Grace > Grace's Quotes

“To be a hero, I thought, you had to be beautiful and adored. To be beautiful and adored, you had to be white. That there were millions of Asian girls like me out there in the world, starring in their own dramas large and small, had not yet occurred to me, as I had neither lived nor seen it.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“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 Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“I finally understood what my birth parents did not: my adoption was hard, and complicated, but it was not a tragedy. It was not my fault, and it wasn’t theirs, either. It was the easiest way to solve just one of too many problems.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“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 Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“But one thing has not wavered or changed: I am still my adoptive parents’ daughter. No matter what, no matter our differences, they will always be my parents, the ones who wanted me when no one else did.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know