All You Can Ever Know
All You Can Ever Know is an autobiographical memoir written by author Nicole Chung. The memoir is Nicole’s account of her journey as a Korean-American who was transracially adopted by a white American family. Her book provides brilliant insight to what it means to search for our identities, and our journeys of searching for (and finding) healthy family relationships.
For those of us who have our own adoption stories, her story could help you find solace in a shared experience. Her retelling of the lived experience of being adopted (without any ties to her birth family) could help you understand and contextualize your own adoption story. Nicole paints a very clear picture of her lived dissonance between knowing that she is deeply loved and cared for by her adopted family, and the knowledge that she is, to the stranger’s eye, an Asian outsider to her white family. Nicole says
“so when people asked me about my family, my features, the fate I’d been dealt, maybe it isn’t surprising how I answered — first in a childish, cheerful chirrup, later in the lecturing tone of one obliged to educate. I arrive to be calm and direct, never giving anything away in my voice, never changing the details. Offering the story I’d learned so early was, I thought, one way to gain acceptance. It was both the excuse for how I looked, and a way of asking pardon for it.”
Nicole is describes her experience of adoption, and what she learned to do in order to fit into a world that couldn’t immediately understand her existence without first questioning it.
For those of who do not share that adoption experience, Nicole’s narrative about her search for belonging feels universal. If you’ve ever felt like you’ve struggled with belonging anywhere, Nicole is able to describe in words what that feeling can be like. She shares what it feels like to bear the weight of feeling like a wayward puzzle piece, and the power of finding yourself as the exact puzzle piece for the exact puzzle set. For example, here are some of her words about her experience of being Asian in America:
“If I were a heroine in a fairy tale, I often thought, and a fairy godmother offered to grant me wishes, I would ask for peaches-and-cream skin, eyes like deep blue pools, hair like spun gold instead of blackest ink. I knew I would be worthy of it all. There was nothing I wouldn’t trade for that kind of magic, that kind of beauty. If you were pretty, if you were normal, if you were white, then the good things everyone saw on the outside would match the goodness you knew existed on the inside. And wouldn’t it be wonderful to go to sleep one night and wake up an entirely different person, one who would be loved and welcomed everywhere? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to look at your face in the mirror and know you would always belong?”
Nicole so poignantly speaks about the internalized rejection of her Asian American self, and describes a desire to want to be someone who society deems as beautiful, as worthy, as accepted, as belonging. Her experience is one that many Asian Americans can share, one that speaks to a tender inner place that is always searching for safety, a home, and a place to belong.
In addition to all these things, her memoir is also about healthy relationships. If you’ve ever experienced unhealthy treatment or unhealthy relationship dynamics from someone who is ‘supposed to’ be an important person in your life, you may be able to relate to how Nicole chose to navigate those waters. It can be devastatingly tricky to figure out what a relationship can look like with someone whom you so desperately hope will be a loving, supportive, positive force in your life, when you know that the reality is that they will bring you instead pain and heartache. Nicole’s own path of balancing those two opposing forces may be one that speaks to anyone who has also experienced pain from their loved ones and are attempting to figure out what that means for them moving forward.
The journey of building our own families, our own identities, our own context, and our own belonging is all expressed in All You Can Ever Know. And as Nicole writes,
“all at once I could envision hundreds of gossamer-thin threads of history and love, curiosity and memory, built up slowly across the time and space between us—a web of connections too delicate to be seen or touched, too strong to be completely severed.”
If any of these journeys resonate with you, give this book a try. See what shared (and novel) experiences speak to you from these pages, and what you can learn about yourself in your own journey of finding belonging, identity, and family. You can follow her here on Instagram.