All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

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 early 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 hopes of giving her a better life; that forever feeling slightly out of place was simply her fate as a transracial adoptee. But as she grew up—facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn’t see, finding her identity as an Asian American and 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, 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.

Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography / Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award / Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, NPR, The Boston Globe, TIME, Newsday, Library Journal, BuzzFeed, Real Simple, Paste Magazine, Chicago Public Library, Seattle Public Library, Goodreads, Shelf Awareness, Electric Literature, and more.

My Verdict

Chung writes with an empathy that considers the perspectives of everyone involved in her adoption story: herself, her adoptive parents and her birth family. Early in the book she writes a chapter entirely in the third person, told from the perspective of one of her birth sisters, Cindy. She continues to tell the story of her birth family in this way, detailing what their life looked like before and after the adoption. The detail is useful for the reader to understand that Chung's search will ultimately be successful, but the book is still paced like a mystery: the how and the when and the why of Chung's reunion are what drive the tale.

Woven through the book is Chung's personal experience of her adoption: the racism that she faced as a child in a predominantly white town, the feeling of not quite belonging, the love she feels for her adoptive parents, and the way she found herself through writing. Early in the book she recounts a story of being newly out of college and meeting a couple who are hoping to adopt a child from another country. They ask Chung if she "minded" her adoption, and it's this question — and Chung's inability to answer it quickly or easily — that frames much of the book.

When she writes about the racism she faced as a child in her predominantly white town, she makes sure to include her confusion as well as the difficulty she has explaining this to her white parents, who loved her absolutely.

The latter half of the book details what she learned about her family: much of which upends the legend she has always heard. Though Chung has been complicating most traditional, prepackaged adoption narratives throughout the book, it's when she is faced with the differences in her own story that the lesson reveals itself to the reader — who begins to see just how varied adoption stories can be.

I enjoyed this book and for me it put a face to the complex topic of interracial adoption. I gave the book 4 stars.