All You Can Ever Know 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

“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

“As my thoughts reached out to them, 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.”
― 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

“Today, when I’m asked, I often say that I no longer consider adoption—individual adoptions, or adoption as a practice—in terms of right or wrong. I urge people to go into it with their eyes open, recognizing how complex it truly is; I encourage adopted people to tell their stories, our stories, and let no one else define these experiences for us.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“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.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“No matter how a child joins your family, their presence changes all the rules; they move into your heart and build new rooms, knock down walls you never knew existed. This is why new parents crave reassurance more than anything else: We tell ourselves, and want others to tell us, that we’re going to be wonderful parents. That our children will be happy. That their suffering will be light—or at least, never of a kind we cannot help them through. We have to believe these things, promise ourselves we’ll meet every challenge, or we’d never be brave enough to begin.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“The belief that I’d actually been wanted from the beginning, paired with the sure knowledge that my adoptive parents loved me, allowed me to grasp at self-worth, despite my doubts; to grow up and live my life free of the darkest feelings of abandonment.”
― 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

“Yet I’ve also found common ground sharing my story with people who, while not adopted, have distant or absent parents. Some of them, too, seek reconnection and reunion, with complicated results. A year or two after I met my birth father, I became friends with a woman who had grown up without her father, only to look for him as an adult. She seemed to understand and relate to my story as much as a fellow adoptee might.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“Now, when I considered all the factors, both known and unknown, that led to my adoption, I could no longer believe that anyone had planned it. I had always been told that my birth parents wished they had been able to keep me. If that were true, why didn’t God care what they wanted?”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“But having never talked about race with anyone before, I couldn’t have strung together the words to describe what I was seeing—or not seeing—just as I couldn’t have told anyone why it suddenly mattered.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“In most published stories, adoptees still aren't the adults, the ones with power or agency or desires that matter - we're the babies in the orphanage; we're the kids who don't quite fit in; we are struggling souls our adoptive families fought for, objects of hope, symbols of tantalizing potential and parental magnanimity and wishes fulfilled. We are wanted, found, or saved, but never grown, never entirely our own.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“But long after the papers are signed and the original familial bonds are severed, adoption has a way of isolating the adoptee. For me, it had always been this way: a wide sea seemed to separate the lone island of my experience from the well-mapped continents on which other people, other families, resided.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“When you are growing up adopted, people like to tell you how lucky you are. Having learned the truth about my birth family, I couldn't disagree. But it wasn't so simple: there are many different kinds of luck; many different ways to be blessed or cursed.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“The adoption story I’d heard so often growing up was supposed to remake me, give me everything I needed, make me feel whole. In the end, though, real growth and healing came from another kind of radical change—from finding the courage to question what I’d always been told; to seek and discover and tell another kind of story. And I know my children will benefit from all the things I will pass on to them now, all the truths I’m able to share.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“The strange thing was that, inside, I always felt I was the same as everyone around me. I am just like you, I thought when kids squinted at me in mockery of my own eyes; why can’t you see that? When I was young I certainly felt more like a white girl than an Asian one, and sometimes it was shocking to catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror and be forced to catalog the hated differences; to encounter tormentors and former friends and know that what they saw was so at odds with the person I believed I was.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“These people weren’t my parents. I knew that. But they seemed meant to be parents, if anyone was, and I could already tell they had the best of intentions. They wanted a child badly enough to open up to a near-stranger, make themselves vulnerable and lay their fears bare. Their longing for a baby to love, for things to work out in their favor, couldn’t help but move me.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“It felt petty and wrong, like I was assigning blame to something I was supposed to be grateful for.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“I doubted it had ever occurred to my adoptive parents that I might want to learn anything about Korea. Had they ever suggested a language class, I’m sure I would have complained—it was bad enough that I couldn’t change the way I looked; did I really have to emphasize my differences by learning a language no one else I knew could speak?”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“If families like mine were better understood, if more people knew that adoption was far more complicated than common media portrayals might suggest, maybe fewer adopted kids would have to answer the kinds of questions I had gotten, or feel pressured to uphold sunny narratives even they might not necessarily believe in.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“I didn't know what to tell people about surviving a loss I couldn't even remember, or how the face I saw reflected in the mirror often seemed like a stranger's. And I couldn't lie to myself about why I struggled to feel I belonged in my own life; not since the day I'd finally asked a classmate why she didn't like me, and she pulled her eyes back and said, "The same reason no one else likes you." No matter how many answers I doled out or how much I prayed for acceptance, I was never going to grow out of being Korean in a white town.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“When we arrived at the home of our childbirth instructor, Brenda, she was arranging candles in an earthen vessel filled with sand. Brenda’s son, who had shown us into the room, cleared his throat to get his mother’s attention, then retreated with the quick step of a middle-school-aged boy in the same room as a gigantic poster of a uterus.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“As we left the birth center, I couldn’t shake the overwhelming feeling that our baby was destined to inherit a half-empty family tree. I wasn’t even a mother yet, and already the best I could offer was far from good enough.”
― 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 that 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 kenw 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

“Sometimes the adoption - the abandonment, as I could not help but think of it when I was very young - upset me more; sometimes my differences did but mostly, it was both at once, race and adoption, linked parts of my identity that set me apart from everyone else in my orbit. I could neither change nor deny these facts, so I worked to reconcile myself to them. To tamp down the stirring anger or confusion when that proved impossible, time and time again.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“But to be adopted is to know only the rewritten story, one of an infinite number possible.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“Reunion has taught me that there is no way to remake your history or your family in the image you want. But there can be more, if you are willing to look for those stories that were lost - you might just find someone new to forgive, to love, to grow with. Someone to take your hand and search *with* you.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“Yes, I thought, and also a miracle. The clichéd word didn’t embarrass me; this day and night was a wonder I’d never get over. As many times as this had happened before, to billions of parents since time immemorial, it was the only time it had ever happened to me. I had a child now, and she was mine. We were together. We would stay together.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know