All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir

Nicole Chung (b. 1981) is a Korean American author and editor. She was born to Korean parents who put her up for adoption after she spent two months in the NICU at the Seattle Children’s Hospital. Her adoptive parents, a white Catholic couple originally from Ohio, raised her in a predominantly white town in Oregon. After attending Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, Nicole moved to the Washington, DC, area where she and her husband, Dan, are raising their two daughters.

Nicole is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, the former editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine, and the former managing editor of The Toast. She has published essays and articles on a wide range of topics, including adoption, family, race, and gender. She has also written about Asian representation in the media, including the impact of seeing the Japanese American figure skating champion, Kristi Yamaguchi, on television. In 2023, Nicole published a second memoir titled A Living Remedy, which addresses the death of her parents and the American healthcare system.

All You Can Ever Know is a bestselling memoir that recounts Nicole’s experiences as a transracial adoptee and her search for her birth family. The book received widespread acclaim. Over the course of the memoir, Nicole traces her journey from being the child of colorblind parents to reconnecting with her birth family and her Korean identity as an adult. Nicole’s journey affects her both emotionally and in terms of her worldview. As a child, she tried her best to conform to her parents’ colorblind values and was left bewildered by the racist comments and teasing other children subjected her to. As she grew older, she began to become more conscious of her sense of alienation and rootlessness.

In seeking out her birth family, Nicole learned that the myths surrounding adoption obscure the far more complicated and emotionally nuanced reality, for both the adoptee and the adoptive and birth families. While the ending of the memoir remains open-ended in many respects—she is still distant from her birth mother, and beginning to reconnect with her Korean heritage—the memoir nevertheless suggests that undermining adoption myths can still co-exist with, and even reinforce, the love shared within adoptive families and within reunited birth families.