Nicole Chung takes on identity, loss and interracial adoption in her new memoir ‘All You Can Ever Know’

In October, Nicole Chung, a Korean American adoptee, published her memoir All You Can Ever Know, sparking a conversation about identity, loss, and family in transracial adoption. Born extremely premature, Chung was given up for adoption by her Korean parents and raised by a white family in Oregon. She is now editor-in-chief of Catapault magazine. All You Can Ever Know was long-listed for a PEN Open Book Award and short-listed for the 2018 Reading Women Nonfiction Award, and it was named a best book of the year by publications such as the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and Buzzfeed.

Chung will stop by Ross Commons at Drexel University on Thursday, March 7, to discuss the book with award-winning author Beth Kephart. She chatted with us about the challenges of writing something so deeply personal and the importance of giving transracial adoptees a voice in literature.

In All You Can Ever Know, you talk about how your first pregnancy led you to try to contact your birth family. You wanted to be able to tell your own children about their family histories, even if it meant confronting painful truths about your own adoption.

Part of it was wanting practical medical information. I felt that it was important to have medical information to share with them one day. At the time, I was young and healthy, so it was really the first time in my life that I had thought about having this medical information for myself. For example, when I was pregnant, I wondered why my birth mother had gone into labor with me early. But the bigger part of it was that becoming a parent made me think so much more about legacy and things that we have to pass on to our kids.

Before I read your book, I had never read anything that so fully represented the complexities of transracial adoption, how it’s not always a fairy tale ending for the families involved. How did you decide to offer your own story?

Growing up, I was a voracious reader. I didn’t get to read a lot of books about transracial adoption, so I knew very early that there was a dearth of literature about that. As I got older, I found that it was the same in adult literature. It was pretty clear to me by my late teens that the adoption conversation was dominated by people who weren’t adopted. It seemed that the overarching perspective was that of the parents who adopted, who were often white. It’s a valid perspective, but there was definitely a lack of literature and stories about adoption from the adoptee perspective.

That was driven home for me when I started publishing a few essays about it. People often reached out, saying, “I don’t read enough from this perspective” or, “This is a perspective that I hadn’t thought about before.” But it took me a while to get there. My search was over 10 years ago now, and I didn’t start writing about it until four to five years after that. But when I tried to write about it, it felt OK because I had processed enough about it and done enough work. I felt very secure in my various family relationships. I was at a point emotionally where I could write about the more difficult aspects of the story.

Did you think of writing the book as providing a resource for other adoptees going through some of the same feelings?

I thought about adoptees a lot when I was writing this book. I would think about fellow adoptees and how generous they had been with me, and what reading something like this, a thoughtful, nuanced narrative with complexity and ambivalence, when I was young would have meant to me. Like a lot of people, reading was how I tried to understand the world. I am very honored when people tell me it’s helpful to them, even though the book isn’t one that gives advice.

Beginning a correspondence with your sister, Cindy, really helped you feel a sense of belonging. Did that make you think more about how biological family plays into that sense of belonging, and why that sense is especially crucial for people of color in the United States?

I wouldn’t say that it’s more crucial for people of color than white people. But growing up, I didn’t really have a real understanding of my Korean American identity. The only sense I had of being Korean was that I was different. I didn’t really make my first Korean friends until college. By then, I was slowly and surely becoming really proud of who I was. But I do think that if I had grown up with just more friends or people around me who were Korean, I could have understood it in a very positive way instead of experiencing racist incidents as a little kid.

I was struck by your frankness about the difficulties of finding the truth and meeting family members in person, especially your dad. Was it hard to capture those very profound moments in words?

It was hard. In some ways, I was helped by time and distance. I felt a sense of responsibility because this is not a topic that’s widely published about in mainstream publishing. The adoptive experience is underrepresented, so I did feel some pressure because I knew I’d be joining a small class. I expected more scrutiny, like people thinking I was trying to say something universal about all transracial adoptions, which I’m very much not. My love for my adoptive parents is a very important part of the book. But for the most part, people have been really thoughtful and generous.

What unexpected challenges came with writing this memoir?

I work a full-time job and have two kids, so finding the time to write was part of it. My adoptive father also passed away the day before the manuscript was due to the copywriter. I loved the book tour and the events, but it was during the time when I was in early mourning for my dad. Travel was tiring. Even though it was a really exciting and wonderful year for the book, I had to find time to process and therapy. It’s been a really hard year for self-care.

6:30 to 8 p.m., Thursday, March 7, Ross Commons at Drexel University, 227 N. 34th St. Free. Information: bluestoop.org.