All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir

Part 1 of All You Can Ever Know introduces the book’s main themes: adoption, race, and belonging. By using two timelines, one focusing on her childhood and the other on her adult life, Nicole underscores how her childhood experiences impacted her later in life, and how her perspective changed from accepting The Myth of Adoption to rejecting it in favor of a more realistic view of her past. The shifts in perspective allow readers to trace how Nicole arrived at her new understanding of her family’s history.

Nicole describes The Difficulties of Being a Transracial Adoptee as central to her childhood experiences inside and outside the home. Nicole’s adoptive parents—who remain unnamed throughout the memoir—provided her with a safe and loving home. Their lack of attentiveness to her Korean identity and social history, however, left her feeling unmoored. Like many Americans who came of age after the Civil Rights era, Nicole’s adoptive parents claimed to be colorblind—that is, they pretended that race was unimportant. What mattered to them was the love they had for their daughter: “You’re our Asian Princess! Of course we don’t think of you as Asian” (31). According to Nicole, colorblindness allowed her parents to ignore that she was the daughter of immigrants from the other side of the world and to claim her as their own: “By adopting me, my parents had made me one of them” (31). Although it came from a place of love, Nicole’s colorblind upbringing created a dissonance between how her parents treated her and the treatment she experienced outside the home.

Being Korean in a predominantly white environment shaped Nicole’s identity. Nicole looked different from everyone around her, including her “red-headed, freckled [w]hite mom and early-graying [w]hite dad” (35). The absence of shared family traits—an important symbol of alienation—bothered Nicole throughout her childhood. Indeed, Nicole’s physical differences with her parents, extended family, and community led to feelings of isolation, which were exacerbated by her complete detachment from her heritage. To Nicole, Korea was “little more than a faraway country” (32). Even in non-transracial adoptions, however, adoptees tend to feel alienated, a feeling Nicole describes in evocative terms:

Long after the papers are signed and the original familial bonds are severed, adoption has a way of isolating the adoptee. For me, it had always been this way: a wide sea seemed to separate the lone island of my experience from the well-mapped continents on which other people, other families, resided (100).

The racism Nicole experienced as a child deepened her sense of alienation. Her first memory of overt racism stems from the second or third grade, when the boy she carpooled with “pulled his eyes into slits,” squinted, and said “me Chinee, me can’t see!” (40). The boy also declared that she was so ugly her own birth parents did not want her. The incident was especially painful because the boy was mocking two unchangeable things: Nicole’s race, and the fact that she was adopted. During the ride home that afternoon, Nicole pretended nothing had happened, but the incident left its mark: “Something inside of me, something still and deep, something precious, had broken” (41).

In addition to overt racism, Nicole experienced microaggressions throughout her childhood. Comments such as, “Where did they get you?” and “How much did you cost[?]” followed her wherever she went (33). The near-constant reminders that she was different troubled Nicole, especially because she did not feel different: “I am just like you” (44), she thought when children squinted at her at school. Nicole was so cut off from her Korean identity that she “felt more like a white girl than an Asian one” (44).

As a result of her upbringing, whiteness became Nicole’s only barometer of beauty and goodness: “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” (44). The impact of her environment was such that her early writing—a recurring motif related to escapism in Nicole’s memoir—featured white protagonists.

A trip to Seattle at the age of 10 marked a turning point for Nicole. The trip was her first exposure to large numbers of Asian people: “I tried to play my Count the Asian game and lost track every time. Here, finally, I was inconspicuous” (69). The tenor of Nicole’s writing changed after this visit. She began filling her notebooks with stories about Asian American characters, placing them in hilltop houses and luxury apartments and surrounding them with characters of diverse backgrounds.

However, it was not until college that Nicole befriended other Asian people:

[College] 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 not to be surrounded by white people who had no idea what to make of me (32).

Nicole’s nuanced views on adoption are among the most important threads of her memoir. Adoption is often presented in exclusively positive terms. This myth, which centers on offering a child a better life, omits important aspects of adoption, namely, loss:

The idea began to grow in my mind that I had lost things, too, all those years ago when I was born too soon and my life changed course. These losses were not limited to personal history or the chance to know the people I’d come from. I had missed out on growing up in a place where my presence was not just accepted or tolerated, but a matter of course (73).

Nicole never expressed this sense of loss as a child for fear of seeming ungrateful. She kept her ambivalence hidden even from her parents, who viewed her as a gift from God. When a woman from church informed her parents that a child was available for adoption, they felt like “God was finally smiling down on them” (52). Nicole’s mother even called her adoption “God’s plan for them” (52). These sentiments confused Nicole, who wondered why God took her away from her birth parents.

Nicole now understands that presenting adoption as divinely ordained glosses over loss and inequity, and that it is used “to justify the separation of a parent and a child” (81). For much of her life, Nicole perpetuated The Myth of Adoption. Today, she provides a more measured response when asked about the practice:

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 (47).