All You Can Ever Know

Nicole Chung's All You Can Ever Know is the memoir of growing up Korean in a white family in small town Oregon circa 1985. I was interested in it as an adoption memoir, and Chung certainly touches on her emotions regarding feelings of abandonment and not fitting in. Much of the latter owes, it seems from the book, to the fact that Chung was raised in a town so small and so white that the only other people of color she ever saw were a handful of Asians in stereotypical roles (aka, dry cleaning and Chinese takeout). Chung's experience was also colored by the fact that she knew much of her early history (born prematurely, immigrant parents unable to cope with the expected special needs, etc.) and as she describes, her birth mother went as far as to attempt to make contact with her when she was still quite young.

Ultimately All You Can Ever Know vacillates between Chung's memoir of a mostly unhappy childhood and then her adult quest to locate her birth family. This she does successfully and, owing to the relationship she forges with a sister, she is also able to tell the family's story, frequently woven through chapters of Chung's own experiences.

Final verdict: I liked it, but I didn't love it. There are a lot of memoirs out there, and a lot of adoption-related books, memoirs, advice, and so on as well. Certainly there's an audience for this work, but on the whole it's a pretty niche read.

Three-and-a-half stars.