Well it’s mid-May so I guess I better start writing reviews.
I read this back in January and liked it ok, and now that I’m recalling it to write this review, I also think I like it ok! It’s not one that I think about frequently, but I enjoyed reading it and discussing it with friends.
The book is split into three sections. The first is about Lily Chen, a somewhat aimless Chinese-American young lady who has a pretty ok internship in NYC in 1999. She meets and falls for a rich man named Matthew Allen, heir to a pharmaceutical giant. Honestly, this section was pretty meh! I found Lily pretty uninspiring and couldn’t figure out why Matthew was into her. But I kept reading, and in section 2 things get more interesting: it’s 2021 and we are following Nick, the child of Lily and Matthew. We see that Lily is now no longer with Matthew, and, in my opinion, was a much more interesting character with a few years and a lot of regrets under her belt. Nick spends this section searching for his father and coming to terms with the reality of his family. The third section, by far my favorite, is about Lily’s mother (Nick’s grandmother), May, a clever science student who escaped the Cultural Revolution and worked with her husband as a geneticist in the States. There is a nice little magical realism twist, which I always enjoy, and the author had very interesting observations about the real ripple effects that our decisions have on our families for generations.
My main complaint was that I wanted a little bit … more. I wanted to feel more strongly about Lily in the first section; I wanted weirder magical realism, which was introduced on page 1 and then seemingly forgotten about for 200 pages. Mostly, I wanted more deliberate moments of discovery – there are lots of connections between the three sections, both obvious and subtle, but because of the structure, the realization of those connections was more of a slow burn and less of an “aha!” Frankly, I think this would have been better as an “aha!” book. If the pages of Aimless Young Lily had been cleverly spliced with the story of Brilliant Young May at the same age, for instance; or if the genetics research had come immediately after Nick’s DNA search; or even if the somewhat hapless husbands (May’s and Lily’s) had been more obviously paralleled, I think it would have been a much punchier and compelling read.
However, I still really enjoyed it! It was clever and had a solid ending, and loved how Khong played with the idea of a “real American” from a lot of different perspectives, and brought back the lil touch of magical realism at the end. A great start to my 2026 reading journey.
