Annual Lecture Fulbright Commission X John Adams Institute

Rachel Khong: An Atlas of Us
Join us on 21 May for our annual event with the John Adams Institute. Rachel Khong is the bestselling author of Goodbye, Vitamin and Real Americans. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Granta, and other publications. Through a blend of historical awareness, literary insight, and emotional acuity, she illuminates identity, community, and the ongoing negotiation of what it means to belong in contemporary America. In Real Americans, Rachel Khong follows a Chinese-American family across eight decades, tracing how inheritance works in the widest sense: the stories we’re told, the choices we make, and the circumstances we don’t choose at all. Moving from Maoist China to contemporary America, the novel asks how identity is formed over time—and how the past, quietly but insistently, shapes the lives we think we’re freely building. At the center of the book is a young woman whose relationship with a wealthy heir sets off consequences that echo across generations and continents. Part love story, part social novel, and touched by a speculative edge, Real Americans explores class, migration, and the lure of reinvention while probing the unsettling question of what, exactly, gets passed down: family traits, family myths, and even the futures we imagine we deserve. With sharp insight and subtle humor, Khong captures America not as a fixed ideal, but as a lived reality, shaped by power and chance, ambition and longing, and by the intimate pressures of family life. Real Americans is a novel about what we inherit, what we resist, and what we carry forward.








































