All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir

Part 4 of All You Can Ever Know returns to the themes of adoption, race, and belonging by focusing on Nicole’s relationship with her birth father. As she did in previous sections, Nicole pushes back against simplistic, feel-good stereotypes about The Myth of Adoption, especially transracial adoption. Being raised by white parents in a predominantly white environment left Nicole feeling rootless. Nowhere are the repercussions of her upbringing more evident than in her first meeting with her birth father. Nicole’s birth father offered her a collection of his essays, which were written in Korean. In this context, the Korean language symbolizes Nicole’s alienation from her roots. Nicole appreciated her father’s gesture, but she was saddened by her inability to read the essays.

Nicole also felt cut off from her heritage when her father, his wife, and Cindy spoke Korean: “I felt no annoyance; only embarrassment at my own inability to understand the language I had been born to speak” (245). Rather than blaming her adoptive parents, Nicole takes responsibility for her shortcomings and their impact on her interactions with her birth father: “I’d been cut off from my culture of origin, yes, but that had been decades ago; I’d had almost thirty years to ask questions, to try to learn more about it. The gap between us wasn’t just his to bridge, and yet I’d come without any real tools” (245).

The language barriers highlight The Difficulties of Being a Transracial Adoptee, as Nicole began to realize the complicated relationship she had with her identity and heritage. As someone ethnically Korean and yet divorced from the language and culture, she had to navigate the gaps in understanding and belonging that were opening as she learned about her roots. Her “embarrassment” at her lack of Korean heritage thus became a powerful incentive to take control and seek a more active recovery of her roots, inspiring her to learn the language.

Getting to know her birth father also brought Nicole’s loss of ethnic identity into sharper focus. While talking about his family in Korea, Nicole’s father mentioned a 10-volume family history that went back 500 years. As an adoptee, she had never been part of this kind of lineage: “The common stories, the shared mannerisms, the physical traits linking one relative to another in a multigenerational tapestry—I had never known these particular aspects of family, of belonging” (247). Nicole wondered if non-adopted people could appreciate what a gift it was to have such a history, and although she was not part of it, simply knowing it existed made her feel connected to her ancestors.

Shared family traits are important symbols of belonging in Nicole’s memoir. Nicole is a writer by profession; her father is a published author and a scholar of Korean literature and linguistics; and Cindy writes poetry and stories in her spare time. Nicole was heartened by these discoveries, as they made her realize that she had something in common with her birth family despite the years of separation: “My own lifelong obsession with writing was a shared family trait, the inheritance of what I was told were generations of scholars and writers” (243, emphasis added). The shared traits also extended beyond writing, incorporating even mannerisms and personal habits: “Sitting next to my father, listening to him speak, I felt sure that many of the things my adoptive family had always found puzzling—my studiousness, my freakish memory, my wide perfectionist streak—would have seemed natural to him” (249). Nicole’s birth father also recognized himself in his daughter. After reading one of her essays, for example, he told Nicole that she took after him and that he was proud of her.

Reuniting with her birth family not only restored relationships that were severed soon after Nicole’s birth, but also shifted existing ones. The reunion forced Nicole’s adoptive parents to rethink The Myth of Adoption as well. For the first time, they considered what she lost by being adopted, in addition to what she gained. Nicole’s adoptive mother asked if Nicole thought her adoption was “a good thing” (267). In response, Nicole encouraged her mother not to think of adoption in terms of “good” or “bad,” but to approach it in a nuanced, realistic manner.

Nicole’s adoption reverberated through multiple families and generations, once more emphasizing that alongside The Difficulties of Being a Transracial Adoptee there are also difficulties for those connected to the adoptee. Beyond Nicole and her two sets of parents, it impacted her sisters and their families, as well as her daughters. At the age of four, Abigail began asking questions about Nicole’s adoption, noting how sad it must have been to be cut off from her roots. Nicole did not gloss over the difficulties: “I don’t try to convince my daughter that the way I lost one family and entered into a new one is entirely natural, that it was an uncomplicated, happy event. It was happy, in a way, but it has also been a source of grief for many” (260). In speaking candidly with her daughter about the nuances and complexities of her own experience of adoption, Nicole ensures that The Myth of Adoption will not be perpetuated in the next generation of her family.

Ultimately, the emotional process of reuniting with her birth family and coming to terms with the truth about her adoption did not change Nicole’s relationship with her adoptive parents. She writes: “I am still my adoptive parents’ daughter. No matter what, no matter our differences, they will always be my parents, the ones who wanted me when no one else did” (273). As the mother of two children of color, however, she vocally opposes their colorblindness, calling out the ideology as harmful to anti-racist work:

Now that I am raising children of color in a starkly divided America I feel, even more strongly, that maintaining my silence with my relatives—pretending my race doesn’t matter—is no longer a choice I can make. It feels like my duty as my white family’s de facto Asian ambassador to remind them that I am not white, that we do experience this country in different ways because of it, that many people still know oppression far more insidious and harmful than anything I’ve ever faced (266).

Nicole still stands by her decision to call out colorblindness, even though it means directly opposing her parents’ well-intentioned but misguided values. For her, as for other transracial adoptees, race is not irrelevant, even in the presence of love.