Goodbye, Vitamin

Goodbye, Vitamin is Rachel Khong’s first novel, and some aspects of her background influence the text. Her grandmother had Alzheimer’s Disease, and Khong incorporates her firsthand experience of a loved one with Alzheimer's into the text, from details about symptoms and medical care to the sorts of questions Ruth, the protagonist, asks herself as she tries and sometimes struggles to care for her father. The methodical recording of Ruth’s family’s journey to keep Howard safe and comfortable as his illness progresses speaks to Khong’s own lived experience.

While race is not a dominant theme within the text, there are moments in the text that speak to Khong’s experience as an Asian American woman. Ruth is half-Chinese, and her mother, Annie, was born in China and adopted as an infant. Rachel Khong, too, is Asian American, born in Malaysia to a Malaysian Chinese family and raised in California, where Goodbye, Vitamin is set.

In the book, Ruth shares a memory in which a man approached her and her friend Bonnie, who is half-Armenian, and “called us pretty, which was exciting at the moment, but we’d learn, later in life, that men tended to say that when they found your appearance confusing, when they couldn’t tell what you were” (37).