“No matter how a child joins your family, their presence changes all the rules; they move into your heart and build new rooms, know down walls you never knew existed.”
This book offers something very unique through the perspective of an adoptee. It does not hold back about the complexities of adoption and does this by the author’s own lived experiences. By the end, you feel like you know Nicole Chung, the author, or had spent hours sitting with her, listening to her life and her deepest thoughts. She recalls memories and beautifully weaves them together with her current quest to find her biological family. Simultaneously, she feels torn between the family who raised her and the family she always longed to know.
Nicole deconstructs her experiences and emotions from childhood to young adulthood. It’s important to remember that every experience with adoption is different. Nicole’s story is unique to her and her family and her quest is filled with many mixed emotions. She sets out to search for her biological family as she approaches motherhood. At different times, she marvels at the connection and the physical and emotional attachments with her baby during pregnancy and after, that are imminent. She reflects how she does not have any of this with her birth mom, let alone many details of her own birth’s circumstances. It’s a loss she’s grieved but now re-experiencing in a new way.
This book will challenge you in many ways that can only be accomplished through the stories of those experiencing adoption and daily living it. It reveals a hidden layer of self reflection. While we celebrate new stages of families and growing bonds, there is also pain through loss that exists in adoption. For some adoptees there is always a pain or isolation that exists in parts of their story, and although Nicole has the opportunity to find some level of closure in hers, she does not fail to acknowledge the hurt and pain that exists for others in her own story or for others and their own experiences. Whether the whole book or parts of the book are familiar to you, it should not be generalized with every adoption. For example, adoptions are also facilitated by agencies, not just attorneys and levels of openness in adoption can vary.
There are several informative topics addressed in the book that any adoptive family, relative or professional, could learn from. We encourage everyone to find space for stories like Nicole’s and gain deeper insight to adoption. Examples of topics included in this book are open & closed adoption, transracial adoption, racism, infertility, pregnancy, poverty, child abuse, grief, trauma, belonging and birth family reunion. You can acquire your own copy here.
If you’re new to hearing the adoptee experience, we also recommend “Closure” , a documentary by Angela Tucker where she and her husband document her search for her biological family. Angela also has a podcast called, “The Adoptee Next Door”, where she features conversations with other adoptees and insights on racism, religion, immigration, trauma, and many other topics.
