Real Americans

Across three generations, Rachel Khong's novel follows a Chinese American family in China and the United States, in three sections. The first is set in New York in 1999, where Lily Chen, a broke twenty-two-year-old intern raised in Tampa by scientists who fled Mao's Cultural Revolution, falls in love with Matthew Allen, heir to a pharmaceutical empire. The later sections move ahead to 2021 and to 2030, each taking up a different generation of the family, and the novel spans more than eight decades. Khong began writing it in December 2016, shortly after the presidential election.

It appeared on Jenna Bush Hager's Read With Jenna book club list on the Today Show.