Writing a Transracial Adoption Story for an Audience with Nicole Chung
Nicole Chung is the author of the nationally bestselling memoir All You Can Ever Know. We’ve done several episodes on adoption at this point, but what’s special about Nicole’s is that she digs into what it means to put such a personal, detailed story out for public consumption, where suddenly your opinions can be seen as the barometer for what’s good or bad, where your story is both deeply personal and also stops being primarily for you.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell us about yourself.
I’m somewhat rare among Korean American adoptees in that my birth parents are Korean immigrants and I was the first person born on US soil. They moved a couple of years before I was born. I have an older sister who was born in Korea. Most of the Korean adoptees you meet were born in Korea adopted and brought over here.
I talk a lot and write a lot about adoption and Korean adoption, but I try not to speak for Korean-born adoptees. We have overlapping experiences, many of us growing up in America in overwhelmingly white communities. But at the same time, if we choose to search for our birth families, it’s a very different process. I have the privilege of never having my citizenship questioned or in danger. As you probably know, many Korean-born adoptees have had the opposite experience, where they can’t produce documented proof of their citizenship because that was overlooked by parents and the adoption system. They’ve even had their US citizenship called into question. I have the privilege of that not happening to me.
My birth parents were small business owners in the Seattle area. I was placed for adoption after being born premature and brought to a small town in Oregon, where I grew up in a white family, a white neighborhood, a white school and community. I did not become close or get to know any other Koreans until college.
I feel like I had to get away from home and the distraction of college to have the freedom to process and question things about my adoption that I’d been told my whole life by my parents and other people. I was in my mid-20s before I could sit and question, What were the effects of that? What does it mean when a transracial adoptee grows up? What questions do I still have that were never answered?
My adoptive parents always told me, “if you want to search, you should wait till you’re older.” They felt it would be too much for me and them when I was younger. It didn’t feel like an option to search or to look for those answers till I was an adult. It was becoming pregnant with my first child that was the final push. That was what made it feel newly urgent.
How did the book come to be?
It was several years after my search and my reunion when I began writing about it at all. I didn’t show the first essays to anybody. I never published them. I needed to write my way into adoption, it was this huge thing that I avoided writing about for so long.
When I finally did, it was like the floodgates opened. Every time I did publish an essay, people had questions. It was hard to get out the full story and feel like I was being fair to everybody: adoptive parents, birth parents, everybody in 2000 words. The more I told the story, the more I started to see the arc and how it would go. Maybe, I thought, a full-length book gives it the space and nuance that it deserves.
What was the process of finding your birth parents?
I had a brief vision of this person ringing up my birth parents — or just showing up on their doorstep! — intent on coaxing them into a reunion with the daughter they had not seen in nearly 27 years. She might imply that they owed me a meeting for the sake of my personal healing; never mind their shock, or what they wanted. Did my own feelings and wishes matter to her? Or would I be just another tally mark in her book of saved lives? — excerpt from All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung
I ended up working with a search agent — the official term is “confidential intermediary,” an impartial third party — in the state of Washington, where I was adopted. In most cases in Washington, you don’t have to go through confidential intermediaries anymore because adoptees, for at least a certain period of time, have access to their original birth certificates. They could do this research, request their original birth certificate, and find their birth parents on their own. But at the time I searched, for the time period that I had been adopted, you had to go through a confidential intermediary.
First of all, she wasn’t allowed to share any identifying information that would allow them to find me either: no last name, not where I lived. Then, she wasn’t allowed to release any of their info to me until they approved. I would know that if they wanted to be in touch with me, it would be their choice. They could say yes, and I could feel confident that it was what they wanted.
But the system is not perfect; it has a lot of downsides. It was an unexpectedly difficult process finding an intermediary I felt remotely comfortable with. Even the one I ended up with — there were moments when I felt like she assumed all along that reunion was what would happen. As naive as I was, I knew it was going to be deeply emotional and hard probably for all of us.
It also cost a thousand bucks, which is a lot of money to me — at that time especially — but I had no other way around it. It was not a perfect system, finding someone to be your proxy to your long-lost parents. My intermediary was not an adoptee herself, or a birth or adoptive parent. She wasn’t a counselor or a social worker either, so had no training in the more therapeutic side to offer like emotional support.
What are some of the nuances in adoptees telling their stories?
Sometimes those things are informed by stereotypes about adoptees, as if all of us feel this deep longing and this gaping hole because our birth families aren’t there; [as if] we all feel a burning need to search. Certainly, lots of us search, but I don’t feel comfortable saying it’s universal. On the flip side, I’ve had so many people telling me my love for my adoptive parents as though that is what makes me safe; that’s what makes me approachable. I don’t think it’s fair to adoptees who have more difficult relationships, or who are estranged from their adoptive families. That wasn’t my experience, but it doesn’t mean that those who have harder experiences are less legitimate. It doesn’t mean they aren’t voices we need to listen to, because I would argue it’s important actually to hear those hard cases, those stories that make us uncomfortable. Particularly stories from transracial adoptees talking about the cultural disconnect and white supremacy, and their families or their communities not being able to support them, or even othering them, despite their love for them.
Those are all stories that need to be heard. If people see me on a surface level as this approachable adoptee, that almost gives them another excuse to ignore the voices of adoptees who they view as angrier. And I don’t think that’s right or fair.
What is it like being an author speaking for yourself but in the role of an adoptee?
Of course, it’s not the job of a writer to try to speak for everyone. Publishing a memoir for public consumption, you hope that people can find something universal amid the personal, which is very different than making yourself a spokesperson for adoptees everywhere. How do you speak to your personal experience in a way where there’s still something for readers to grab on to and develop their own opinions independent of your story? If I had gone into it thinking I have to be a voice for adopted people, or even just all Korean adoptees, I would never have had the courage to start; that is too huge of a task. It’s an impossible task. All you can ever do is say what you know to be true for you. The relationship between a reader and a book is their own.
Can you speak to the feeling of closure, or the lack of it?
From the time I was young, I had assumed the same truth that freed me would also free my birth family — that the rush of air and light sweeping away the secrets would come as a relief to all of us. If I learned one thing in the early days of our reunion, it was that I could not compel another person to feel comforted, to feel whole, to forgive themselves. The peace I’d wanted so badly to give my birth parents, all along, was never in my power to give. — excerpt from All You Can Ever Know, by Nicole Chung
I think closure is impossible, honestly, in most situations in life. Most things that are on your heart and weighing on your mind for years are going to be impossible to get full closure.
Going in, I knew enough to realize this was not going to clear everything up for me. It wasn’t going to get every question answered. It wasn’t going to undo feelings that I’d had. I’m still always going to have grown up adopted. I was privileged to be able to search at all. Many adoptees just try and don’t have enough to go on, or the laws are such that they cannot get access to the information they need. There’s no fully regaining what you lost — there is just incorporating that into your life as best you can if you’re lucky enough to have the support to do that. You move forward, but it’s always part of you.
What is it like meeting other adoptees?
I had the honor of giving a keynote at KAAN, the Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network conference last summer. There were massive numbers of adoptees there. It was a great, affirming experience for me to be in a room like that.
I only had a few adopted friends growing up. We did not talk about it, but we were kids, so I don’t know that that would have been the expectation. I had a friend in college whom I found out a year into our friendship that she was also adopted. We spoke about it once for like two minutes and then never again. I don’t feel like we were avoiding it. Sometimes, I have found hanging out with adoptees in smaller groups or one-on-one that we will end up getting into it. I find it helpful to talk with adopted friends, especially Korean and other transracial adoptees, about growing up in our white families and white communities.
Tune in to Episode #31, contact us at dividedfamiliespodcast@gmail.com and follow us at @DividedFamiliesPodcast.