A marriage of food and fiction

KNOCKING ON THE FRONT DOOR, IT’S AL-ready clear that this is one of those dreamy California artist houses, its rich green paint and big windows lighting up a quiet street. Inside there are flowers on the bathroom shelf, music lilting in the background. And the kitchen! A jar of fresh cilantro sprigs on the table. The sea green backsplash, warm wooden cabinets, and the dangling strands of a pothos over the sink. It’s an unfriendly, blustery early-spring day out there in Los Angeles, but everything in here is inviting, most of all its inhabitants: the author and food journalist Rachel Khong and a sweet brown cat she and her husband call Bunny.

I was warned about this. A mutual friend told me about Khong’s cozy office, stacked high with books; about the persimmon tree outside; about, most of all, what happens in this kitchen: “She’ll woo you with her delicious things.” Tonight, I’m here to talk to Khong about her second novel, Real Americans, while making a dinner she planned for us—mapo tofu with pork and mushrooms, smashed-cucumber salad, and rice.

This marriage of food and fiction is only fitting for a writer whose career has been defined by both. Khong, 38, started in food service then came up in food media, an early staffer at Lucky Peachmagazine under celebrity chef David Chang and his partner Chris Ying. After the magazine shuttered in 2017, she founded the Ruby, a co-working space for women and nonbinary creatives in San Francisco, making food and beverage programming a crucial element.

For all these reasons, people who know Khong’s work tend to arrive at her fiction with certain expectations. To some, her 2017 debut novel Goodbye, Vitamin, about a young woman caring for her father after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, was brimming with food. To others, there wasn’t enough. Real Americanswill inspire the same response.

On its surface—and at its heart—the book has nothing to do with cooking or dining; it’s a multigenerational family saga tracing the lives of a mother, a son, and a grandmother through a history that begins in China during the Cultural Revolution and reaches into the future, though not in that order. Khong layers the lives of her characters to challenge how well we can really know one another. The book asks who gets to be American and calls for deeper compassion. It also, in my experience, could make a reader very hungry.

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