All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir

All You Can Ever Know centers upon the myths surrounding adoption. Over the course of the memoir, Nicole gradually becomes more aware of how certain myths shaped her life and her views of both her adoptive family and her birth family. In seeking to undercover the truth behind the myths, Nicole eventually develops a deeper awareness of how complex adoption can be, both in terms of its joys and its heartbreaks.

One of the aspects of the myth of adoption concerns selfless birth parents willingly giving up a baby to ensure a better life for their offspring. Nicole recalls her mother’s explanation from her childhood: “Your birth parents had just moved here from Korea. They thought they wouldn’t be able to give you the life you deserved” (27). Nicole first heard the story when she was three or four years old, but her adoptive mother repeated it throughout her childhood. She sometimes added details to satisfy Nicole’s curiosity, all of which emphasized her birth parents’ love and devotion to her: “Your birth parents were very sad they couldn’t keep you, but they thought adoption was the best thing for you” (28, emphasis added). By the time Nicole was six years old, she had heard the story of the loving birth parents who selflessly put her up for adoption so many times she could recite it from memory.

However, as Nicole discovered once she found her birth family, the truth was far more complicated. She learned from her search angel that her birth parents already had two daughters and that they may have preferred a boy. Her search angel also revealed that her birth parents may have been embarrassed to bring home a sick baby and that they thought it would be easier if they told people their baby had died. Also, learning that Cindy was abused by their birth mother and that her birth parents blamed each other for the adoption taught Nicole that the myth of “selfless” parents was neither accurate nor fair. Instead, she gradually learned to accept that her parents were flawed individuals who had done what they felt was the easiest thing to solve a problem under difficult circumstances.

Another persistent aspect of the adoption myth is the idea that adoption is a purely happy event. As a child, Nicole understood that she was lucky to have been adopted by parents who wanted her so much, and that they believed she was a gift from God, “a thing divinely ordered, almost biblical” (80). Nicole not only repeated the myth of her adoption, but also embellished it: “Most people are stuck with their kids […] My parents chose me” (37), she said to her classmates. The older she grew, the more Nicole realized that this myth obscured the many deep emotional complexities surrounding transracial adoption. While she loved her adoptive parents and did feel lucky in many ways, she finally accepted the fact that she had also experienced difficulties and losses as an adoptee. For her parents, the soothing myth had made it “easier to gloss over real loss and inequity, to justify the separation of a parent and a child” (81). For her, the myth of the lucky and happy adoptee had suppressed her disconnection from her heritage and her loss of her original Korean identity. In learning to embrace both the advantages and losses in adoption, Nicole gained a more balanced understanding of what adoption truly means for all parties.

Rather than maintaining myths, Nicole now advises readers to view adoption in a realistic way and to see the good alongside the bad. Moreover, she urges adoptees to “lay down the burden of being ‘the good adoptee’, the grateful [child] who’d been lost and then found” (121), and to pursue their origins, if that is their wish. As Nicole’s experience proves, reconnecting with one’s roots does not necessarily mean rejecting one’s adoptive family—instead, both forms of love can co-exist and strengthen, while one’s sense of identity can become both more accurate and more complete.