39 pages • 1 hour read
Nicole ChungAll You Can Ever Know: A Memoir
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3 Summary
Part 3 of All You Can Ever Know focuses on Nicole’s early experiences as a parent and her blossoming relationship with Cindy. Despite her fears, Nicole gave birth to a healthy baby girl named Abigail after 24 hours of labor. As she watched her daughter sleep in her incubator, Nicole wondered if her mother had been given the chance to hold her before giving her away, and if her father had even seen her. Nicole and Cindy grew closer after Abigail’s birth. Cindy sent gifts to her niece and the sisters exchanged many emails. Visitors commented on how much Abigail resembled Dan, but Nicole recognized herself in her daughter.
A week after bringing Abigail home, Nicole received a call from her birth mother. The first thing her mother did after identifying herself was apologize for abandoning her. Her mother claimed she did not want to put Nicole up for adoption, and that her husband had forced her to sign the papers. Her words were what Nicole had longed to hear her entire life, but she was unsure if she believed them. Nicole wanted to lash out at her birth mother for abusing Cindy. Instead, she remembered Jessica telling her that their mother had a hard life and told her she did not blame her. However, she did not commit to visits or phone calls when her birth mother asked; rather, she thanked her mother for calling and said goodbye.
Weeks after giving birth, Nicole started exchanging emails with her birth father. In his initial message, he shared information about his work and faith, in addition to apologizing for putting her up for adoption and asking for forgiveness. Nicole’s birth parents told vastly different stories about the circumstances surrounding her adoption, yet both claimed that it was beyond their control. Due to her relationship with Cindy, Nicole was inclined to trust her birth father, but that did not mean she was ready to start a relationship with him. Her birth father seemed equally reticent, even telling Nicole he did not wish to discuss the past.
While Nicole’s interactions with her birth parents stagnated, her relationship with Cindy grew. The sisters wrote to each other almost every day, sharing information about their lives and imagining what their relationship might have been like as children. Although their messages could not make up for their lost years, the two shared an easy friendship. About four months after Abigail’s birth, Nicole invited Cindy and Rick to visit. A month before the visit, Cindy called to tell Nicole she was pregnant. Three days later, she learned it was an ectopic pregnancy that required injections to terminate. However, the procedure was unsuccessful and required surgery.
Despite these setbacks, Cindy and Rick traveled to see Nicole and Dan as planned. Nicole noticed the physical similarities with her sister instantly, as did Abigail. Nicole also took note of their differences, such as Cindy’s rounder face, darker hair, and more prominent cheekbones. Even more pronounced were the differences in their voices—Cindy’s was soft while Nicole’s was loud and brash. Cindy told Nicole about living in Seoul, South Korea, with her grandmother and later joining her mother, stepfather, and Jessica in Seattle. She speculated that the early alienation from her mother made her an easy target for abuse. Her father was initially unaware of the abuse, while Jessica, who was 10 years older than her, was rarely home. Cindy cried as she described her childhood to Nicole.
She also showed Nicole an old photo album and gave her a stack of pictures to keep. There were no photos of their mother. Later during the visit, Cindy encouraged Nicole to visit their father. She also told Nicole that their father had not told any of his family members about her. Nicole wondered how her father would introduce her to his relatives if she visited. A few days before Cindy’s departure, Nicole told Cindy she wanted them to be “real sisters” (230). Cindy replied, “You’re already there with me” (231).
Part 3 Analysis
Part 3 of All You Can Ever Know revisits the theme of The Intersection of Pregnancy, Motherhood, and Reunion. Birthing a child is a momentous event, but it takes on special meaning for adoptees. Nicole grew up not looking like any of her relatives. This lack of shared family traits—a recurring motif in Nicole’s memoir—exacerbated her feelings of alienation. Thus, recognizing her features in her daughter’s was especially poignant for Nicole: “Her skin, ruddy from birth, would settle into a shade that nearly matched mine. She was born with a tiny bump of a nose—I recognized it as my own in almost comic miniature. The shape of my eyes. A look on her face that I recognized” (182). Many friends and relatives commented that Abigail looked like Dan. These remarks stung Nicole, who recognized herself in her daughter: “I saw myself every time I looked at her” (186).
Birthing a child also brought Nicole new insights about her adoption by further undermining The Myth of Adoption: “My birth parents could not have been to me what I was to Abigail, I thought. They had left me and they hadn’t even known I would be okay. They had denied the very fact of my life. As a parent, I was incapable of such a thing” (197). During her first conversation with her birth mother, Nicole intended to tell her that she made the right decision, but she realized that the story she told herself growing up about parents who loved her so much they had to give her away was not precisely true: “This woman had never felt about me the way I felt about my daughter. To her, I was fairly certain, I had been a complication in an existing tangle of misery; a problem that had to be solved” (191). As a new mother, Nicole therefore had to come to terms with her birth parents’ motivations and feelings surrounding the adoption, just as she had already had to re-evaluate some of the values and myths surrounding her adoptive parents’ roles in the process.
However, Nicole later understood that her adoption was no-one’s fault, but simply “the easiest way to solve just one of too many problems” (193). She even recognized that some parts of her adoption story were in fact accurate, further complicating her views on adoption:
When you are growing up adopted, people like to tell you how lucky you are. Having learned the truth about my birth family, I couldn’t disagree. But it wasn’t so simple: there are many different kinds of luck; many different ways to be blessed or cursed (202).
Nicole gradually learned to accept that she had been lucky in some ways and unlucky in others, once again speaking to The Difficulties of Being a Transracial Adoptee.
Motherhood not only changed how Nicole thought of her birth parents and her adoption, but also brought new insights into her adoptive parents. As she and Dan cared for their newborn, she wondered how her adoptive parents felt about missing out on the first two months of her life:
I wondered if my parents had ever felt cheated out of so many firsts—by the time they brought me home, someone else had changed my first diaper, caught my first funny stares and smiles, and taught me to drink from a bottle […] How long had it taken for them to feel like my real parents? (187).
Nicole’s first experiences as a parent also coincided with her burgeoning relationship with Cindy. From the start, the sisters chose to be honest with one another, even when the truth hurt. Against Jessica’s advice, Cindy told Nicole about the abuse she suffered at their mother’s hands. Here, Nicole further develops the theme of The Myth of Adoption, further undermining the myth: Nicole’s birth parents were not selfless heroes who gave her up as an act of love, but a dysfunctional couple who struggled with abuse.
Learning about what happened to Cindy broke Nicole’s heart: “I wanted to cry, too, for my sister now and also for the child she’d been. But […] I wanted to be strong for her and not break down. It seemed the least I owed her, when I had escaped, and she had not” (219). Although Nicole was grateful for her relationship with Cindy from the start, she wondered what it would have been like to grow up with her: “Looking at little Cindy on the park bench, I wished I could magically insert myself in the photograph. I wished we had actual memories together, instead of years of secrets and silence” (221). In the end, however, Nicole realized that her present with Cindy mattered more than the past: “We were sisters, at last, because we had decided we should be” (231). In becoming a mother, Nicole was also learning how to become a sister, once more echoing The Intersection of Pregnancy, Motherhood, and Reunion.
