7,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Pushkin Vertigo
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
This book moved me to my very core' Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires EverywhereFinalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for AutobiographyNamed a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, NPR, Time, The Boston Globe, Real Simple, Buzzfeed, Jezebel and BustleGrowing up in a sheltered Oregon town, Nicole Chung was the only Korean she knew. Taunted in the playground, and constantly reminded that she was different, she dreamt of one day looking in the mirror and feeling as thought she belonged.The story her mother told her about her birth parents was always the same: they had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hopes of giving her a better life. But years later, grown up and expecting a child of her own, Nicole begins to wonder if her mother's story is the whole truth. As she embarks on a search for the people who gave her up, she discovers that the deeper she digs, the darker and more surprising the truth.Heart-rending yet endlessly hopeful, All You Can Ever Know is a compelling memoir about adoption, race, and how it feels to lose your roots – and then find them in the least expected of places.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Ähnliche
“A family story of heartbreaking truth – personal in its detail, universal in its complexity”
Entertainment Weekly
“Chung writes her memoir as a transracial adoptee with honesty, wisdom, and love. Her search and what she discovers offer us life’s meaning and purpose of the very highest order”
Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food For Millionaires and Pachinko
“Opening readers’ eyes to the complexities of cross-cultural adoption, Chung makes a resounding case for empathy”
Time
“Chung’s memoir is more than a thoughtful consideration of race and heritage in America. It is the story of sisters finding each other, overcoming bureaucracy, abuse, separation, and time”
New Yorker
“One of this year’s finest books, let alone memoirs… Chung has literary chops to spare and they’re on full display in descriptions of her need, pain and bravery”
Washington Post
“An urgent, incandescent exploration of what it can mean to love, and of who gets to belong, in an increasingly divided country. Nicole Chung’s powerful All You Can Ever Know is necessary reading, a dazzling light to help lead the way during these times”
R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
“All You Can Ever Know is a landmark in the literature of adoptions”
Marion Winik, National Book Critics Circle
“Though the story is intensely personal, it’s never myopic and, ultimately, it’s universal: a story about learning to grapple with our own identities, about learning where we belong, and about families”
NPR Books
2“With clarity, grace, and no small amount of courage, Chung has written a powerful memoir about her experience as an adoptee, an Asian-American, a daughter, a sister, and a mother… this book… will resonate deep within the core of anyone who has ever questioned their place in their family, their community, and the world”
NYLON
“Riveting and painfully real. It’s a story of lost generations and found families, infinitely relatable whether you’re adopted or not”
Bon Appetit
“Nicole Chung’s memoir stands out for its broadening of the discussion exploring the complicated consequences of interracial adoption… All You Can Ever Know is the messy navigation of Chung’s new reality… and her exploration of the profound, ever-shifting meaning of family”
Buzzfeed
“Nicole’s writing on motherhood, intergenerational trauma, and race is nothing short of brilliant”
The Rumpus
5
for Cindy and for our daughters
6
7
What? You too? I thought I was the only one.
—c. s. lewis, The Four Loves
8
Contents
PART I
10
11
The story my mother told me about them was always the same.
Your birth parents had just moved here from Korea. They thought they wouldn’t be able to give you the life you deserved.
It’s the first story I can recall, one that would shape a hundred others once I was old enough and brave enough to go looking.
When I was still young—three or four, I’ve been told—I would crawl into my mother’s lap before asking to hear it. Her arms would have encircled me, solid and strong where I was slight, pale and freckled against my light brown skin. Sometimes, in these half-imagined memories, I picture her in the dress she wore in our only family portrait from this era, lilac with flutter sleeves—an oddly delicate choice for my solid and sensible mother. At that age, a shiny black bowl cut and bangs would have framed my face, a stark contrast to the reddish-brown perm my mother had when I was young; I was no doubt growing out of toddler cuteness by then. But my mom thought I was beautiful. When you think of someone as your gift from God, maybe you can never see them as anything else.
How could they give me up?
I must have asked her this question a hundred times, and my mother never wavered in her response. Years later I would wonder whether someone told her how to comfort me—if she read the advice in a book, or heard it from the adoption 12agency—or if, as my parent, she simply knew what she ought to say. What I wanted to hear.
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.
Even as a child, I knew my line, too.
They were right, Mom.
By the time I was five or six years old, I had heard the tale of my loving, selfless birth parents so many times I could recite it myself. I collected every fact I could, hoarding the sparse and faded glimpses into my past like bright, favorite toys. This may be all you can ever know, I was told. It wasn’t a joyful story through and through, but it was their story, and mine, too. The only thing we had ever shared. And as my adoptive parents saw it, the story could have ended no other way.
So when people asked 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 strove 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.
Looking back, of course I can make out the gaps; the places where my mother and father must have made their own guesses; the pauses where harder questions could have followed: Why didn’t they ask for help? What if they had changed their minds? Would you have adopted me if you’d been able to have a child of your own?
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 13ourselves, and our families, and our place in the world. When tiny, traitorous doubts arose, when I felt lost or alone or confused about all the things I couldn’t know, I told myself that something as noble as my birth parents’ sacrifice demanded my trust. My loyalty.
They thought adoption was the best thing for you.
Above all, it was a legend formed and told and told again because my parents wanted me to believe that my birth family had loved me from the start; that my parents, in turn, were meant to adopt me; and that the story unfolded as it should have. This was the foundation on which they built our family. As I grew, I too staked my identity on it. The story, a lifeline cast when I was too young for deeper questions, continued to bring me comfort. Years later, grown up and expecting a child of my own, I would search for my birth family still wanting to believe in it.
14
They asked if I ever felt like my adoptive parents weren’t my “real” parents.
Never, I said firmly.
They asked if I had been in touch with my birth family.
No, I said, I hadn’t.
They asked if there had ever been any issues when I was growing up.
I felt something like panic, the sudden shame of being found out.
Perhaps confusion was all they could read on my face, because one of them attempted to clarify: Had I ever minded it? Not being white, like my parents?
I wanted to answer. I liked this couple, and I knew it was my job to offer them the comfort, the encouragement they so plainly deserved. Did I mind not being white? It amounted to asking if I minded being Korean; yes, I minded, or no, I didn’t mind, both seemed too mild for how I’d felt.15
The truth was that being Korean and being adopted were things I had loved and hated in equal measure. Growing up, I was the only Korean most of my friends and family knew, the only Korean I knew. 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 of anger or confusion when that proved impossible, time and time again.
All members of a family have their own ways of defining the others. All parents have ways of saying things about their children as if they are indisputable facts, even when the children don’t believe them to be true at all. It’s why so many of us sometimes feel alone or unseen, despite the real love we have for our families and they for us. In childhood, I was uncertain who I was supposed to be, even as I resisted some of my adoptive relatives’ interpretations—both you’re our Asian Princess! and of course we don’t think of you as Asian. I believe my adoptive family, for the most part, wanted to ignore the fact that I was the product of people from the other side of the world, unknown foreigners turned Americans. To them, I was not the daughter of these immigrants at all: by adopting me, my parents had made me one of them.
And perhaps I never would have felt differently—perhaps I, too, would have thought of myself as almost white—but for all the people who never indulged this fantasy beyond my home, my family, the reach of my parents’ eyes. Caught between my family’s “colorblind” ideal and the obvious notice of others, perhaps it isn’t surprising which made me feel safer—which I preferred, and tried to adopt as my own.16
Somewhere along the way, though, after leaving home, I had learned to feel strangely proud of my heritage. I’d made friends in middle school and high school who liked and accepted me even though I was one of the few Asian kids they knew. Then I had gone off to college and found myself living among huge numbers of fellow Asians; on campus, which soon felt more like home than the town where I had lived all my life, I finally learned how it felt to exist in a space, walk into a classroom, and not be stared at. I loved being just one Asian girl among thousands. Every day, I felt relieved to have found a life where I was no longer surrounded by white people who had no idea what to make of me.
Still, I did not know what it meant to be a Korean completely sundered from her culture, or if I could truly call myself a Korean at all—when my Korean American dormmate in college referred to me as a “banana,” I knew enough to understand it was not a compliment, but had no real defense. To me Korea was little more than a faraway country, less real to me than a fantasy, and my own Korean family existed in an alternate timeline I could hardly begin to imagine. I had yet to grapple with or resolve my adoption’s place in my life, what it meant and how I ought to think of it—at twenty-two, sitting in my new friends’ dining room, a genuine, perhaps more generous understanding of who I was still flickered beyond my reach.
I looked from one pair of earnest eyes to the other, wondering how I could explain all this to them. How had I gotten here? How had I become the voice of reassurance for two people about to embark on parenthood? I’d been out of college a matter of weeks. I still had trouble thinking of myself as an adult. I had no idea what it took to raise a child, let alone one 17whose face would announce to everyone that they weren’t born into their family.
My hometown is a five-hour drive from Portland, nestled in a valley in sight of three mountain ranges. For years now, when I go home, it has been my ritual to step off the plane and begin counting the people of color in the town’s one-room airport; often, there’s only me. I spent eighteen years there without getting to know another Korean.
Once my parents and I left our little house on Alma Drive, we were bound to turn heads. Where did they get you? people at the grocery store asked. Or, on the playground, How much did you cost? Kids at school wanted to know why I didn’t look like them. Teachers stumbled over my Hungarian surname, looking perplexed even after my corrections.
To my family’s credit, my adoption was never kept secret from me—not that it could have been, I suppose. I avoided the fate of adopted children of earlier generations, who were often told about their adoptions late in adolescence, as adults, or not at all. An adopted woman I met once told me she didn’t learn she was adopted until she was a teenager, an echo of other stories I’d heard before. She found out by accident; friends and relatives knew, and one day someone let slip the neighborhood secret.
My parents explained my adoption when I was too young to remember, adding details over the years until I knew almost everything they did. Just as I don’t remember the day I learned I was adopted, I don’t remember precisely when I realized I was practically the only Asian I ever saw—but I imagine it must have been sometime in kindergarten, my first year of school. I was already aware that no one in my family looked like me—nor did anyone in our neighborhood, or in my grandmother’s 18neighborhood across town—but it hadn’t mattered much in the years before I stepped through the doors of our town’s only Catholic school, because I knew so little about people beyond the circle of my own family.
There were around twenty-five kids in my afternoon kindergarten class, every one of them white. At morning circle, on the playground, packed into the pews during school-wide Masses, at assemblies and concerts and sporting events, it was the same: white child after white parent, face after face that looked nothing like mine. By the age of five, I must have had words like Korean and Asian to describe myself, because I remember deploying such terms at school. I might have also possessed a vague, sight-based understanding of whiteness. 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.
And at first, in truth, it wasn’t so difficult to be the only Asian girl in my class. A particularly innocent classmate once asked me, “Are you black?” and this was easily answered. One of so many towheaded girls said, “Mary did not have black hair!” when the Christmas pageant rolled around, and I decided that was fine, because the angels got wings and better songs. I knew I was different, but during kindergarten I believed it was simply a fact, one that caused me little distress.
In first grade, when I took my turn as the designated “Very Important Person,” I brought in my family photos glued to white poster board as all the kids before me had. My classmates, arranged in a semicircle on the woven rug, naturally wanted to know why all of my pictures showed me flanked by my redheaded, freckled white mom and early-graying white dad, though that wasn’t what they said—what they said was, “Are 19those your parents? How come you don’t look like them?” I spent most of my presentation explaining matters, but I didn’t mind much; it was thrilling, in a way, to hold so many of my classmates in thrall. A strange feeling spiked, the earliest suspicion that I might eventually spend a great deal of time answering people’s questions about adoption, but I told myself it was fine. How lucky that I already knew so much about it.
Then one of my classmates thrust his hand in the air. His face was expectant—and a little reproachful, as though I’d stopped reading just before the end of a rollicking good story and was deliberately keeping everyone in suspense. “Don’t you want to meet your real parents?”
No one in my family ever referred to my birth parents as my real parents. But once I got over my initial shock, I understood why he had asked. Of course the other kids would be curious about my birth family. Of course they would want to solve the mystery I, too, obsessed over.
In the years to come I would hear variations on this same question, over and over, and it would never again surprise me—I just never knew what to say. What did it matter what I wanted? I wasn’t going to meet them.
When it was time to gather up my poster and return to my seat, I was glad I’d had the opportunity to tell my story. I could still tell myself that the unknown or confusing aspects of my history didn’t matter; that none of my classmates really cared that I was Korean, or that my family wasn’t like theirs. It was the last year I would be able to pretend that was true.
Facing the hopeful couple across from me, I knew I had to speak. We had been introduced by mutual friends precisely so I could tell them how wonderful it was to grow up adopted. “I just think 20it would be great for them to talk to you,” my friend had told me when she set up the meeting. I was there—I had agreed to go!—to offer reassuring statements about being raised by white parents who loved me. I wanted to be helpful. Why was I hesitating?
Ten, even five years earlier, it would have posed no great challenge; I’d never shied away from the story I grew up hearing. By the time a friend in middle school asked me what it was like to be adopted—as if I could compare it to anything else—I knew just how to laugh, just what to say. Most people are stuck with their kids, I told her, rather insufferably. My parents chose me. But I was out of practice, having spent the past four years at a university whose enrollment was one-quarter Asian. Friends and classmates and professors who had never seen me with my parents had little reason to ask if I was adopted. And when I did mention it now, when I told people like my college roommate or my faculty advisor or even my boyfriend, Dan, the fact emerged as a biographical footnote: people usually nodded and filed the information away, even if I did sometimes see curiosity spark in their eyes. My two worlds were three thousand miles and a world of experience apart, and rarely collided.
When Dan met my parents, in October of my junior year, I was so anxious—I remember being irrationally convinced that he wouldn’t be able to understand or find common ground with them, generous and kind as he was. When he asked me why, I could only come up with one answer: We’re just so different. The old self-consciousness, the archetypically adolescent God, you guys are so embarrassing familiar to any teenager, had given way to the less cringing but still sure knowledge that my parents and I were opposites in every conceivable way, from how we looked to the ways our minds worked. They tended to act less like my parents and more like my peers; they were always telling 21me I worked too much, thought too much, cared too much. We weren’t really prepared to have a kid like you, my mother had said once, something she might have regretted if she were in the habit of questioning her words.
Even without this revelation, though, I would have known. I had always felt like the much-adored but still obvious alien in the family. I knew we didn’t always make sense to other people. And of course my adoption, the obvious explanation for it, was right there, but I could never bring myself to reference it—not even to Dan. It felt petty and wrong, like I was assigning blame to something I was supposed to be grateful for. I still wanted our family to pass muster as “normal,” whatever that meant, and so our differences—and how I came to belong to my parents—were not supposed to matter. Not to anyone we met, and certainly not to me.
Now, facing Did you mind it? from people I liked, people who wanted to become parents just like mine had, I was not yet thinking of their future child; I wanted to reassure them. I could see compassion and silent encouragement in their eyes, the promise of friendship, a churning worry they couldn’t entirely hide. Something about them tripped every quiet doubt, every fiercely protective instinct I’d ever had about my own family. Here were two potential parents who were ready to believe in adoption and so, by extension, the goodness and rightness of my own upbringing. How could I explain what it had been like? How my presence in my family, and especially in the town where I grew up, had often made so little sense to me? How could I tell them that their child might feel the same way, no matter how much they were loved?
These people weren’t my parents. I knew that. But they seemed meant to be parents, if anyone was, and I could already 22tell 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.
Though I felt like I’d been stalling, considering their question for far too long, it was probably only the space of a few breaths. I stretched my mouth into a smile. I tried to radiate the real warmth I felt toward them, though we had only just met. I leaned forward a little in my chair, and I told them no. No, there were no big “issues.” I’d been loved. I’d been okay. Their child would be okay, too.
I was rewarded with twin beams of happiness and relief, and I found myself smiling wider in spite of myself. I could tell they weren’t especially surprised. Of course I had been okay. I was sitting here now, with them, wasn’t I—healthy, happy, well-adjusted, weeks away from a bachelor’s degree, an engagement ring on my finger? Clearly everything in my life had worked out fine. Their child would be just fine, too. That was what they had wanted, expected to hear, all along.
I was in second or third grade when I heard my first slur.
I argued with a boy on the playground—I don’t remember the reason. He called me ugly, which stung a bit, but it was also the sort of generic insult kids flung at one another all the time. If he’d stopped there, it might have remained a remote, laughable memory, a childhood squabble buried alongside dozens of other such moments.
Instead, he pulled his eyes into slits. His voice turned shrill as he sneered, “You’re so ugly, your own parents didn’t even want you!”23
It was the first time anyone had ever used my adoption as an insult, and it would have been shocking and painful enough without the eyes, the broken singsong chant. He screwed up his face into a squint, asking how I could see. “Me Chinee, me can’t see!”
Was “Chinee” supposed to be a nickname? I did not know what it meant, but I instinctively understood that he wasn’t making fun of something about me, or something I had done. He wasn’t mocking a name I could change into a nickname, or clothes my parents could replace, or glasses I could take off at recess. His target was who I was. How I’d come to be here, in this place where he believed I did not belong.
I waited, almost in suspense, for my own voice to emerge, for my sharp tongue to go on the attack. But any return insults withered and died in my throat. I couldn’t have been more passive had I been invisible, a ghost floating high above the blacktop, watching the other kids laughing and feeling surprised, just as any witness or casual observer might, by my own shame and silence.
He made more faces, his eyes still pulled back tight; I wondered if he could see. To anyone watching, I probably looked eerily calm—the same girl I’d always been. This boy was in my carpool, and lived in my neighborhood, and until this day I’d thought of him as a kind of friend. When we rode home together that afternoon, side by side in the backseat of his mother’s blue sedan, I was silent and so was he, pretending nothing had happened between us that day. But inside of me, something still and deep, something precious, had broken.
After that day, when I heard more words like that from him and other classmates—when adults I met questioned my nationality or my lack of an accent, or measured me against 24Asian stereotypes that were true in their minds—I would, to some degree, expect it. Each and every time I found myself on the defensive, defining an identity that seemed to require endless explanations, it would remind me of that day at recess when I learned what a slur meant, even if I did not yet know the name for it. And maybe I should have known to be angry as a child. Maybe I should have realized that others were the problem, not me. But hadn’t I already been suspicious before that day when my neighbor’s words hit the bull’s-eye? Hadn’t I already wondered if I might be wrong, taking up space where I did not have a right to? The self-consciousness I’d felt but hardly known how to track since starting at that small white school bloomed to sudden, painful awareness. If I wasn’t safe with a boy who’d known me for years, who knew where I lived, whose mother knew mine, then I couldn’t trust anyone.
I remember I could tell my parents only part of the truth. I said that someone had made fun of me for being adopted. I didn’t mention the other words the boy had used. This felt like a different kind of humiliation, one I could not expect them to understand. They had always insisted the fact that I was Korean didn’t matter; what mattered was “the kind of person” I was. How could I tell them they were wrong?
If my parents were surprised or upset, they didn’t show it. They have both always possessed a rather low opinion of human nature, and spitefulness, even outright cruelty, from an ignorant boy could not have shocked them. My mother said that he shouldn’t have teased me for being adopted. “He’s only doing it to get a reaction,” she told me.
“If you ignore him, he’ll stop,” my father agreed.
I tried, but the schoolyard taunts multiplied, spreading beyond the first boy to other classmates. When they tried out 25new words, or told me to go back to China, or babbled in their made-up languages, no one stood up for me. Kids I’d known since kindergarten now seemed like strangers—either hostile, or else somehow remote and inaccessible. I had not changed, and maybe they hadn’t, either, but when they looked at me it was as if we’d never known each other at all.
At our school, you were with the same kids grade after grade, the same boys with saints’ names and the same pretty, fair-haired girls. Who you were in second grade was who you were in fourth grade and who you were in sixth. So the taunts continued, all the way until I completed sixth grade and moved on to another school, where sometimes I still heard the same words. Remembering my parents’ advice, I tried not to react to the pulled-back eyes, the stinging chants, the cold shoulder from kids I’d once thought of as friends. The closest anyone ever got to noticing what was going on was when my second-grade teacher alluded to my general unhappiness on my third-quarter report card. But my grades were always good, and I was targeted only when there were no teachers around. If I was isolating myself more and more at school, retreating to the library as often as possible, well, I’d always been a bookish child.
I never had a name for what was happening. I had never heard or read about any racism other than the kind that outright destroys your life and blots out your physical existence; even that was relegated in books and lessons to “it happened in the past.” What I experienced on the elementary school playground, and then later on my middle school bus, and for the rest of my years in southern Oregon when people demanded to know where I was from and why I had a white family, always seemed too insignificant to be even remotely connected to real racism. My parents and I had certainly never discussed the possibility that 26I might encounter bigots within my school, our neighborhood, our family, in places they believed were safe for me.
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. Why did I have to look the way I did—like a foreigner; like my birth parents, two people I would never even meet? Why hadn’t my adoption transformed me into the person I felt I was?
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?
When the couple hoping to adopt asked me what it had been like to grow up the Korean child of white parents—Was it all right? Had I ever minded it?—I didn’t want to tell them that I had minded not being white every day for years on end. That 27sometimes it still bothered me, because while I had finally found another life for myself, my story was still not quite what others expected when they saw me.
