All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir

by Nicole Chung

Overview

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER

This 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 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948226370
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	10/15/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	94,312
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Nicole Chung is the author of the national bestseller All You Can Ever Know. Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Time, Library Journal, and many other outlets, All You Can Ever Know was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a semifinalist for the PEN Open Book Award, an Indies Choice Honor Book, and an official Junior Library Guild selection. Chung is a contributing writer and editor at The Atlantic, and her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Time, The Guardian, and Vulture, among others. In 2021, she was named to the Good Morning America AAPI Inspiration List honoring those “making Asian American history right now.”

Read an Excerpt

The story my mother told me about them was always the same.


Your birth parents had just moved here from Korea. They thought they wouldn’t be able to give you the life you deserved.


It’s the first story I can recall, one that would shape a hundred others once I was old enough, brave enough, to go looking.


When I was very young—three or four, I’ve been told—I would crawl into my mother’s lap before asking to hear it once more. Her arms would have encircled me, solid and strong where I was slight, pale, and freckled against my light-brown skin. Sometimes, in these half-imagined memories, I picture her in the dress she wore in our only family portrait from this era, lilac with flutter sleeves—an oddly delicate choice for my solid and sensible mother. At that age, a shiny black bowl cut and bangs would have framed my face, a stark contrast to the reddish-brown perm my mother had when I was young; I was no doubt growing out of toddler cuteness by then. But my mom thought I was beautiful. When you think of someone as your gift from God, maybe you can never see them as anything else.


How could they give me up?

I must have asked her this question a hundred times, and my mother never wavered in her response. Years later, I would wonder if someone told her how to comfort me—if she read the advice in a book, or heard it from the adoption agency—or if, as my parent, she simply knew what she ought to say. What I wanted to hear.


The doctors told them you would struggle all your life. Your birth parents were very sad they couldn’t keep you, but they thought adoption was the best thing for you.

Even as a child, I knew my line, too.

They were right, Mom.

By the time I was five or six years old, I had heard the tale of my loving, selfless birth parents so many times I could recite it myself. I collected every fact I could, hoarding the sparse and faded glimpses into my past like bright, favorite toys. This may be all you can ever know, I was told. It wasn’t a joyful story through and through, but it was their story, and mine, too. The only thing we had ever shared. And as my adoptive parents saw it, the story could have ended no other way.


So when people asked about my family, my features, the fate I’d been dealt, maybe it isn’t surprising how I answered—first in a childish, cheerful chirrup, later in the lecturing tone of one obliged to educate. I strove to be calm and direct, never giving anything away in my voice, never changing the details. Offering the story I’d learned so early was, I thought, one way to gain acceptance. It was both the excuse for how I looked and a way of asking pardon for it.


Looking back, of course I can make out the gaps—the places where my mother and father must have made their own guesses, the pauses where harder questions could have followed: Why didn’t they ask for help? What if they had changed their minds? Would you have adopted me if you’d been able to have a child of your own?


Family lore given to us as children has such hold over us, such staying power. It can form the bedrock of another kind of faith, one to rival any religion, informing our beliefs about ourselves, and our families, and our place in the world. When tiny, traitorous doubts arose, when I felt lost or alone or confused about all the things I couldn’t know, I told myself that something as noble as my birth parents’ sacrifice demanded my trust. My loyalty.


They thought adoption was the best thing for you.

Above all, it was a legend formed and told and told again because my parents wanted me to believe that my birth family had loved me from the start, that my parents, in turn, were meant to adopt me, and that the story unfolded as it should have. This was the foundation on which they built our family, and as I grew, I too staked my identity on it. That story, a lifeline cast when I was too young for deeper questions, continued to bring me comfort. Years later, grown up and expecting a child of my own, I would search for my birth family still wanting to believe in it.

Editorial Reviews

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography
Long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award
Finalist for the ABA Indies Choice Adult Nonfiction Book of the Year Award
A Finalist for the 2019 NAIBA Book of the Year in Nonfiction
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, NPR, Time, The Boston Globe, and more

"[A] deeply moving and profound account of [Chung's] life as a Korean American adoptee, as she grows up and strives to understand her identity . . . All You Can Ever Know honors the grand complexity of love, family, and identity, while showing us how these things can save us and break us with devastating clarity and beauty." ―Today

"Chung’s memoir is more than a thoughtful consideration of race and heritage in America. It is the story of sisters finding each other, overcoming bureaucracy, abuse, separation, and time." ―The New Yorker

"Chung’s search for her biological roots . . . has to be one of this year’s finest books, let alone memoirs . . . Chung has literary chops to spare and they’re on full display in descriptions of her need, pain and bravery." ―The Washington Post

"The book is an extraordinary, honest, nuanced and compassionate look at adoption, race in America and families in general. It's also such an engaging read. I stayed up way too late one night reading it because the story just pulled me in. I read it months ago, and I still think about it and quote some of the lines in this book at least weekly." ―Jasmine Guillory, Code Switch, NPR

" Revisits her coming of age with a deep melancholy, favoring clarity over sentimentality . . . Chung emotionally relays her journey to becoming a writer―her path of negotiating and asserting her identity―and to learning about her birth family’s rather traumatic past. Yet her empathetic, graceful prose shines brightest when she casts her gaze elsewhere: on her adoptive parents―their warmth and their secrets, their struggle to talk about race―or on her birth sister, Cindy, who opens Chung’s eyes in adulthood, while similarly trying to find herself. Through them, Chung reveals a family story of heartbreaking truth―personal in its detail, universal in its complexity." ―Entertainment Weekly

"The honesty with which Chung grapples with this kind of racial erasure is a hallmark of her stunning debut memoir, a book that confronts enormous pain with precision, clarity, and grace . . . In addition to being deeply thoughtful and moving, the book is a fiercely compelling page-turner . . . But what shines through this beautiful book is her clear-eyed compassion for all her relations, her powerful desire for connection, her bold pursuit of her own identity, and the sheer creative energy it took to build her own family tree, to 'discover and tell another kind of story.'" ―The Boston Globe

" A landmark in the literature of adoption, and will be of enduring value to people looking for advice about raising a child of a different race." ―Marion Winik, Critical Mass: The Blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors

"A tender, unsentimental memoir . . . All You Can Ever Know has the patient pacing of a mystery and the philosophical heft of a skeptic’s undertaking." ―Newsday

"What gives All You Can Ever Know its power is the emotional honesty in every line, essential to the telling of a story so personal . . . All You Can Ever Know, sometimes painfully and always beautifully, explores what it means to be adopted, to be a different race from the family you grew up in, and to later create a family of your own." ―The Seattle Times

"Chung’s dynamic prose tackles identity and the forces that shape it . . . What Chung painstakingly unearths about her birth family is thrilling and unsettling, and her articulation of her findings averts tropish feel-good stereotypes. Here, the open wound at the heart of this exquisite narrative heals slightly skewed, exactly as it should." ―Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

"Raw, open, forthright, Chung’s personal odyssey is an intimate journey toward self-understanding and acceptance." ―The Christian Science Monitor

"This touching memoir explores issues of identity, racism, motherhood, and sisterhood with eloquence and grace. Highly recommended." ―Library Journal (starred review)

"[A] stunning memoir . . . Chung’s writing is vibrant and provocative as she explores her complicated feelings about her transracial adoption (which she 'loved and hated in equal measure') and the importance of knowing where one comes from." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Highly compelling for its depiction of a woman's struggle to make peace with herself and her identity, the book offers a poignant depiction of the irreducibly complex nature of human motives and family ties. A profound, searching memoir about 'finding the courage to question what I'd always been told.'" ―Kirkus Reviews

"This book moved me to my very core. As in all her writing, Nicole Chung speaks eloquently and honestly about her own personal story, then widens her aperture to illuminate all of us. All You Can Ever Know is full of insights on race, motherhood, and family of all kinds, but what sets it apart is the compassion Chung brings to every facet of her search for identity and every person portrayed in these pages. This book should be required reading for anyone who has ever had, wanted, or found a family―which is to say, everyone." ―Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere

“Adoption is neither an incident nor a process―it is an evergreen story of lives growing and resisting simple definitions. Chung’s All You Can Ever Know takes the grammar of adoption―nouns, verbs, and direct object―and with extraordinary integrity remakes them into a narrative about what it means to be a subject. A primary document of witness, Chung writes her memoir as a transracial adoptee with honesty, wisdom, and love. Her search and what she discovers offer us life’s meaning and purpose of the very highest order.” ―Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko

From the Publisher

Narrator Janet Song explores the complex emotions of adopted children in this memoir about family. Song recounts the confusing upbringing of author Nicole Chung, a Korean who was adopted by Americans and raised in a small, mostly Caucasian town in Oregon. Song’s narration is sensitive as she delivers details of subtle discrimination against Chung and her nagging questions about her biological parents. Song’s tender voice draw listeners loser to Chung's dilemmas. Her pace is consistently steady as the story moves between the present and past, creating a seamless listening experience. Listeners are immersed in an emotional journey of one woman's discovery of her past as she begins her own family. This contemporary exploration of identity will resonate with many listeners. M.R. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2018 - AudioFile

Narrator Janet Song explores the complex emotions of adopted children in this memoir about family. Song recounts the confusing upbringing of author Nicole Chung, a Korean who was adopted by Americans and raised in a small, mostly Caucasian town in Oregon. Song’s narration is sensitive as she delivers details of subtle discrimination against Chung and her nagging questions about her biological parents. Song’s tender voice draw listeners loser to Chung's dilemmas. Her pace is consistently steady as the story moves between the present and past, creating a seamless listening experience. Listeners are immersed in an emotional journey of one woman's discovery of her past as she begins her own family. This contemporary exploration of identity will resonate with many listeners. M.R. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2018 - AudioFile

2018-06-27
An essayist and editor's account of her search for and reconnection with the parents who gave her up for adoption.Chung, the editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine, had always been obsessed with the Korean birthparents she had never met. Her adoptive mother and father told her a story that emphasized the birthparents' loving selflessness and how "[t]hey thought adoption was the best thing for me." But the "legend" they created was not enough to sate Chung's curiosity about the past or ease her occasional discomfort at being the Korean child of white parents in a largely Caucasian Oregon community. A year after she graduated from college, Chung discovered a way to work around the legalities of what had been a closed adoption to find out more about her birthparents. However, it was not until she became pregnant a few years later that she decided to make contact. Eager to know why she had been given up for adoption but troubled that she was betraying the trust of her adoptive parents, the author quietly moved forward with her quest. Much of what she learned—e.g., that she had been born premature and had two sisters—she already knew. Other details, like the fact that her parents had told everyone she had died at birth, raised a host of new questions. Just before Chung gave birth, her sister Cindy made contact. She revealed that their mother had been abusive and that their father had been the one who had decided on adoption. Fear of becoming like her birth mother and anger at both parents gradually gave way to the mature realization that her adoption "was not a tragedy" but rather "the easiest way to solve just one of too many problems." Highly compelling for its depiction of a woman's struggle to make peace with herself and her identity, the book offers a poignant depiction of the irreducibly complex nature of human motives and family ties.A profound, searching memoir about "finding the courage to question what I'd always been told."

Kirkus Reviews