Excerpt from All You Can Ever Know

by Nicole Chung, Adult Adoptee, Author, National Bestseller

Part 1: All You Can Ever Know Excerpt

The story my mother told me about them was always the same.

Your birth parents had just moved here from Korea. They thought they wouldn’t be able to give you the life you deserved.

It’s the first story I can recall, one that would shape a hundred others once I was old enough and brave enough to go looking.

When I was still young-three or four, I’ve been told-I would crawl into my mother’s lap before asking to hear it. Her arms would have encircled me, solid and strong where I was slight, pale, and freckled against my light brown skin. 

Sometimes, in these half-imagined memories, I picture her in the dress she wore in our only family portrait from this era, lilac with flutter sleeves an oddly delicate choice for my solid and sensible mother. At that age, a shiny black bowl cut, and bangs would have framed my face, a stark contrast to the reddish-brown perm my mother had when I was young; I was no doubt growing out of toddler cuteness by then. But my mom thought I was beautiful. When you think of someone as your gift from God, maybe you can never see them as anything else.

How could they give me up?

I must have asked her this question a hundred times, and my mother never wavered in her response. Years later I would wonder whether someone told her how to comfort me-if she read the advice in a book or heard it from the adoption agency-or if, as my parent, she simply knew what she ought to say. What I wanted to hear.

The doctors told them you would struggle all your life. Your birth parents were very sad they couldn’t keep you, but they thought adoption was the best thing for you.

Even as a child, I knew my line, too.

They were right, Mom.

By the time I was five or six years old, I had heard the tale of my loving, selfless birth parents so many times I could recite it myself. I collected every fact I could, hoarding the sparse and faded glimpses into my past like bright, favorite toys. This may be all you can ever know, I was told. It wasn’t a joyful story through and through, but it was their story, and mine, too. The only thing we had ever shared. And as my adoptive parents saw it, the story could have ended no other way.

So, when people asked about my family, my features, and the fate I’d been dealt with, 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 strove 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 an excuse for how I looked, and a way of asking pardon for it. 

Looking back, of course, I can make out the gaps; the places where my mother and father must have made their own guesses; the pauses where harder questions could have followed: Why didn’t they ask for help? What if they had changed their minds? Would you have adopted me if you’d been able to have a child of your own?

Family lore given to us as children have such hold over us, such staying power. It can form the bedrock of another kind of faith, one to rival any religion, informing our beliefs about ourselves, 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.

They thought adoption was the best thing for you.

The pauses where harder questions could have followed: Why didn’t they ask for help? What if they had changed their minds? Would you have adopted me if you’d been able to have a child of your own?

Family lore given to us as children has such hold over us, such staying power. It 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.

They thought adoption was the best thing for you.

Above all, it was a legend formed and told and told again because my parents wanted me to believe that my birth family had loved me from the start; that my parents, in turn, were meant to adopt me; and that the story unfolded as it should have. This was the foundation on which they built our family. As I grew, I too staked my identity on it. The story, a lifeline cast when I was too young for deeper questions, continued to bring me comfort. Years later, grown up and expecting a child of my own, I would search for my birth family still wanting to believe in it.

Written by Nicole Chung, Adult Adoptee, author of All You Can Ever Know, a National Bestseller & Author of the upcoming memoir A Living Remedy, Available April 4, 2023, Pre-order HERE: https://www.loyaltybookstores.com/preorderlivingremedy