What can we ever know about our family’s past? How do we love those closest to us when doing so brings us to the edge of insanity? Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know and Sam Mills’s The Fragments of My Father explore both of these questions.
Chung’s memoir takes on a sleuth-like quality as she describes the process of uncovering her birth family. Born weeks premature, she was put up for adoption by her Korean-American parents, who feared she wouldn’t survive. Throughout her childhood, the reasons behind her adoption were presented as solid and comforting: ‘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,’ her mother told her. Chung’s response was always: ‘They were right, Mom.’
By the time she was six, Chung could recite the tale of her selfless birth parents by heart. But something else lurked behind the thought that this ‘may be all you can ever know’. Despite a loving upbringing, being the only Korean in small-town Oregon had its challenges. The racism she experienced as a child was difficult to convey to her white parents, and she kept the playground slurs to herself. The stress of dealing with frequent taunts finally became apparent when Chung’s parents and teachers noticed a ‘tiny bald spot’ — the result of Chung twisting her hair so tightly around her forefinger that she couldn’t free it without ‘yanking a few strands out’.
This urge to know more increases until Chung, pregnant with her first child, sets off to discover where she came from. Writing had always been a way for her to make sense of her life as an adoptee:
We are wanted, found or saved, but never grown, never entirely our own.
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