, next to the rice cooker. Soon, to crush cucumbers, she will give me the biggest pestle I’ve ever held – the kind used to make curry paste in Southeast Asia. And later, I’ll watch her as she stands over the pan of sizzling mushrooms and meat, her hand on her hip, stirring together a mixture of Chinese and Japanese pastes and seasonings without measuring (Sichuan pepper and chili sauce, miso and vinegar, soy sauce). There is a sense of mixing of cultures here that seems particular, a porous line between identities that appears in Real Americans.

There is no shortage of great immigration stories. Khong’s feels real because it comes from a place of authenticity. This isn’t your family’s story, but the way the characters search for belonging or find ways to be multiple things at once rings true – it captures the feeling of floating in the middle, not firmly tied to one pole of identity or another, but instead looks for a way to feel safe in their own space.

And that title—Real Americans— evokes more questions than any book could answer. What is American and what is real? In Khong’s novel, it is someone distant, someone who has never identified as American, who uses the phrase to describe one of the three main characters. And this character probably wouldn’t say that about herself. This is how Khong’s novel pokes holes in the assumptions we make about each other. Just as you begin to understand one of the three protagonists, she moves on to the next, tracing the influence of history, trauma, biology, and life experience on how the characters are understood, or misunderstood, by each other.

Khong describes the space she is trying to fill – or rather, the space she finds herself in without trying. Favorite writers of hers are Deborah Levy, Ruth Ozeki, Kazuo Ishiguro-writers who do their own thing, conventions be damned, and this book offers a twist on its own genre, a turn into the realm of speculative fiction. On a more personal level, Khong felt that there was no one with her point of view writing fiction that she could fully identify with when she was a child. Amy Tan’s work was “unabashedly Chinese” in a way that Khong was not. “I felt like I wasn’t enough at all – I wasn’t Chinese enough. I wasn’t Malaysian enough. I was definitely not American enough, although I felt more American than anything else,” she says. She is similar to how Lily-the mother in Real Americans, sandwiched between the other two characters – can describe itself.

Khong avoided writing about Asian American identity in Goodbye, vitamin– she didn’t feel skilled enough to handle it the way she wanted to. Since then, she has written several short stories featuring Asian characters, finding her way. “It’s not usually that the whole story is about Asian-American identity. It’s more like this Asian-American female character is just going about her day and then is reminded by other people that she is Asian, which reflects my own experience,” she says. Lily is a representation of this woman in the Y2K era. Someday, says Khong, Lily’s story may seem obvious. “As I was writing, I was thinking: How much of this is too basic?” she says. She sets an example, linking her thoughts, as always, to food. She references the “story of the smelly lunch” and how certain experiences become tropes. “People know that immigrant children were once embarrassed about their lunches, and now it’s a cliché. If 10 years from now it feels like Lily’s story is dated because no one could be insecure about these things anymore, that’s okay,” says Khong – and then clarifies: “That would be really great.”

We are both hungry the time dinner is ready. I’m dizzy as I help set the table, laying out yellow cloth napkins and heavy ceramic plates. Khong has this device that she uses to write – the food in her world is like the weather, an omen. That dry chicken I remembered before? It was a breakup scene, a mistake in the kitchen foreshadowing certain doom. “Food is bad when people aren’t having fun or something is wrong,” she says.

We were silent for a moment, chewing. The tofu is soft and flavorful, Khong’s improvised blend of spicy, savory and spicy flavors hitting every note. The cucumbers are crunchy and garlicky, in contrast, refreshing. The rice is fluffy and soft, balancing everything. This food is, in a word, delicious.