All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

6 hrs. 42 min. | Memoir | Catapult | Release Date: 10/2/2018

Nicole Chung is probably most well known around the internet as the managing editor of the now-defunct The Toast and her If John Cho Was Your Boyfriend piece.  In her memoir she tells the story of her transracial adoption, her path to finding her birth family and how she inadvertently uncovers a family secret. 

Chung dismantles many of the problematic myths about adoption but alos reveals some uncomfortable truths about the difficulties children in transracial adoptions face. When she becomes pregnant with her first child she searches for her biological family to get a medical history but the truth behind her adoption is more complicated than she imagined.

There have been a lot of antiracist reading lists floating around and I think those are great but they also focus a lot on interactions with whiteness. Sometimes I think it’s just as necessary to read personal stories like this that are people of color telling their stories and not centering or trying to teach white people.

At a few points Chung switches the narrative to an imagined third person perspective featuring her biological sister and parents. Even though these sections maybe aren’t traditional for memoir I thought they were the strongest. Chung reveals a lot about her birth family and I can’t imagine how difficult it was to put that all out for public consumption.

This audiobook is a shortie at just under 7 hours and narrated by Janet Song. Song’s voice is a little bit sleepy and I did find myself tuning out at moments. Also, and I don’t know if this is just the Hoopla version, but you can really hear the edits in this.