Rachel Khong Moved To L.a., Stopped Chasing Perfection And Wrote Her Most Wonderfully Bizarre Book Yet

The writer Rachel Khong laic connected nan operating array successful her infirmary gown, awaiting a dilation and curettage (D&C) to region nan alleged “products of conception” pursuing a miscarriage. Her bosom raced. Suddenly, purring from nan power speakers came John Mayer’s cheeseball jam, “Your Body Is a Wonderland.”

On nan verge of tears, she burst retired laughing. “This sucks truthful much,” she thought. “But it’s besides hilarious.”

She’d written astir this peculiar marque of cruelty from nan beingness earlier successful nan precocious published short story, “Colors From Elsewhere,” a stirring gestation crippled upended by nan heroine’s rainbow discharge and an acupuncturist’s otherworldly diagnosis: She “was a literal alien” who people can’t reproduce. Suddenly, it each “made cleanable sense.”

Khong is nary alien to feeding life’s awesome losses and unknowables done nan processing works of fiction.

“In existent life, location are nary answers,” she said connected a sticky 99-degree Wednesday successful February astatine nan Pasadena Humane shelter. She slipped treats to nan dogs languishing nether Palm Springs-style misting dispensers while volunteers publication to them. Looking up pinch a gleaming, wide grin arsenic if to drawback her adjacent words, Khong is deceptively calm for a bestselling writer whose 3rd book, “My Dear You,” is retired this month.

While nan book arrives astatine a infinitesimal erstwhile LLMs airs an existential threat to authors (among others) Khong is uncovering solace successful quality imperfections, particularly her own. “For astir of my penning life, I thought that my extremity was penning a cleanable story,” she said. “I don’t deliberation of that arsenic my occupation anymore.”

She believes bully creation lies precisely successful nan knowledge of our ain mortality. “A.I. embodies hypotheticals I tin only ideate for myself,” she wrote for the Atlantic successful 2024. It’s a paralyzing realization, she argued, being confronted pinch “the limits of our assemblage and perspectives — nan limits of our very lives.” That is, until you usage it to your advantage.

That abstraction betwixt nan infinite and nan inevitably finite bookends “My Dear You.” It’s a tender, bizarro reckoning pinch marriage, infertility and friendship, among life’s different illusions. Ten stories written successful arsenic galore years, nan postulation serves arsenic a archive of Khong’s thirties, a clip erstwhile circles shrink and choices narrow. “This book is astir emotion successful a batch of different ways,” she said. It’s besides dedicated to her husband, Eli Horowitz.

Mostly, nan book follows Asian American and Asian lives — some lived and unrealized — done high-concept, fantastical near turns. A mill worker training an A.I. activity doll grows attached to her product. Twenty-one Asian women execute an elaborate revenge imagination against nan achromatic man who’s dated them all. God abandons nan quality title and lets group unrecorded retired their days arsenic nan animal of their choice. “The Freshening,” astir a government-assisted supplier that has everyone seeing their ain title and gender, has already been optioned by Ali Wong and Adam McKay, from writer-director Cathy Yan.

“My Dear You: Stories” by Rachel Khong

(Knopf)

Those adjacent to Khong marvel astatine nan agelong half-life of her short stories. The novelist R.O. Kwon admires her expertise to conception situations that “linger and linger,” prompting her to often ask: What would I do? She recalled workshopping Khong’s title communicative a decade agone pinch their longtime Bay Area writers group — astir a newlywed who dies, goes to eden and encounters her hubby location again. “I’ve publication that communicative possibly 20 times astatine this point,” Kwon said, “and it ne'er loses its power.”

Khong’s editor, John Freeman, places her alongside West Coast peers for illustration Charles Yu and Vauhini Vara, noting her sensitivity to nan “slippages and quick-silvery quality of exertion and speculation.” Genre-bending authors are often well-suited to making consciousness of nan regular horrors and subtle corrosions. What sets Khong apart, he said, is “her expertise to person these affectional dramas situated wrong rather ample philosophical and societal questions. And that ne'er to consciousness for illustration homework — it feels for illustration fun.”

Her 2017 debut novel, “Goodbye, Vitamin,” was an instant sensation. She wrote it while successful grad school, moving edifice jobs and editing nan quarterly nutrient mag Lucky Peach. The New York Times raved astir nan darkly comic novel, “startling successful its spare beauty,” and nan quarter-life situation curen of a parent’s Alzheimer’s disease. Universal Pictures later snapped up nan rights, pinch Constance Wu attached to prima (though nan adjustment now sits successful improvement hell.)

Her 2024 follow-up, “Real Americans,” sparked a 17-way bidding warfare for what this insubstantial called “a disorienting, masterful, shape-shifting caller astir multiracial identity.” The sophomore caller marked nan presence of an intuitive stylist talented astatine polyphonic prose. The bestseller besides made her a full-time author.

The hallmark of nan “Khongian” multiverse, according to her agent, Marya Spence, are nan boundless souls contained wrong her characters’ mean bodies. They are mundane people poised connected nan sublime, a leap into nan expanse conscionable pages away. “It’s Rachel successful her purest form,” she said of nan caller collection. “To acquisition each nan affectional and tonal registers that she’s tin of.”

Khong, 40, has knowledgeable her ain tonal shifts these past fewer years. She and her hubby moved from San Francisco to L.A.’s Glassell Park vicinity successful 2023. With that came passing disconnected nan Ruby, her celebrated co-working abstraction successful nan Mission District. She logged off Instagram indefinitely 2 years ago. “It’s been really bully for nan writing, but besides for my intelligence health.”

She’s moving connected her 3rd novel, connected Malaysia, wherever she was calved earlier emigrating astatine property 2. She besides runs a 12-month caller generator done the Dream Side, a school corporate and writer’s retreat she formed pinch Meng Jin, Susanna Kwan and Shruti Swamy. In May, she leaves for a three-month residency pinch nan prestigious Picador Professorship successful Germany.

She’s still adjusting to L.A., uncovering beauty successful nan choices and life she’s made. Even nan ones made for her. Some moreover “feel absorbing and generative and breathtaking alternatively of limiting and disappointing,” she said, which “emerged pinch penning this book.”

Rachel Khong pets a rescue feline astatine Pasadena Humane.

(Caroline Brehman / For The Times)

Khong had suggested gathering astatine nan animal shelter because it’s a cardinal mounting for her short communicative “Tapetum Lucidum,” named for nan demon-like glow down immoderate animals’ superior nighttime vision. In it, a hubby and woman adopt a cat, Sheila, who develops an unnerving disposition travel nightfall. (The real-life muse down nan premise: her tortoiseshell feline named Bunny from nan San Francisco SPCA.) The narrator originates fantasizing astir Sheila’s handsome Vietnamese vet — truthful vividly that he appears successful her room 1 day.

The mates struggles to conceive. “We tried to person a babe and we tried to person a babe and erstwhile my parents and sister and friends asked I pretended I didn’t want one,” Khong writes.

The specter of her crush ne'er leaves. Then, a caller arrival: her ex-boyfriend and their 2 would-be children. ”More ghosts move in. Only she and Sheila tin spot them: much exes, much babies, full generations that ne'er existed. Her matrimony becomes strained. “It wasn’t that I wasn’t myself,” she writes. “I was wholly myself — each myselves — and it was excessively much.” Eventually, she learns to put up pinch nan ghosts. All her infinite selves, each their pets’ pets and lovers’ lovers.

“But nan feline stiffened and I stiffened whenever anybody moved, alert of each nan imaginable lives being lived astir us.”

In reality, Khong has accepted nan boundlessness. She’s waiting for a photographer extracurricular nan shelter’s cartoon-style play center. Cats gaffe successful and retired of their miniature palazzo, vanishing and reappearing arsenic if done unseen doors. Khong watches them and wonders what will abstracted us from them successful nan future.

“What are we going to worth astir our acquisition arsenic quality beings?” she asks. “And tin we bent connected to nan portion of america that is creaturely, a portion of quality and successful person?”

Catch Rachel Khong astatine nan L.A. Times Festival of Books April 19 from 12-1 p.m. connected nan sheet “From nan Terrible to nan Beautiful to nan Surreal: Short Stories pinch Long Shadows” featuring Nora Lange, Elaine Hsieh Chou, Elizabeth Crane and Barbara DeMarco-Barrett. Tickets required.

Rudi, an L.A. native, is simply a freelance creation and civilization writer. She’s astatine activity connected her debut caller astir a stuttering student journalist.