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3.97 AVERAGE
3.97 AVERAGE
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
This was a challenging subject. Nicole Chung, an infant of Korean descent, was adopted by a loving, white family but always felt a huge disconnect between her race and that of her family. She felt like her family was not cognizant of the importance and impact of her race and her place in the world. Her adoptive parents certainly misstepped in not recognizing her racial difference and at one point in actually throwing away a letter from her birth mother, that she didn't find out about until years later. This book is actually a strong argument for open adoption at the least, and a caution against transracial adoption. In the absence of any real information, Chung (a name she took later from her birth family) filled in the gaps by imagining loving parents who gave her up for the best of reasons and intentions. The truth when she finally learned it, wasn't as simple or attractive. The book is a chronicle of her search for and integration of some members of her birth family into her life as an adult. I felt bad for her real (adoptive) parents throughout. She seems to dismiss the 20 years of intense parenting as not good enough. The book was also repetitive and heavy on how she felt, which would have been fine if the same feelings weren't repeated throughout.
Read this start-to-finish in 3 hours. Beautifully written. Was hooked from the first page.
I'm not sure that I've ever read a memoir by someone who had been adopted as a baby, so this book, to me, was riveting. It raised so many questions to me, and it exposed me to a totally different life. I appreciated the insight into adoption, not to mention into cross-cultural adoption, and I found myself reflecting often upon my childhood and the lack of diversity I experienced as a child, and what it must have been like to be on the other side of the coin. This wasn't a perfect book, but what it lacked in perfection it made up for in demanding I think.
I love the idea of this book, after all our lives are similar in ways many other peoples’ lives are not. However I found some of the book repetitive and heavy-handed. Show me, don’t tell me, about the angst about meeting biological parents. Show me the relationship with your new sister (and whatever happened to the other sister who was not mentioned very often at all?). It’s a memoir with good bones but not great execution
It is unfortunate that this is THE book on transracial adoption. We need more.
It is unfortunate that this is THE book on transracial adoption. We need more.
I consider myself a well-read, progressive and unbiased person, so when I started reading Nicole Chung's memoir about growing up as a Korean-American adoptee, I didn't think there would be much for me to learn about the experience. After all, one of my closest friends is a Korean adoptee, and my first cousin was adopted from China.
However, I was wrong.
I learned so so much about what it's like to grow up in a cross-racial, cross-cultural adoption from this narrative. I read it with my Korean-American friend, which was an amazing experience. We texted about particular parts of the memoir that resonated with her life, and there were many that did. I realized that there is so much that goes unspoken about being an adoptee, so much that is erased with the narrative that "everything was meant to be" and "you're so much happier than you would have been."
And the thing is, Chung really DOES have a good life with a loving family, but Chung's story complicates the widespread notion of selfless birth parents and even-more-selfless adoptive parents. This is not one of those flashy primetime narratives that you usually read about adoption where the adoptive parents are awful human beings or the birth parents challenge the adoptive parents rights in court; this is a story of flawed human beings making difficult decisions. It's about people trying there best and sometimes falling short, of parenting in all its good intentions, challenges, and glory.
Just four stars instead of five because sometimes the writing fell a little flat for me, but overall, I highly recommend this book, especially for anyone in close relationship with cross-cultural adoptive parents or adoptees.
However, I was wrong.
I learned so so much about what it's like to grow up in a cross-racial, cross-cultural adoption from this narrative. I read it with my Korean-American friend, which was an amazing experience. We texted about particular parts of the memoir that resonated with her life, and there were many that did. I realized that there is so much that goes unspoken about being an adoptee, so much that is erased with the narrative that "everything was meant to be" and "you're so much happier than you would have been."
And the thing is, Chung really DOES have a good life with a loving family, but Chung's story complicates the widespread notion of selfless birth parents and even-more-selfless adoptive parents. This is not one of those flashy primetime narratives that you usually read about adoption where the adoptive parents are awful human beings or the birth parents challenge the adoptive parents rights in court; this is a story of flawed human beings making difficult decisions. It's about people trying there best and sometimes falling short, of parenting in all its good intentions, challenges, and glory.
Just four stars instead of five because sometimes the writing fell a little flat for me, but overall, I highly recommend this book, especially for anyone in close relationship with cross-cultural adoptive parents or adoptees.
emotional
informative
reflective
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad