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?
It’s a tough novel to capture in a sentence or two, Khong concedes. “I appreciate that the publisher is just allowing it to be its own weird thing, and not trying to overly advertise it as one genre or something,” she said.
Born in Malaysia, Khong grew up in Southern California — Rancho Cucamonga, Indio, San Dimas, the “desert-y parts” of the state. “Growing up, she said, “I didn’t know any novelists.”
She went to Yale to pursue a degree in English, in the hopes of becoming a journalist. She got an internship with The Village Voice, where she wrote for the music section. After earning her M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Florida, she moved to San Francisco, where she joined the staff of Lucky Peach.
By then, Khong said, “I was sort of itching to do my own thing.” Between chef interviews and trips to Noma, she began writing her first novel.
Much of the early interest in “Real Americans” was probably because of the success of her debut novel, “Goodbye, Vitamin.” Published in 2017, it was selected as a best book of the year by numerous media outlets, including NPR and Esquire. The New York Times Book Review called it “a quietly brilliant disquisition on family, relationships, and adulthood” and praised its prose (“startling in its spare beauty”) and humor.
Khong now lives in Los Angeles, and on a morning in March, she sat down in a coffeehouse in the Glassell Park neighborhood and talked about the importance of community and coffee shops, and how her second novel, seven years in the making, came to be.
Khong began “Real Americans” in December 2016, at the dawn of the Trump presidency. “I really wanted to write about the different meanings of the term ‘real American,’” she said.
The moment also made Khong assess the importance of community. Living in San Francisco’s Mission District at the time, she watched as artists fled a city once defined by them, driven out by high rents.
“San Francisco can be isolating when you haven’t found your people,” she said. “And obviously the dominant industry is tech, so it can feel alienating to be an artist, because the world around you is operating at a different speed, with different priorities.”
Not long after starting the novel, Khong began to think about creating a space that would provide a meeting place and a haven for fellow artists — one where everyone wasn’t wearing headphones and working on their latest startups.
She decided to make the collective for women and nonbinary writers and artists because “I was thinking about all of these groups of women that I really loved. I had a group I played mahjong with, a book club, a writing group. So I wanted to make a space for something like that to happen.”
Khong found a space in the Mission District and got to work. Invitations for membership went out, beginning with the writers, photographers, illustrators, and chefs she knew from her years at Lucky Peach. Soon enough, a core group of around 50 went to work picking the furniture and painting the place. Khong did much of the carpentry. She didn’t want the place to have the bland aesthetic of a Starbucks or WeWork.
“I missed the old San Francisco coffee shops that had crappy furniture and were kind of dirty, but that had a lot of character,” Khong said.
The result was the Ruby, a 9000+ square foot co-working collective and self-described “love letter to San Francisco.”
Once it was up and running, Khong planned events and workshops and occasionally worked the front desk. “Rachel is one of those people who are extremely talented at a lot of weird and random things,” said Meng Jin, the author of “Little Gods” and a longtime Ruby member. On Fridays, Khong invited an eclectic group of Bay Area-based female chefs to cater lunch; an upstairs living area hosted visiting writers and artists.
“She didn’t just open a space and say, Come on in, there’s extra laptop chargers or whatever,” said Shruti Swamy, the author of “A House is a Body” and a founding member. “She really thought about, how do I make the space welcoming to people?”
The Ruby soon became a magnet for area writers, including Gabriela Garcia (“Of Women and Salt”), R.O. Kwon (“The Incendiaries”) and Cecilia Rabess (“Everything’s Fine”). Artists met other artists at happy hours and lunches, and friendships grew. “Rachel is really good at bringing people together,” Jin said.
After creating a haven for others, however, Khong found the day-to-day running of it so distracting that when she had to find a quiet place to write “Real Americans,” she often ended up going to, yes, another cafe. “I do see the irony of that,” she said.
Khong is currently working on a third novel that’s about Malaysia, but isn’t set in Malaysia, she said. And she has already completed a collection of short stories, which Knopf will also publish.
As for the Ruby, that space is still going strong, even after Khong retired from running it in 2021 and moved to Los Angeles. Recent events have included a kimchi making class, watch parties for the PBS series “Hungry Planet,” and a night of readings by Vietnamese American women poets and writers.
“It’s really hard to communicate just how special that place was, and still is,” Swamy said. “The Ruby feels like something that a writer does: They make a world that they want to live in with their work. And Rachel not only did that in her work, she literally did it with the Ruby.”
