Real Americans

by Rachel Khong

The seed is unspectacular, so old it resembles a stone. Yet she’s aware it contains an entire future: roots, stems, leaves, blooms, to seeds once more—encoded, like she is. Her heart pumps blood, her lungs take in air, she sleeps, wakes, eats, excretes. Will her life be long or short? What has she chosen, she wonders, and what has chosen her?

I’d been wary in the wake of the morning.

I wasn’t a lucky person. I’d never defied odds.

he stood and smiled in this amused way, as though we already shared a secret.

everyone had their own private universe of concerns;

I was never going to be a scientist, like my parents—interested in life at the molecular level, in things even smaller than molecules.

Architecture had seemed to me so glamorous: imaginary structures, made real.

the end, I wasn’t the sort of person who yearned to shape a landscape. I wanted only to observe it.

had one of those blue rocks but had never known why. The rocks were Earth, Matthew said. Meant to remind us of our own smallness.

I couldn’t imagine a child comprehending that—that we were so insignificant, that we didn’t matter. Even now, it was something I understood in the abstract—not in any real way.

often wondered what percentage of things I said were truly original, and how much of what I said I’d heard said before and was only repeating.

By this point I’d stopped noticing our surroundings. It was only the two of us, and our conversation turned manic.

Whereas my mother was a scientist like someone might be a painter—wholly, and obsessively. It was her entire life.

wasn’t accustomed to speaking this way with anyone—without purpose, as though time weren’t finite but unlimited.

It was something I did, back then—disregard what I didn’t understand.

Stan was good-looking. Not conventionally, but specifically.

But there were also the inarticulable things, which came to mind in scents, in colors, impressions I didn’t have language for—the rightness I felt with him.

She had always longed for more. She had always wanted more than one life could contain.

I tried to make out the invisible strings connecting them—taut with tension, or loose, estranged.

to an orchard of gnarled apple trees, older than we were by hundreds of years. In the trees, the apples were golden. There were apples on the ground, too, brown and rotting. Flies swarmed everywhere around the putrid pulp. But what we noticed were the apples that hung, radiant, on branches like arms, extended to us.

Have a moment, as though time weren’t all of ours, as though a moment could belong to one person. Even now, this belonged to her.

Was motherliness something that could be cultivated?

The lotus is an important plant, in Chinese medicine. Every part of it is used. The roots, seeds, leaves—used for blood disorders, for increased vitality. And the lotus is ancient—existing at the same time as dinosaurs. We knew that the lotus’s incredible, ancient genome could repair its own genetic defects,

It was easy to comprehend that a tree had outlived you, several lifetimes over, but a seed? For a moment I pretended we were gods, holding a tiny planet. Then your mother closed her fist, brought it to her mouth, and swallowed.”

Her expressions were slight, but I grew up reading them like a language: the way she looked to the side when she was uncertain, or her eyes widened when I said something that interested her.

This was what love had always been for me: denying your own reality in order to protect another person.

It was a perfect ecosystem in which my lies could flourish—the way mushrooms popped up at the shaded bases of trees, especially after storms.

worried about what the answers might be or, more likely, that answers didn’t exist at all.

I would wake up trapped in a moment. It was as though time had dimensions, width and length, and where most people perceived time’s length, I could feel the width of it.

There was a way of resting into it—a relaxing. I could prolong an hour to linger in it, only for myself, in my own mind. She explained how I could release the moment, too.

My mother never described herself as an outsider, she just was one—that was obvious to me. From the perimeter, she could see what was invisible to everyone in the middle.

Maybe loneliness was in our genetic makeup, though, and no matter what I did, who I met, I would always be alone.

was books, the immense volume of them, that opened my eyes to how little we understood about the world we inhabited: a world that appeared ordinary in its dailiness yet contained mysteries upon mysteries, one door opening onto another.

ordinary—abundant—yet fascinating,

A stalk that seemed to us so plain, so inert, in actuality abounded with life—whole cities unseeable on our scale. The leaves were rough because of protuberances, like small hands, that swatted the water away. We stood green stems in glass beakers. We studied the chloroplasts within the leaves. Like our mitochondria, they contained DNA. Under a microscope, what was obvious disappeared. Even the color green vanished. What seemed obvious to us, to our naked eyes, was anything but. We were blind to so much. It thrilled me: that what was invisible to our eye could be so rich. I thought of myself as a lotus plant—growing

We would study how the lotus understood time. Understood is not the right word—it’s a human word. How did a lotus know to open in the day and recede into the water at night? I say know—again, the wrong word. Understanding, knowledge—it was what we wanted, not the lotus, which only did what it did without our human anxieties.

You envied what you felt was possible.

The English word harbor described the body of water we saw from the institute—tranquil, protected in part by land. But harbor also meant “refuge,” a place of safety. Many English words, said in identical tones, had more than one meaning. This harbor, which had been my harbor, was at risk of evaporating. The prospect terrified me. I wanted to stay.

before I learned what the jokes themselves meant, I learned the cadence of a joke, how people’s faces and voices changed when they expected you would respond with laughter.

In the end, she was a woman. In the end, she looked the way she did.

And love: Had I ever felt it before? It was a conviction that this miniature person, with her tiniest inhalations and exhalations, faint yet fierce, needed to be alive—and close to me—for as long as I existed. It no longer mattered what had come before—my unspeakable past. The important thing was that she would be my future.

told her I loved her. My parents had never said the word to me. But even though the words sounded unnatural when I spoke them, I felt them, I felt them, I wanted to make them felt. I held her tightly in my arms, in an impossible attempt to communicate my love to every particle, to the deepest part of her, to every nucleus.

flowers were a marvel. Season after season, they erupted into their astounding array of colors and shapes and scents—brilliantly existing, never considering the question of: What for?

Once she had believed that connection meant sameness, consensus, harmony. Having everything in common. And now she understood that the opposite was true: that connection was more valuable—more remarkable—for the fact of differences. Friendship didn’t require blunting the richness of yourself to find common ground. Sometimes it was that, but it was also appreciating another person, in all their particularity. She

Of course she was interrupting. As people we interrupted one another’s lives—that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up like me: living life without interruption, totally alone.

Later, I learned that life lay in the interruptions—that I had been wrong about life, entirely.

The house grew more distant, obscured by trees. Nick preferred watching the party happen from a distance, seeing it like a dollhouse or music box, glowing golden against the black sky, like something you could pick up and hold.

There were other stories being told now, an abundance of other stories, and yet this one persisted. Here were two adults making choices. But was it a choice, Nick wondered, when you were told, all your life, before your life, what it was you should want? If Nick was curious about immortality, it was only because he wanted to see whether, if given years upon years, these scripts could change, turn over, and the dominant actors along with them.

I was good at the long phrases, because I had studied idioms so intently when I had learned English. I could see the shape of a phrase easily.

we were free. But were we? When we were made to value certain lives more than others; when we were made, relentlessly, to want more? What if I had seen through it? What if I had understood that I already had enough?