All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This book was our selection this month for the Literary Lush Book Club. Unfortunately, Covid messed up our meeting plans, so we haven’t discussed it yet. In any case, as is our usual tradition for November, we read the “One Book One Bakersfield” selection. 

All You Can Ever Know is a deeply personal and emotionally raw account. The author was adopted as an infant. Her biological parents were Korean immigrants, and, as she discovered later, there were a lot of factors that went into her being placed for adoption. 

 

Her adoptive parents were white, and raised her in an overwhelmingly white town in central Oregon. As was common back in that time, they had no knowledge or resources on how to raise a non-white child in that situation, so she grew up facing constant racism and unable to talk with her parents about it. 

 

Later in life, after she married and was pregnant with her first child, she decided to find her birth parents. And her older sisters who had no idea she existed. (They were told the baby had died.) 

 

This book is all about the author’s life, and her complicated relationship with her family - all of it. 

 

I was surprised just how much this book emotionally affected me. My situation is very different, and yet, the complexities of family, of rejection, of abuse, and of the emotional ties to our parents that are complicated, are common to our stories in enough ways. 

 

The other thing that this book makes clear is that adoption is not the panacea that the anti-abortion lobby makes it out to be. While an adoption may be an unmitigated good for the parents, this isn’t the case for the child. At the heart of any adoption is a loss, a tragedy, a separation.  This doesn’t mean that adoption itself is bad - far from it in many situations. But it isn’t a simple happy ending, and it isn’t the solution that should be our first choice in every situation. 

 

I want to make clear that I do not mean to denigrate any of the adoptive parents I know (or the ones I don’t.) Most adoptive parents do so from good motives, do the best they know for their children, and are usually good people. I’m sure there are exceptions, but for the most part, the problem isn’t bad intent. 

 

The problem is that in many cases, a child is separated from parents not because those parents are dead or bad people, but because of poverty and the problems that come with poverty. 

 

By the way, I have some experience in this. For the past 22 years, I have represented Indian Tribes in Juvenile Dependency cases pursuant to the Indian Child Welfare Act. This means that I have seen up close which children are removed from homes, what those homes are like, and who the children end up with when adopted. 

 

I can say straight up that there are very few white middle-class children who are adopted out. For the most part, the people in the system are poor. Full stop. Poor. 

 

Yes, of course, drugs and alcohol are factors - but middle-class people have addictions without losing their children. And yes, there are abusive parents - but middle-class abusers usually get to keep their kids. It is poverty that makes the difference. 

 

So, in this book, you have a fairly poor immigrant family. The mother is mentally ill, but has no access to treatment. She gets pregnant, and finds to her dismay that the child is another girl. When she gives birth prematurely, the doctors tell the parents that the child will be profoundly disabled and need lifetime care - care that the parents cannot possibly afford. The father is worried already because the mother is abusive to her younger daughter, and he is concerned that the baby will be abused even more. 

 

And so, the decision to place the child for adoption is made. 

 

It is a decision that neither of the parents truly wants, but one they feel they have to make. In a better world, one where medical and mental health care was available, in a world where income was not so precarious, or even in a world where someone was willing to give some reassurance and encouragement, Nicole would not have been adopted out. 

 

There is an interesting line in the book on that note. 

 

Today, when I’m asked, I often say that I no longer consider adoption - individual adoptions, or adoption as a practice - in terms of right and wrong. I urge people to go into it with their eyes open, recognizing how complex it truly is; I encourage adopted people to tell their stories, our stories, and let no one else define these experiences for us. 

 

Later in the book, she discusses the wide range of opinions her fellow adoptees have expressed, from “closed adoptions like ours are little better than child trafficking” to “I never think about my birth family at all.” It is complicated, to put it mildly.

 

I should explain here as well that Nicole had and has a good relationship with her adoptive parents - the ones she considers her “real” parents. They are portrayed very positively in the book, as any errors they made were out of ignorance rather than malevolence, and they take Nicole’s quest for her birth family with incredible grace and encouragement. She is correct in her conclusion that her life was in most ways better because of the adoption. 

 

Her birth father also is portrayed in an empathetic manner. He is a flawed man, but he tries, and as a result, ends up being in Nicole’s life - and indeed, part of her extended family. 

 

Her birth mother, on the other hand, is more problematic. The middle sister was brutally abused by her, and in fact when her parents divorced, she insisted on living with her father. Because Nicole knew about the abuse, and bonded with her sister, she wasn’t really able to build a relationship with her birth mother, who never really took responsibility for that. It is sad, but entirely understandable. 

 

The book, like the relationships, is complicated. It doesn’t shy away from the tough stuff, and Nicole is strikingly open about her messy feelings. 

 

There are a few lines that I wanted to highlight that stood out to me. 

 

Family lore given to us as children has such hold over us, such staying power. In can form the bedrock of another kind of faith, one to rival any religion, informing our beliefs about ourselves, and our families, and our place in the world. When tiny, traitorous doubts arose, when I felt lost or alone or confused about all the things I couldn’t know, I told myself that something as noble as my birth parents’ sacrifice demanded my trust. My loyalty. 

 

Man, the family lore in my own family was really strong, and I tried so hard to believe it for so many years. We were different - in a good way. We were accepting and welcoming. We were the nice people. It really wasn’t until it was made clear that my wife was not accepted and would never be accepted that I was able to see that the narrative was straight-up bullshit. A myth to make my parents feel better about themselves, lies to make them comfortable. 

 

All members of a family have their own ways of defining the others. All parents have ways of saying things about their children as if they are indisputable facts, even when the children don’t believe them to be true at all. It’s why so many of us feel alone or unseen, despite the real love we have for our families and they for us. 

 

This was a big part of it. With the “inspiration” from religious charlatans - those authoritarian parenting gurus my parents followed - I was typecast as the rebellious child, the one who needed most to be “fixed,” the one who was in for a rude awakening when I tried to make it in the real world. (And in particular, when I discovered that no woman would want me until I learned to be fully responsible for their emotions.) 

 

And yes, starting in my early teens, I felt alone and unseen by my parents. I still do not fully grasp how they completely failed to understand who I was - a child who was not in fact rebellious, but who had too much integrity to simply comply when I felt things were unfair. 

 

There is another fascinating line in the book, one uttered by Nicole’s adoptive mother when she was a kid. 

 

We weren’t really prepared to have a kid like you, my mother had said once, something she might have regretted if she were in the habit of questioning her words.

 

As Nicole notes, she was a loved member of the family…but still an outsider. I feel this one so much. I’m not even going to try to list all of the similar things I have heard from my parents over the years, but it is very much clear that they were not prepared at all for a child like me. I was not the kind of child they wanted - sickly, needy, emotional, skeptical, a voracious learner. (My sister was the kind of kid they wanted, and that much continues to be made very clear to me.) 

 

I know that none of us parents are prepared for our kids, and we all have to improvise as we go. I am sure I have made many, many mistakes with my kids. I am determined, however, to accept them for who they are, and not consider them defective because they aren’t what I expected. 

 

As a parent herself by the time she wrote this book, she also has plenty of empathy for parents, whether adoptive or otherwise. This line resonated with me regarding the experience of being a parent. 

 

No matter how a child joins your family, their presence changes all the rules; they move into your heart and build new rooms, knock down walls you never knew existed. This is why new parents crave reassurance more than anything else: We tell ourselves, and want others to tell us, that we’re going to be wonderful parents. That our children will be happy. That their suffering will be light - or at least, never of a kind we cannot help them through. We have to believe these things, promise ourselves we’ll meet every challenge, or we’d never be brave enough to begin. 

 

Man, that is so true. I often wonder if I had known the future, if I would have chosen to have kids. And this is no reflection on my kids, who are great people, or on the experience of being a parent, which I have greatly enjoyed. But without that foolish optimism, would I have done it? 

 

Another passage that was fascinating was Nicole’s description of her own emotional wrestling with the fact of her adoption. In a way, her birth parents abandoned her, and there is trauma from that, even if Nicole’s life was indeed better in her adoptive family. 

 

Back then, the mystery I wondered about more than anything else was why my first parents had given me up. I knew the practical reasons: money, my health - but I did wonder if there were other reasons, too; if something about me had simply failed to move them, command their love or loyalty. 

 

All of us who have been abandoned or rejected by our parents have wondered this. For me, I continue to wonder what it was about me that never really commanded my parents’ love or loyalty. Why it was that when I expressed hurt (at least of that hurt came from my mother or sister), my feelings were dismissed. Why it was that it was okay to hurt my wife, and when I expressed my feelings about that, everything shut down and was never spoken of again. Why does my sister receive their unconditional love and loyalty, but I do not? I guess I wasn’t the child they were prepared for or wanted. 

 

There is another passage that relates to this. Nicole’s anxiety as a parent often is related to her fear that she will be like her birth mother. 

 

Sitting there on my sofa talking to my mother, hugely pregnant and fighting tears, I couldn’t yet understand that my birth mother’s nature would become the invisible thread connecting all my anxieties, my many shortcomings, all my worst moments as a parent. That it would cause me to question my instincts, bring me up short every time I lost my temper with one of my children. Years later, I would think of her when I stopped, mid-argument, to give my tearful daughter permission to challenge me if she ever thought I was being unfair: You can always tell me. You can say, I think you’re being too hard on me right now, and I’ll stop and listen to you. 

 

This is one area I know I fail in, and I do so the same way my parents did. I am trying to be better about listening, but the patterns run deep. This is one area I do want to break the family cycle, because this was - and indeed is - the core problem with my parents: as the authoritarian parenting gurus taught them, a child is to comply first, and only discuss afterwards, and the parent is free to dismiss the complaint. A child should never challenge a parent or that parent’s fairness. Ever. I want my children to be able to do this, which is one reason why my wife and I have chosen not to focus on “talking back” as a bad thing, the way my parents did - and continue to do. 

 

Nicole’s sister Cindy’s story comes into the book as well. Her being left behind with the grandparents in Korea when her parents immigrated, for example. And then, when she reunited, not remembering her mother much, was shocked and horrified to find her angry and abusive. Worse, she, like other abused children, thought that this was just normal - all parents are like this. 

 

Gradually, Cindy realized that the way her mother treated her was not normal. She began to wish for a different life because hers made no sense to her. And even though our reasons were so different and she’d had the worst of it by far, this reminded me so poignantly of how I used to feel too. 

 

Me too. I think it was around puberty that it first started to dawn on me that my mother was not okay, that she was not normal. That she was in a real sense, suffering from untreated mental illness likely due to her childhood trauma. 

 

Later, when we joined Gothard’s cult, despite my best attempts to go along and believe my parents (I told you I was not rebellious), I increasingly wanted a different life, because the one I had was indeed making no sense. I naively believed that when I moved out, married, and had kids, that I would be able to do that and still maintain a relationship with my parents. It didn’t work out that way, unfortunately. 

 

On a much lighter note, I have to mention her account of the birth of her first child. When she went into labor, she didn’t wake her husband up, with the idea that at least one of them should go into the process well rested. My wife definitely fits that approach. She looked great after each delivery, and I looked like hell. She literally sent me home to sleep - after I fetched her some In-n-Out for her postpartum meal. 

 

I’ll end with this passage from the end, which also resonates with me - with Trump’s first election, I decided that I would no longer let racism pass without comment, even if it was family saying crap. 

 

Though I’ve sometimes grieved for absent solidarity, now that I am raising children of color in a starkly divided America I feel, even more strongly, that maintaining my silence with my relatives - pretending my race does not matter - is no longer a choice I can make. It feels like my duty as my white family’s de facto Asian ambassador to remind them that I am not white, that we do experience this country in different ways because of it, that many people still know oppression far more insidious and harmful than anything I’ve ever faced. Every time I do this, I am breaching the sacred pact of our family, our once-shared belief that my race is irrelevant in the presence of their love. 

 

Ultimately, this was the issue that led to my parents cutting off contact. (According to them, at least. I think there were other unspoken reasons: my decision to go no-contact with my sister, a child coming out as transgender, their beliefs about the Covid vaccine, and so on…) In the final analysis, their comfort in their beliefs about race mattered more to them than I did. And perhaps, it really was that I was not the kind of child they wanted. 

 

I know this got personal quite a bit, and I don’t want that to detract from the book at all. The book is excellent, and everyone should read it, particularly if they were adopted, have adopted, or know someone who was adopted. I was unprepared for how much emotion this book would touch in me, which is why I ended up talking about my own fraught relationship.

 

However a child came to be abandoned or rejected, those complicated emotions are a universal human experience, and this book spoke to me in that way as a result. 

 

I am glad Nicole Chung chose to speak out about her experience. Too often adoption has been seen in terms of good or bad and not often enough as a complex and diverse experience. Chung’s nuanced and empathetic account of her life reveals many layers of that complexity, and gives all of us insight into the lives of others we share this world with.