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All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir
Written by Nicole Chung
Narrated by Janet Song
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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 the same warmth, candor, and startling insight that has made her a beloved voice, 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 for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong.
Book Actions
Start ListeningBook Information
All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir
Written by Nicole Chung
Narrated by Janet Song
Description
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 the same warmth, candor, and startling insight that has made her a beloved voice, 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 for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong.
About the author
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Reviews
What a thoughtful and thought provoking book on being adopted by parents who don’t share your racial identity.
Rating: 5Gives 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
Rating: 4Phenomenal. Incredibly poignant memoir about adoption, family, race, and just being a human.
Rating: 5Best 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.
Rating: 4A 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.
Rating: 4
As someone considering adoption, this was very poignant and very important.
Rating: 5This is an amazing book... if you're someone who's thinking about adoption or an adoptee yourself, you should definitely read this. It's the beautifully written story of Nicole Chung's personal experience as an adopted child who seeks to find her family. It's honest, heart-wrenching and heartwarming at alternate turns. I wanted to hear more, but I appreciated having such an honest look at cross-cultural adoption and the need for more honesty and empathy in considering such things.
Rating: 5A book hasn’t made me cry in a long time.
Rating: 5What a beautiful memoir about finding ones roots. I truly loved it!
Rating: 5read 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.
Rating: 4i'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.
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.
Rating: 4I 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.
Rating: 3