Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Finding family

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

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I first saw All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung on NPR’s Best Books of 2018. It is a memoir of Chung’s life growing up in rural Oregon, and her quest to find herself. She was born prematurely from Korean immigrant parents, and adopted by a white couple. Part of what sparked my interest in this book is that it reminded me of Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. These books are very different, but one story line involved the interracial adoption of a Chinese baby girl by a […]

An Honest and Gracious Look at the Complexities of Adoption

All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir by Nicole Chung

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From now on, when people ask what being adopted is like, I’ll just smile and tell them to read this book. It’s all in here. The simultaneous emotions of feeling special because you were chosen by a family and worthless because your parents didn’t want you. The confusion of not knowing who exactly you are, or whether you should feel thankful that you were taken in or annoyed that human right was even in question. Who are your “real” parents, if there is such a […]

“My adoption was hard, and complicated, but it was not a tragedy”

All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir by Nicole Chung

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Nicole Chung was born to Korean parents, extremely premature, and adopted by a white couple in Oregon. Her adoption was never kept a secret — instead, it was presented to her all her life as the amazing miracle that came out of the terrible tragedy of her parents giving her up. You can see how that would affect a person. “To be a hero, I thought, you had to be beautiful and adored. To be beautiful and adored, you had to be white. That there […]

“To be adopted is to know only the rewritten story, one of an infinite number possible”

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

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Nicole Chung was born prematurely and adopted by a white couple in a small Oregon town. Growing up as the only Korean person anyone knew – including herself – she struggled with how she fit in. Her adoption story was full of love and comfort. Nicole had been so tiny, her birth parents weren’t able to care for her. They thought adoption was the best thing for her. As a child, she of course agreed. Growing up, she had more questions about her birth family […]

“I finally understood what my birth parents did not: my adoption was hard, and complicated, but it was not a tragedy. It was not my fault, and it wasn’t theirs, either. It was the easiest way to solve just one of too many problems.”

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I basically read this all in one sitting last Saturday morning. It’s a relative short book at around 220 pages, but I think I would have wanted to read it fast even if it were 400. Nichole Chung, unsurprisingly to anyone who’s read her other work (I’ve mostly done so on The (dearly departed) Toast), is a very good writer. In fact, she started writing about adoption years before this book was published; I remember reading several of her articles about it and thinking at […]

Families Are Complicated

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CBR 10 BINGO Square: Listicles: So many, but I’ll go with the Seattle Times Fall Reading List 2018 (the author was born there, I lived there for 10 of the last 20 years). Best 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 […]



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