A NATIONAL BESTSELLERThis beloved memoir “is an extraordinary, honest, nuanced and compassionate look at adoption, race in America and families in general” (Jasmine Guillory, Code Switch, NPR)What does it means to lose your roots—within your culture, within your family—and what happens when you find them?Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and … premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, prepackaged myth. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But as Nicole grew up—facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn’t see, finding her identity as an Asian American and as a writer, becoming ever more curious about where she came from—she wondered if the story she’d been told was the whole truth.
With warmth, candor, and startling insight, Nicole Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, which coincided with the birth of her own child. All You Can Ever Know is a profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections and the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets—vital reading for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong.
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Beautiful, heartrending and thought provoking – I’d never before truly reckoned with the complexities of adoption that Nicole so elegantly explores in this book.
Nicole Chung’s debut, All You Can Ever Know, is a memoir of the search for her Korean birth parents. Filled with graceful prose and heaps of empathy, she confronts the ways in which traditional adoption narratives rarely tell the whole story and shows how well-intentioned white adoptive parents are often wildly unprepared for raising children of color in a society that is nowhere near the post-racial future of many Americans’ imaginations.
This book was recommended for our book club to read. We try to read different genres, so a memoir was a good selection.
I found this story to be very interesting and important. I have an adopted grandchild, so it was eye opening to see how important it is to help her fill in the blanks as she gets older. The author did a good job of describing her internal struggle with identity and her decisions to truly discover who she is while still acknowledging and respecting her adoptive parents.
I am happy for her that she gained a true sister in her searching. I would have liked to know. Ore about her conversations with her adoptive parents while she was building these relationships with her birth family.
Another aspect that is important in this story is how underlying and unintentional racism played a part in her life. There will be much to discuss at our book club meeting! This was definitely a book worth reading.
A Korean-American woman, adopted as a baby by a white family and raised in a predominantly white community, examines issues of cultural identity, loss, and family in this thoughtful and moving memoir.
A memoir is difficult when the subject is an unexceptional person whose life had few interesting aspects. This would have been a fine short story. “Mommy, am I a real Korean?” her daughter asks her at age five. She thought about it. She had been adopted by a white family after her Korean parents gave her up. She had always been told it was a loving sacrifice and was “for the best.” She believed it. It turned out not to be entirely true, and it had made for a difficult childhood for her – growing up looking different from her parents and from everyone else in her small Oregon town. She had discovered the real truth as an adult, and now she faced her young daughter, questioning her own heritage.
Then, pick up the book at chapter . . . well, there are no chapter numbers, so all I can say is about four chapters from the end. The story about how she decided to learn to speak Korean, as her daughter was also learning, and through the language she discovered a missing piece of her heritage is a beautiful little story. It’s not a novel. The problem with this book as a memoir is that the first 85% is a very long-winded and emotionally flat recounting of the author’s childhood, marriage, and pregnancy. She wasn’t really tortured by her adoptive status, but she tries to make that dramatic, but in a very detached way. There is very little angst or any other emotion in the storytelling. If you’ve ever listened to a woman tell the story of her pregnancy and birth, it was probably more interesting than this one – and much, much shorter.
I appreciate the importance of a story like this to people who were adopted, but I’m sure there are more heart-felt versions of this kind of story. I’m sure the expression of exclusion and isolation from a non-White person living in White family and a very White part of the country is poignant to some readers and it’s a message worth delivering. The point of wanting a connection to your family and history is also a familiar theme. In a novel, these themes would have been woven into a compelling story with characters and plot and action and emotion and crisis and resolution. Here, it’s a dull recitation of the author’s life without much to make you want to keep turning the pages. There is also a stark absence of discussion about the love and support provided by her adoptive parents, and how they impacted and shaped the author’s life — it’s as if they didn’t really count, which is disappointing.
There is a very narrow audience that is going to love this book. I’m not part of that audience. Be careful about whether you really want to spend the energy and time diving very deeply into this shallow pond.
I read this book as the selection for my book club. I’m marginally glad I read it, because there are some perspectives here that are worth wile. They just could have been written so much better. I have a difficult time understanding all the acclaim the book has garnered. (It’s also amazing that a major publisher with a high-profile book has an obvious grammar error in the book blurb on amazon, which may be fixed someday, but for now after 500+ reviews it’s pretty sloppy.)
This is a fascinating look at one woman’s experience as a Korean child adopted into a white family living in a small, predominantly white town and what it was like to search for her birth family and how that impacted her life as well as her adoptive parents’ lives. This was touching and informative.
This is the story of a Korean girl adopted by a white couple and her feelings about not fitting in and ultimately wanting to find her birth family. Slow going but would resound to adoptees I would think
Felt I was reading the life stories of my own children!
Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know is the memoir of growing up Korean in a white family in small town Oregon circa 1985. I was interested in it as an adoption memoir, and Chung certainly touches on her emotions regarding feelings of abandonment and not fitting in. Much of the latter owes, it seems from the book, to the fact that Chung was raised in a town so small and so white that the only other people of color she ever saw were a handful of Asians in stereotypical roles (aka, dry cleaning and Chinese takeout). Chung’s experience was also colored by the fact that she knew much of her early history (born prematurely, immigrant parents unable to cope with the expected special needs, etc.) and as she describes, her birth mother went as far as to attempt to make contact with her when she was still quite young.
Ultimately All You Can Ever Know vacillates between Chung’s memoir of a mostly unhappy childhood and then her adult quest to locate her birth family. This she does successfully and, owing to the relationship she forges with a sister, she is also able to tell the family’s story, frequently woven through chapters of Chung’s own experiences.
Final verdict: I liked it, but I didn’t love it. There are a lot of memoirs out there, and a lot of adoption-related books, memoirs, advice, and so on as well. Certainly there’s an audience for this work, but on the whole it’s a pretty niche read.
(This review was originally published at https://www.thisyearinbooks.com/2018/12/all-you-can-ever-know.html)