All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir

"Well, again, I think that it is a combination of the voice and the story, and also in this case the timeliness of it. This is something that people are just beginning to talk about openly. There’s always been this idea that America is a big melting pot and we’ve had international adoption for a long time. Romanian orphans, and Russian orphans, and Chinese orphans, and Korean babies: we’ve moved around the world adopting these children and bringing them here to the land of plenty, to blend into our melting pot. But a melting pot is not reality, and this is not what it feels like for these children. I think for a long time adopted children stayed quiet about how they felt—with closed adoptions there was no way for a child to find a birth family, and there was also a sense of not wanting to hurt the feelings of adoptive parents. “If you find out where you come from, it may not be what you’re expecting” Chung, though, writes about these things quite openly, and navigates the complicated and sometimes conflicting emotions skilfully. She writes about how isolated she felt growing up as a Korean girl in a white family, in a very white neighbourhood: she always had this sense that she didn’t really belong and that no one really understood her. Nobody looked like her. She felt quite alone. So that’s part of the book. The other part is her search for her birth family, which does not turn out in the way that one might expect. She did find her birth mother and father, who had divorced, and she found a sister that she had not known about. But it was not an entirely positive experience. Her mother was apparently a pretty brutal person, who beat her children. And so, it’s about finding her place in the world, and examining this idea of multicultural or interracial adoption but then it’s also about what figuring out what family is. She formed a very tight bond with her sister, they became very close. But with her birth mother? Not so much. So it’s also sort of a reality check: if you find out where you come from, it may not be what you’re expecting. What you learn may not be what you had wanted to learn."