All You Can Ever Know
Ratings14
Average rating4.1
Chung investigates the mysteries and complexities of her transracial adoption in this chronicle of unexpected family for anyone who has struggled to figure out where they belong.
Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. She was told 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 Nicole grew up facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn't see, and wondered if the story she'd been told was the whole truth. Here Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, and chronicles the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets. -- adapted from jacket
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2020 – 5 stars. I wasn't ready for this book in 2018.
2018 – 4.5 stars. My feelings about this book, as a fellow Korean adopted, are very complicated, but I'm so glad to have read it. Thanks to Nicole Chung for sharing her life with us readers.
I really loved this book. The writing is lovely and the “plot” is a page turner. The author is able to sort of take a really complicated thing (her closed, transracial adoption) and honor every part of it and really dig into every corner of the emotions involved for her and others, and leave it complicated but not unresolved. If that makes sense? It's just a great book about identity and expectation and unwalked paths and family and the “origin stories” we tell ourselves.
I loved this and I wish it had been even longer - I tried to read it more slowly but before I knew it I had finished. I'm neither an adoptee nor an adoptive parent, but I am a parent (which is still weird to say!) and the theme of parenthood forcing you to reflect on who you are and what you want your children to inherit from you really resonated with me, especially as we're raising a boy in this incredibly toxic culture. Nicole writes so beautifully and with such clarity that I really felt that I was with her on every step of her journey to discover her birth family. I can't wait to read the next thing she writes, whether memoir, fiction, or anything else!
