Real Americans by Rachel Khong

There is a tension in this book about what it is to be "real" in a country where almost everyone is an immigrant. Even the Native Americans, who are arguably the only real Americans, came from somewhere else, on foot or by boat, but they did not originate here--and also have intermingled DNA with all the other immigrants over the centuries since. The vibe here is that white people are the "real" Americans and that Asian immigrants are the interlopers who are trying to fit in. The book spans three generations of a Chinese-American family. The relationships between each generation are both loving and deeply troubled. May is a woman who flees Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China to come to the U.S. She’s a brilliant scientist (a researcher of biogenetics, which becomes weirdly relevant) but struggles to form a close relationship with her daughter, Lily. Lily wants the loving relationships she sees in other American families but her mother can barely identify her emotions, much less identify them. The third generation is Lily's son Nick. As is so often the case, in both literature and in life, this is a family that does terrible things to each other, with consequences that span decades. The characters are both sympathetic and unlikeable, shutting each other out and making decisions without ever talking to each other, and in the end, the secretive nature of one generation is passed down to the next. And even as each generation tries to overcome the deficits of the previous generation, it doesn’t make things better. Lily tries to be the affectionate parent her mother wasn’t, but both overcompensates and is no more honest with him about his father and grandmother than her mother was with her. Nick also finds himself in troubled relationships, because he’s uncommunicative and closed off. And so it continues, trauma bleeding from one generation to the next, and yet, with a twist of genetic manipulation added into the mix.