Review by Booklist Review
ldquo;You're not famous," Chung's mother innocently commented when Chung began writing All You Can Ever Know (2018), her transcendent memoir about her identity as a transracial Korean adoptee. "Do you think anyone is going to read it?" Her mother need not have worried; Chung's debut is a lauded best-seller. Five years later, Chung applies the same incisive intimacy with which she explored her reconnection with her birth family in her first book to examine her profound relationships with her white adoptive parents. Born severely premature in Seattle, Chung was nurtured in a loving home in homogeneous small-town Oregon. By high school, the family "no longer lived paycheck to paycheck, as my mother had once told me, but emergency to emergency." They managed to provide a comfortable (enough) upbringing until Chung left for college on the East Coast where stark socioeconomic differences demanded careful navigation. Chung stayed East, married, had two daughters; rare were her visits home but steadfast was the mutual devotion. Illness, exacerbated by an inadequate health-care system, claimed her father at 67. Her mother faced her loss with hope, but she died at 68 while the global pandemic prevented final goodbyes. Chung's prose hones her grief into razor-sharp insights even as her words interrogate, honor, and celebrate the unbreakable bonds of parenthood.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Chung (All You Can Ever Know) couches the evolution of the bond between parent and child in the struggles of class and loss in this melancholy memoir. Born "severely premature" in Seattle to Korean immigrants who "did not believe they could afford to raise a medically complex child," Chung was adopted by a white couple from rural Oregon who had "little guidance from the child welfare system and no model for how to raise a Korean child." Her adoptive parents lived paycheck to paycheck, which they tried to hide from Chung, who likewise hid the trauma of "racial isolation as an adoptee" growing up where others "let me know that I was not wanted." She later attended college on a scholarship, married, had children, and moved to D.C. for grad school. Loaded down with student debt, Chung was unable to help her parents as their health failed: her uninsured father couldn't afford treatment for his diabetes, and her mother died of ovarian cancer, which had Chung "falling, tumbling through empty air, with nowhere to land," during the pandemic, necessitating her to attend the funeral virtually. Powerfully rendered scenes illuminate this quiet polemic against a dysfunctional healthcare system, hidden poverty, and racism, though the narrative stumbles toward the end as Chung meanders through scattered reflections. There's great emotional power here, if an imperfect execution. Agent: Maria Massie, Massie and McQuilkin. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An adopted daughter finds herself robbed of the chance to give back to beloved parents. Chung grew up in rural Oregon, the Korean daughter of White parents and one of the only Asians in her area, a situation she described in her poignant debut memoir, All You Can Ever Know. Her urge to confront troubling truths continues to drive her second book, which examines and expiates the vexing circumstances of her parents' deaths. After living "paycheck to paycheck" throughout her youth, her parents were out of work and without health insurance when her father's sudden, serious illness began. Death is no great equalizer, as the author soon learned: "Sickness and grief throw wealthy and poor families alike into upheaval, but they do not transcend the gulfs between us, as some claim--if anything, they often magnify them." Her father's death felt like "a kind of negligent homicide, facilitated and sped by the state's failure to fulfill its most basic responsibilities to him and others like him." His passing came just before a change in Chung's own finances, as the manuscript of the memoir her father never finished reading was bought and published. Briefly, things looked brighter, as her bereaved mother planned a trip to Greece with friends from her church. Then, in quick succession, she was diagnosed with cancer, and Covid-19 arrived. Again, Chung's hands were tied, and she faced the cruel situation so many did during lockdown, unable to be present with dying relatives. Memoirs such as this one provide an important record of the emotional cost of the pandemic. Read in tandem with the author's first book, it underlines the strength of her connection to both her adoptive parents and the birth-family relatives she found. As Chung seeks a way to grieve without self-punishment, this open-hearted, unflinching account will be a boon to others. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
