Real Americans

“My mother was a scientist like somebody might be a painter, wholly and obsessively. It was her entire life.”

This passage speaks to May’s characterization as well as to the novel’s interest in the theme of Fraught Family Relationships. Because May is so driven and focused on her professional career, she neglects her relationship with her daughter, Lily. The two will struggle to feel a sense of connectivity for much of their lives, but the fact that they reconcile at the end of the novel gestures toward the author’s interest in the possibility of hope and reconnection in difficult familial relationships.

“I was one of only a handful of Asian women, and silently I wished for more of us.”

Lily is often the only Asian woman in majority-white spaces. She contends with bias and stereotypes and feels as though she has an outsider status in the country where she was born because people so frequently assume that she is foreign. The impact of being treated as an “other” shapes her identity, and she is often slightly ill at ease, even in familiar surroundings.

“All I could think of was my mother, her disappointment. Whenever we spoke, I tried to talk to her about Matthew, but she would veer the conversation to my professional life.”

Lily feels alienated from her mother. Her mother cares primarily about work, and partly because she views her own identity through the framework of professionalism, she is more interested in Lily’s professional life than in her personal one. Lily feels as though she does not live up to her mother’s lofty expectations, and she perceives the gulf between them as ever widening.

“His Florida was so different from the one I had known, gleaming and polished, not mossy and mildewing.”

Lily and Matthew come from different worlds, and she is initially hyper-focused on their class differences. This is embodied by the juxtaposed adjectives here, which compare the two characters’ worlds. She worries that his affluence and her modest background might become a source of tension.

“Our marriage would be different, we swore to each other. It wouldn’t resemble our parents’.”

Although they come from different class backgrounds, Lily and Matthew share a certain alienation from their families. Both have been led to believe that they are in some way a disappointment to their parents, and both struggle to relax in the company of their family members. They are drawn to each other in part because of this shared tension, although they hope not to reproduce it in their own relationship. This quote is later revealed to be ironic, as their relationship does not last.

“She’d never expressed a desire to return. This made me curious. Where was the place she’d come from? How could she leave and never want to visit, not even once?”

May’s experiences in Mao’s China ground this novel within the lived experiences of the second large wave of Chinese immigration to the United States. Because so many academics, scientists, intellectuals, writers, and former government officials were persecuted during China’s Cultural Revolution, there was a massive push among the nation’s intelligentsia to emigrate. May is caught up in this chaotic upheaval, and the difficulties she experienced in China drive her to fully embrace her identity as a new American. Lily’s confusion about her mother’s point of view highlights the different experiences between first- and second-generation immigrants.

“In America people saw me as Chinese and here they saw me, unpleasantly, as an American.”

Lily is characterized in part by her acute sense of cultural dislocation. She is viewed as foreign by many white Americans despite having been born in the country, and it disappoints her that in China, she is not automatically accepted. Her character speaks to the difficulty of cross-cultural identity: She is neither Chinese enough for the Chinese nor American enough for the Americans.

“It was something I’d wondered myself. Why didn’t I look Chinese? My hair was blonde, and my eyes were blue, and I didn’t resemble my mother at all.”

Both Lily and Nick struggle with their racial and cultural identities, albeit in different ways. Whereas Lily feels caught between two cultures and is often stereotyped as a foreigner despite her American birth, Nick struggles to feel a sense of his Chinese identity at all, in part because he resembles only his white father. Each character has to come to terms with who they are and find a way around the sense of seemingly inescapable alienation that they feel.

“Classmates and teachers tensed when Timothy talked to them, bracing themselves for some contrarian comment.”

Timothy is characterized in part by his contrarian nature. He is not necessarily intractable, but he is invested in truth telling and in the politics of equal representation. He points out gaps in their learning not merely to disagree with their teachers but to make broader points about colonialism and white supremacy in the West.

“Why can’t you just be normal, I sometimes thought. Life would be easier if we were both normal people.”

Nick feels a distinct sense of alienation as a young man. Although he looks white, his mother is Chinese, and he feels like an outsider in his small community. His only friend, Timothy, is also what he considers an odd duck, and although he does not feel a sense of kinship with their fellow students, he often wishes that he were more like his peers.

“I hadn’t told my mom that I’d applied to the same Ivy Leagues that Timothy had, fees I’d paid for with Matthew’s credit card instead of hers.”

Family ties are complex in this novel, and each of the text’s three narrators has difficulty relating to their nuclear family. In Nick’s case, he bristles against his mother’s controlling nature and isolationism, even as the two share a deep and loving bond. The opportunities offered to him by his father are symbolized by his credit card, a marker of the differences between Matthew’s and Lily’s experiences of class.

“We were an American family, my mother and I, and yet it wasn’t American, I thought, for her to love me as much as she did. Was it Chinese? It was some synthesis of the two, elements brought together to form a new compound.”

May, Lily, and Nick all struggle to balance their Chinese heritage with their American identities in some way. Lily is thoughtful and given to self-reflection, and in this passage, she considers what it must have been like for her mother to parent a child in her newfound country, caught between Chinese traditions she wanted to leave behind and American values she wanted to embrace but about which she often felt conflicted.

“My mother never described herself as an outsider, she just was one. That was obvious to me.”

Many of the characters in this novel are defined in part by their outsider status. Lily and Nick feel alienation because of their racial identity, but others also struggle with connection. Matthew has never felt truly at home in his family. Timothy struggles in school because of his keen intellect and his sexual orientation. Throughout the novel, each of these characters is forced to come to terms with their differences and to find their own particular place within their communities and society as a whole.

“My mother hadn’t told me any of this. She had kept it from me. Whatever happened to her, to us, it wasn’t right. But I agreed with Matthew, nothing could be changed.”

This scene speaks to the theme of Fraught Family Relationships. Nick finally learns the story of his parents’ brief marriage and concludes that his mother had been in the wrong. Each of the characters in this novel experiences difficulty within their nuclear family, and Nick’s relationships with both his mother and father are strained.

“She never said it, but I knew she wished I didn’t look so white.”

Nick’s relationship with Miranda helps the author interrogate the idea of race and belonging. Miranda is, like Nick, biracial, but she locates racial identity firmly within appearance. Miranda is struggling to come to terms with her own racial identity, and it becomes clear to Nick that although they share biracialism, Miranda considers herself to be a more authentic person of color because she looks the part.

“I hadn’t realized that as an American child and a Chinese mother, communication would always be insurmountable.”

This realization of May’s speaks to the novel’s interest in Immigration, Race, and Identity. May, Lily, and ultimately Nick all feel out of place at various points in the narrative, and their racial identities and family immigration history are part of what alienates them, both from society and from one another. Here, May realizes that her daughter will never be as Chinese as she is and that although they are related, there will always be a distance between them.

“Mao was one of us: the son of a peasant from Hunan. He had declared the founding of a People’s Republic of China when I was four years old.”

Although the narrative focuses more on its characters and their relationships, the history of China in the 20th century underpins many of its events. Like many émigrés of the era, Lily’s parents were driven out of China during the Cultural Revolution. May recounts here her early support for Mao and his revolutionary project, but she also recalls her growing realization that his “people’s republic” did not entirely deliver on its promises to the people.

“Biology fascinated me, the astonishing intricacy of who we were born and became. Invisible codes made us. Our cells carried the instructions with which we formed ourselves.”

Biology is an important motif within the novel. The study of biological sciences, particularly genetics, becomes a point of connection between various families and across multiple generations. In a text so interested in cultural differences and fractured family ties, science functions as a bridge between people who otherwise feel a distinct sense of alienation from one another.

“Red Guards began flooding into Beijing, and we university students had to share housing with them.”

This detail grounds the novel within the history of China’s Cultural Revolution and helps paint a portrait of the China from which May felt she had no choice but to emigrate. The Cultural Revolution targets universities, students, and faculty, and the climate at Peking University becomes increasingly repressive as May continues her studies. No one is safe from denunciation, not even scientists.

“Most people in America who are fed and housed and clothed can choose what to care about. From your comfortable position you can decide if you want to know about people in Syria or Myanmar.”

Although May leaves China to be free from persecution by the Communist Party, she never fully adapts to life in America. Lily perceives her parents as staunchly pro-America and recalls how infrequently they spoke Chinese or ate Chinese food, but May cannot help but observe the differences between immigrants like her and American-born citizens. Having once lived through the kind of terrifying political upheaval that Americans only watch on television, May understands what a privilege it is to be able to tune the rest of the world out.

“Meanwhile, anger roiled in me. How could communism look like this? Like chaos. Like the worship of one individual.”

Much of May’s narration is devoted to her gradual realization that the communist project in China has failed to deliver on many of its promises, noting the difference between ideology and praxis. She observes the political repression, violence, chaos, and hunger that is coming to characterize the new regime and realizes that the state violently silences dissent and punishes its subjects indiscriminately. She is disgusted by Mao’s cult of personality and does not feel safe on campus.

“While I was better at the language, Charles took to being an American immediately. Greedily he watched TV. He took delightedly to the new American foods we ate: rich, without flavor, tasting of chemicals.”

Both Charles and May embrace their new country, although in different ways. Charles is drawn to food and popular culture, and May’s language here critiques these aspects of American culture through adverbs like “greedily” and adjectival phrases like “without flavor” and “tasting of chemicals.” Linguistic choices like these add nuance to the novel’s discussions of immigration, avoiding black-and-white depictions of China or the United States as wholly good or bad.

“China is not my home. We want to be American. We work hard. We will work harder than any scientist here.”

May and Charles, who are rarely on the same page, do agree on their desire to be American. Whereas Charles develops an affinity for American popular culture and food, May readily adopts an American work ethic. For Charles, the United States is television, hamburgers, and excess. For May, it is economic opportunities accessible through hard work.