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    All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir
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    All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir
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    All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir
    Ebook265 pages4 hours

    All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir

    By Nicole Chung

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    NATIONAL BESTSELLER

    What does it mean 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCatapult
    Release dateOct 2, 2018
    ISBN9781936787982
    Author

    Nicole Chung

    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, Time, 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 a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Chung's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Time, GQ, Slate, and the Guardian. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she now lives in the Washington, DC, area.

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    Reviews for All You Can Ever Know

    4/5

    146 ratings18 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Gives a perspective on transracial adoption that I'd wondered about. How does that loved little child really fit in to a community of white only families if they are not white? Nicole does a great job looking at the issue. Really made me think
    • 5/5
      What a thoughtful and thought provoking book on being adopted by parents who don’t share your racial identity.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Best for: Anyone interested in a beautifully written memoir that explores adoption, transracial adoption, race, and family. In a nutshell: Author Nicole Chung was born to Korean parents in the US and adopted by a white couple. In this book, she explores what it meant to be one of the only Asian people around growing up, as well as how she connected with some of her birth family.Worth quoting:“People were not so simple; people could be and think and want many different things at once.”Why I chose it:I’ve seen so many people online raving about it.Review:This is a lovely book. When thinking about words that could describe it, I could also have gone with powerful, honest, or insightful. But I chose lovely because the writing is just that, as is the way the author handles complex and complicated issues. Nicole Chung was born two months premature to parents who had moved to the US from Korea just five years prior to her birth. They already had one child together; they chose to place Ms. Chung up for adoption, but not through what we would probably think of as regular channels (i.e., an agency). Instead, someone working in the hospital knows the couple who would become Ms. Chung’s adoptive parents and alerts them to this possibility.Ms. Chung is raised in the pacific northwest, in a part of Oregon with very few other Asian individuals. Her parents are always open about the fact of her adoption, but they don’t take steps to help Ms. Chung learn about her Korean heritage, and she doesn’t not pursue it independently much until she reaches college. Once she is married, she decides to see if she can get in touch with her birth family, motivated further when she learns that she may have a sister.This book explores one story, and it is not claiming to be universal, but still, the issues it addresses can apply to so many of us, I think. There are obviously some specifics (e.g. the reality of transracial adoption) that may only be directly relatable to similarly situated individuals, but the overall concepts of belonging and family, about other possible life scenarios, about whether a choice was the best one (and if that is even the right question to ask), about how our families influence who we become, and even about nature vs. nurture, they all take up space here. I’ll be thinking about this one long after I pick up my next read.
    • 5/5
      Phenomenal. Incredibly poignant memoir about adoption, family, race, and just being a human.
    • 5/5
      This book isn't just for adoptees. Nicole Chung shares her exciters from being bullied as a child to dealing with differences in identity to not fitting in to motherhood and sisterhood. It was a very easy read and interesting to explore.
    • 5/5
      Beautifully written. Honest. Revelatory. Redefines societal standards of the word “family.” Though it was a quick read, each page unfolding to reveal another piece of Nicole’s complicated background and history, it probably could’ve been shorter. Despite it being a memoir, it still kept the reader guessing if she’d reunite with her birth parents and how that reunion would be received. I’m glad she avoid typical cliches and tropes, with her birth mother and adopted parents. That was refreshing, albeit a little sad. Favorite parts were the recounts of her early childhood in the first half of the book. The introduction of the two sisters was a confusing transition because I had gotten acclimated to Nicole as the sole narrator. The only people and stories I felt weren’t resolved was her half-sister Jessica and her mother. But perhaps that’s the point.
    • 5/5
      A guide for others who have the strength to reunite.
    • 5/5
      Raw, honest narrative of a transracial adoptee’s identity crisis and journey through healing. As a TRA, I am comforted in the authors painful truth about adoption and reunion.
    • 3/5
      I found the book a bit slow moving, but was interested in the topics of adoption and racism. I know people similar situations to the author and this gave me insight to what they have gone through and some emotions that they may deal with.
    • 4/5
      This is an unflinching glimpse at the complex nature of identity as a transracial adoptee. As someone who wants to adopt her children someday, I found a lot to chew on. This is an engaging and thought-provoking memoir.
    • 4/5
      Serviceable memoir about the impact of transracial adoption on a young woman of Korean descent who was raised by white parents. When the author goes looking for her birth parents, she unearths the disturbing secrets of her family of origin. A quick read, but padded with oddly selected details, much repetition, and too many rhetorical questions.
    • 3/5
      Ponderous, plainly written, some useful perspectives but i couldn't relate to her child centric traditional straight laced POV and the writing was uninspired and slow, it was a slog to get through, honestly
    • 4/5
      A sensitive portrait of a Korean girl adopted by a whilte family and raised in a white community in Northwest USA. Nicole shares her quest to find her identity and self acceptance through her childhood and young adulthood. Nicole Chung gives insight ito the complexities of belonging to two cultures and occasionally feeling that one does not belong anywhere.
    • 4/5
      read this for work but happily!

      i'm adopted and so so many of the questions she asked in here really struck a chord with me. she's a super articulate and moving author while still writing with a definite purpose. loved her work, will definitely read more. i feel like this review is terrible bc i'm still processing but yah it was really lovely.
    • 4/5
      This was an interesting read but not one that kept my interest all that much. There where times when I felt it was being drawn out. This is my first book by Nicole Chung. I am not familiar with her writing style.In All you can ever know, Nicole is writing about her adoption and her struggles in wanting to learn about her birth parents. Her struggles of being adopted by white people. Not feeling she belongs in her adoptive family or in the school she was attending since she didn't see other Korean children.I felt that Nicole's adoptive parents were wrong in not telling her things or even teaching her a little about her Korean Nationality. This was a good book for our book club because it got the whole group talking and sharing our thoughts.
    • 5/5
      This is more than just a story about adoption. This book is the type of book that you have no idea when you start reading, but in the end, you love it so much. Khamsa hamnida Nicole-noona for this beautiful book!
    • 3/5
      I was eager to read Nicole Chung's memoir -- there has been lots of buzz about this and being Chinese American I thought this would resonate. Growing up in a very white neighborhood of upstate New York, I could relate to Nicole's feeling of alienation and the looks and stares that she got in school or around town. Although I'm not adopted, I remember how strange it felt for my sister and I to be the only Asian kids in our school. Questions like 'why are your eyes like that' or 'how do your parents tell you apart' might come across as naive curiosity, but still sting. For Chung, having to also deal with the uncertainty of adoption must have made this even more difficult.However, I felt like this memoir was too angst-ridden. Yes, I understand that adoption carries a psychological burden, but there were times reading this book where I wished I could tell her to just get over it. There so many bigger tragedies in life -- the loss of a spouse, a parent, a child, physical abuse, war, terminal illness -- I could go on and on. Reading this felt like a slog through a 'woe is me' type of story. The one redeeming part of this memoir was finding a sister to love, beautifully written and enjoyable to witness.