Nicole Chung is a chronicler of loss. In her debut memoir, “All You Can Ever Know,” she wrote about what has become known as disenfranchised grief — sorrow that is not publicly acknowledged or socially supported — as she explored the circumstances of her adoption. Now, in her second memoir, “A Living Remedy,” Chung’s anguish is focused on the glaringly visible: the broken U.S. health care system; the brutality of capitalism; the hurt of everyday racism; and the devastating shock of losing her adoptive parents and the family narrative that, for so long, was all she knew.
Surrendered as a “severely premature” baby by her Korean immigrant birth parents, Chung was adopted by a religious white couple in rural Oregon who told her that it was God’s plan that she join their family. Chung struggled to square this tidy legend with the reality of growing up in a place where her ethnicity immediately marked her as “other.” The judge who finalized her 1981 adoption told Chung’s parents to ignore the issue as they raised her. “Assimilate her into your family,” he told them, “and everything will be fine.”
It was profoundly misguided advice. Chung’s classmates taunted her with slurs, and adults asked her thoughtless questions. But at home, Chung wanted to protect her parents by never mentioning the racism she experienced when she stepped outside. “I could no more make them understand how it felt to be a Korean American adoptee than they could transfer their whiteness to me.” She turned inward, focusing on books (most of which had white protagonists) and stories she wrote with Paper Mate pens in spiral notebooks.
Hovering above Chung’s adolescence was another unspoken but very real anxiety: the threat her parents’ financial insecurity and sporadic insurance coverage posed to their fragile health. As a teenager, Chung knew little about the decline of Oregon’s timber industry and the economic havoc unleashed by the disappearance of the well-paying jobs it underwrote, but people in her church community understood her family’s desperate circumstances. A babysitting client paid Chung more than usual after her mother’s breast cancer surgery; another time, an anonymous neighbor left her family $500 in an envelope. Her father, who worked managing pizza restaurants, could not afford his diabetes medication, so he simply went without, leaving his blood sugar dangerously unregulated. The couple’s relative youth and meager earnings made them ineligible for government assistance. Later in life, Chung’s mother helped pay bills by selling her plasma. The family lived not paycheck to paycheck, Chung writes, “but emergency to emergency.”
At the elite university she attended on scholarship, Chung could finally breathe. She was no longer the only Asian, but she still straddled an economic gulf, juggling work-study jobs while affluent classmates blew off steam by shopping at Armani Exchange. In her early 20s, she got married, settled on the East Coast and started a family.
As she managed new motherhood and her own student debt, her father’s diabetes worsened, so she scrambled, guilt-ridden, to find him a low-cost clinic from 3,000 miles away. When he died at 67, Chung’s heartache about her father’s premature death turned to rage. She was, she writes, “grieving under capitalism” for the years with her father that were lost because he could not afford basic health care.
Chung sees her father’s death as part of a larger systemic breakdown — one aggravated by the politics of recent years — in which uninsured people who fall ill are blamed for their own suffering. The United States, she writes, is “a country that first abandons and then condemns people without money who have the temerity to get sick, accusing them of their own deaths. It is still hard for me not to think of my father’s death as a kind of negligent homicide, facilitated and sped by the state’s failure to fulfill its most basic responsibilities to him and others like him.”
Chung’s despair over his loss, and the cracked national safety net, is wrenching. But she slowly regained her bearings as she prepared for a national tour to talk about her first book. Her enthusiasm is short-lived. On publication day, her mother called to tell her that doctors had found a mass in her abdomen — a cancer that would metastasize. Then came the Covid pandemic. Weeks into lockdown, her grandmother died alone in an Oregon memory care facility. Her mother succumbed the next month, and Chung could attend her funeral only remotely, watching the service on her couch between her husband and daughters, time zones away. In the wake of those three deaths, Chung tells a cousin: “It’s like being unadopted.”
In her clear, concise prose, Chung makes the personal political, tackling everything from America’s crushingly unjust health care system to the country’s gauzy assumptions about adoption, a practice that is itself rooted in economic inequality. Her observations are particularly timely at a moment when life expectancy in the United States is falling, and when adoption, in post-Dobbs America, is promoted by the religious right as the “loving option” for unwanted pregnancies. Chung’s work reveals a different truth: The lives of adoptees begin (and continue) with a rupture few wish to recognize.
Chung writes with aching and transcendent longing — for a past she never had; for her flawed home state; and for a more compassionate future, even as she navigates the “yawning terrain our loved ones have left behind.”
With this work, Chung offers a luminous addition to the literature of loss, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Notes on Grief” to Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking.” Absorbing, spare and sometimes terrifyingly close to the abyss, “A Living Remedy” shows us the power of resilience.
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