All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir

What does it mean to lose your roots—within your culture, within your family—and what happens when you find them?<br /><br />Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From early childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, prepackaged myth. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hopes of giving her a better life; that forever feeling slightly out of place was simply her fate as a transracial adoptee. But as she grew up—facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn’t see, finding her identity as an Asian American and a writer, becoming ever more curious about where she came from—she wondered if the story she’d been told was the whole truth.<br /><br />With warmth, candor, and startling insight, Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, which coincided with the birth of her own child.<i>All You Can Ever Know</i>is a profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections and the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets—vital reading for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong.