All You Can Ever Know

Very good memoir - Chung writes of adoption from the perspective of an adoptee. It is a deep look at the many ways adoption shaped her. She tells of the hardships of being different from her community. She takes a loving and truthful approach to how her parents loved her and in some ways failed her. I enjoyed reading it very much. I am looking forward to reading her next book.

This book doesn't feel like it has much content - it could be an essay or a novella length piece. The part at the end about the authors relationship with her sister is the only real interesting part. Her experiences with pregnancy and childbirth and parenting weren't what I signed up for here.

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 didn't expect this to yank so hard on my heartstrings, but it did. There were moments I could relate to Nicole's story (growing up Asian with the kids who spoke sing-song fake Chinese words to me while pulling their eyes into slits), but what really got to me was when she started building a relationship with her sister. I couldn't imagine missing out on growing up with my sister and I loved that Nicole got to connect so deeply with Cindy.

I just loved this.

This is a beautifully complex memoir. There are big questions with no easy answers, but moving prose along the way.

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!