All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung (Catapult)

One of the first stories Nicole Chung begged to hear when she was a little girl was the story of her adoption. Born premature to parents who had recently moved to the U.S. from Korea, Chung was told that her birth parents gave her up for adoption because they knew that would give her a better life. The people who brought her home were her mother and father from the time she was two and a half months old, still an infant who, at under six pounds, weighed less than many newborn babies. From that beginning, Chung was bathed in love that came from parents “who had chosen her,” she explained to friends when they asked why she didn’t look like her mother and father.

But in the small Oregon town where Chung grew up, there was nobody who looked like her, and once she was in school, a boy on the playground cruelly made this an issue by squinting his eyes at her and chanting “Me Chinee, me can’t see.” When Chung told her parents, they told her if she ignored her tormentor, he would stop. Instead his friends joined him in taunting her and her classmates pulled back from the child who was different. Chung’s Second Grade teacher remarked on her report card that she seemed unhappy but since Chung’s torture only took place on the playground when no adults were around, nothing was done about it. 

Suddenly Chung felt a deep separation, not only from her classmates but from her parents. At family gatherings, when she heard her cousins being singled out as resembling other relatives, she knew she was an outsider, loved and cherished but not one of the clan. Not until she was ten, on vacation with her parents in Seattle’s International District, did Chung see people who looked like her; she “couldn’t count all the Asians.”

Still she was loved, she made good grades, and she learned to find a refuge in books and in her own writing. But in the books she read and in her own stories, the heroines were always white girls. 

When Chung left her hometown to go to college, she found a world in which she was one of many Asian girls. The man she married was Irish and Lebanese. Being different was no longer a burden and a stigma. But when Chung learns that she’s pregnant and her doctor asks for her family medical history, she believes that, if only from a health standpoint, it’s time to find her birth parents.

Her quest is as emotionally difficult as her lack of knowledge ever was. Chung discovers she has two sisters, sharing a mother with one and both parents with the other, and she learns that her birth parents had told her sisters that she had died when she was born. Rapidly she and her full sister forge a connection through letters and Chung learns the dark secrets of her birth family--the cruelty and the violence that her birth mother inflicted upon the sister who is becoming her closest friend.

Life rarely provides fully happy endings and the story of Chung’s search is no exception. There are questions for which she will never have answers and she learns that although she’s in the nineteenth generation of her father’s family, she will never be included in the family history. In Korea she simply doesn’t exist.

Her memoir is a piercing look at the racism directed toward America’s model minority and the double-edged sword of bi-racial families formed by adoption. Chung shows the importance of blood relatives as well as the happiness that can come from parents who have chosen their child. “Being adopted,” Chung concludes, “probably saved my life.”~Janet Brown