How Rachel Khong Conjures Worlds, in Her Books and Beyond

By the time Rachel Khong was finishing her latest novel, “Real Americans,” in 2022, interest in the book was so high that it sparked a 17-way bidding war between many of the country’s top publishing houses.

Among the interested parties was John Freeman, the writer, literary critic and executive editor at Knopf, who was teaching in Paris that summer and planning to fly to Sarajevo for a book festival. He learned Khong was on vacation in Istanbul, which he thought was sort of on his way (“I didn’t really look at a map,” Freeman confessed). Maybe the two could meet?

They got together at a cafe in Istanbul — a dog cafe, to be precise, where they were greeted at the door by a resident basset hound. The whole scene, he said, felt like a page out of the novel that Khong had been writing, “where you see people blown slightly sideways through life, through unexpected passages that they often choose very quickly.”

The meeting went so well, and the email Freeman sent afterward was so compelling (he offered to be her longtime editor, snowplow, hurricane lamp, map holder and in-house fire starter, among other things) that Khong signed a deal with Knopf five days later.

Due out on Tuesday, “Real Americans” is a remarkable tale about three generations of a family that spans seven decades, and shuttles from China during the Cultural Revolution to the publishing world of late ’90s Manhattan to an oyster farm in Washington state. Folded into it are doomed love stories, fancy parties, a subplot about epigenetics, Chinese people who look white and yummy treats (before becoming a novelist, Khong was executive editor of the beloved food magazine Lucky Peach).

The book also poses a dizzying array of questions: What does it mean to be American, and who gets to say who is one? How would we have turned out if we had grown up obscenely rich? How much can we blame our parents for who and what we become? Am I, maybe, racist? When scientists and techies say they can make a better human, should we run the other way?