Nicole Chung

 
“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“There is nothing easy about migration. It is a search for a better life, but in this way it is also a death. How easily would you choose to leave this life? How quickly, if the decision were made for you? It is a line you cannot uncross, whether you are lucky enough to visit every few years or if you left knowing you will never return. Everyone and everything you knew and loved are gone.”
― Nicole Chung, A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home

“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

“They were told that couples facing infertility should grieve the loss of biological children, the hopes raised and disappointed cycle after cycle, before they moved forward with adoption. For them, though, spending years or even months in mourning didn’t feel right. The miscarriage had been devastating, but they had already resigned themselves to the fact that biological children might not be in their future. If adoption was God’s plan for them, she said, she didn’t mind missing out on the experiences of pregnancy and birth. She joked, when she was ready to joke about it, that if someone else did all that work instead, it would be okay with her. They both just wanted a baby. If they were lucky enough to be able to adopt, they would never dwell on things they had been denied.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“When I tried to write novels, sprawled on my bed with a ballpoint pen and spiral notebook, I imagined girls who outsmarted grown-ups and rescued their best friends from kidnappers, girls who raced in the Iditarod and girls who traveled to worlds far beyond our galaxy—girls who were always white. 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

“Sometimes it seems to me a miracle that so many worlds exist on the same planet and don't collapse into one another and collapse. How do we do it? Even more so in the age of social media, where everything exists all of the time. How can I lie in that hotel bed, the pillow fluffy and white, and see this happen, and not only not fall apart, but thrive, make my coffee, walk along a trail, sit in a meadow and revel in the glory of nature?”
― Nicole Chung, A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home

“A map is only one story. It is not the most important story. The most important story is the one a people tell about themselves.”
― Nicole Chung, A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home

“know, I told myself that something as noble as my birth parents’ sacrifice demanded my trust. My loyalty.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“They would never be my refuge, my first call in a crisis. Even if you found your birth family, how could you ever be certain they would stick around? How could you think of them as your real family when they hadn’t been there all along?”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“This realization welled up, overflowing in another discovery: I had nothing to prove any longer. Even if I still felt the need to assert my love for my adoptive parents, or defend my family to people who had no idea how it felt or what it meant to be adopted, that did not mean I had to forever deny all interest in the people who’d given me life. It was time to lay down the burden of being “the good adoptee,” the grateful little girl who’d been lost and then found. Who cared what anyone thought of my decision? Who cared about their questions?”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“I wondered how often my birth family talked about me—if they ever prayed for me, or wished for some way to know that I was all right. Suddenly very little seemed to separate us. And maybe that had always been true, especially if they really had cared about me; if they had known me once. 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

“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

“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 re-connection 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

“As for so many children of immigrants, their lives came to me in little fragments and echoes that I collected in my palm like rainwater.”
― Nicole Chung, A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home