A review by minheeshock
All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

5.0

After I finished “All You Can Ever Know,” I wanted to press it into the hands of my loved ones and say, “This is the book you must read if you want to understand me. THIS is a book finally written for me.”

In "All You Can Ever Know," Chung shares her experience as a transracial adoptee. It is an exploration of family and identity and the tension between the two – how family forms your identity and subsumes your identity for the sake of the tribe. It is a topic I know well. Like Chung, I am Korean by ethnicity but was adopted and raised by a white family. It takes place in a setting — the Pacific Northwest — that is also the backdrop to my life.

Chung was born premature at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Her birth family gave her up for adoption for reasons that reveal themselves as the book goes on. She was adopted by a loving couple in southern Oregon. Teased and bullied by her classmates as a child, Chung always wondered about her birth family and was faced with the limits of what she could know, giving the book its title. One day she found a business card with a lawyer’s name on it in her parents’ files. She called the number and set off a series of events that connected her with her birth family.

I grew up in Port Orchard on Washington’s Kitsap Peninsula. Because of its proximity to Bremerton, the navy town just north, my town was more diverse than Chung’s. But still I stuck out. I was browner than the mostly white community surrounding me. Raised by a white family, I didn’t have much in common with the people of color I met either.

My family was very loving and I found a community of friends I have to this day, but often I had to face how alone I was. That’s why reading “All You Can Ever Know” feels like such a solace — for the first time the story being told is my story too.

With honesty and clarity, Chung shares experiences and emotions I’ve had too — some of which I haven’t been brave enough to write about or even verbalize: How her parents completely accepted her into the family but weren’t prepared to acknowledge the things that made her different; how pain over adoption is kept secret because it feels like a betrayal of the community who raised you; how having a child of her own made her curiosity about her origins all the more urgent until she couldn’t deny it any longer.

For me, the book’s biggest revelation is about narratives — the stories we tell to make sense of ourselves. I don’t know my origins or reasons for being on this earth. I was told I was abandoned at a police station in South Korea, and I can’t even know if that’s true. How can I make sense of my story?

Chung’s parents told her it was God’s plan for her to be with them. My non-religious community told me that it was destiny, meant to be. But if it was written in the stars, there’s no room to question it. The counter-narrative states that you can’t feel whole until you’ve found your origins – that reunion will heal the wounds in your heart.

Neither sits right with me. One approach prioritizes the role of the adoptive family, while the other prioritizes the birth culture. What if there’s another option?

Chung shows us a new narrative that belongs to the adoptee alone: the fate of the adoptee is to always be questing, processing and reinventing the meaning of family and heritage. As the book goes on, Chung finds answers, but they lead to even more questions and open up more wounds, while healing others. At book’s end, her journey isn’t over.

Quoting a birth mother, she writes, “If there’s something that everyone should know about adoption, it’s that there’s no end to this. There’s no closure.”

My grandpa just turned 98. On one visit, he looked at me, his eyes moistening, and said in his slow Southern drawl, “We sure are lucky to have you. Do you ever think about finding your parents?” For the first time, someone in my family was asking about my adoption. At his old age, he still wants to know and connect. He remembers that my experience in the family is different.

“I don’t know, Grandpa, I just don’t know,” I said.

Nicole Chung’s memoir has shown me how an adoptee’s search evolves but never ends. That is my story. I know this answer is the best I can give right now, and I know someday my answer may change. For now, it is enough.