Jo Reed:  From the National Endowment for the Arts, This is Art Works I’m Josephine Reed.  Nicole Chung has written two memoirs in the past five years. And both of them deal with loss and family. Her first book the critically acclaimed All You Can Ever Know explores the circumstances of her adoption as a Korean American growing up in a white family in a white community, the deep love she felt for and from them despite their refusal to recognize her racial difference as having any significance, and her subsequent successful search for her birth family as an adult. All You Can Ever Know went on to be named a best book of the year by over twenty outlets including NPR and The Washington Post and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. But Nicole Chung had little time to enjoy that success.  As her memoir A Living Remedy details, Nicole lost both her adoptive parents within two years of each other. A memoir that deftly navigates personal loss and broader societal issues, A Living Remedy deals with Nicole’s profound grief and her anger at a healthcare system that failed her father, her efforts to help her much-loved terminally ill mother who lived across the country and entered hospice as the country shut down due to the pandemic, and her struggle to balance the duties of mother and daughter. I spoke with Nicole Chung recently about  A Living Remedy but first wanted to touch briefly on her first memoir All You Can Ever Know beginning with the circumstances of her adoption and her decision to look for her birth parents

Nicole Chung:  So my first book, All You Can Ever Know was published in 2018And as you mentioned, it primarily deals with my growing up adopted in a white family.  And but it's much more focused on when I grew up and what happened when I decided to search for my Korean birth family, and what I discovered in that search which happened to coincide with my pregnancy and the birth of my own first child.  So it's also a book about expanding family in many, many different ways, you know, being in reunion with my birth family while my own family was growing.  And the circumstances of my adoption-- so I'm actually the only Korean adoptee I know who wasn't born in Korea.  My birth parents were immigrants to this country, so they came shortly before my birth, and I was born very prematurely in the Seattle area and adopted from there in the early eighties.  My adoption was a closed adoption, as many were back then, which means there was no contact or information exchanged between my birth and my adoptive families.  So I really knew nothing substantial about my birth family, and they were always a source of curiosity and like some confusion, if I'm honest, and a lot of big, tangled emotions as I got older.  And my adoptive parents had always told me, you know, it's your decision if you want to search when you're an adult.  They were very opposed to there being any contact between our families when I was a child.  But it's not like I started searching right when I turned 18.  The real final push for me after decades of curiosity was when I got pregnant with my first child, and I remember just like feeling as though I didn't have -- not only did I not have like medical or social history, like those hard facts that we often want.  I felt like there was something else that was missing, like part of my legacy, my family history. The intangible, unknowable things, the things you can only really learn if you get to talk with and get to know people and get to have those relationships that I never got to have with my birth family.  And I just remember feeling as though I have like another reason to search now, you know, I can search for both of us, and maybe if my birth family's willing to talk with me, I can at least learn more and have more of my history, our history, to pass on. 

Jo Reed:  You finally did meet your birth parents, and you met one of your siblings, Cindy, who has become a very, very important part of your life. 

Nicole Chung:  Yes.  My sister and I are still very close.  And so, you know, the part of All You Can Ever Know, not to give like too much away, but focuses on that reconnection, which I think has been really nourishing and really important for both of us.  And we've been in reunion now for over a decade, and she's still like a very big part of my life and part of my kids' lives.  So I'm really, really  grateful for that. 

Jo Reed:  You make it crystal clear in both your books -- nothing could be clearer -- that you were deeply loved by your parents, and you deeply loved them in return.  But they were told when they adopted you to take a colorblind approach to parenting, and you write very eloquently about what the implications of that were for you both inside your home and outside.

Nicole Chung:  Yeah.  My parents were really following the advice of, I mean I refer to them as "experts" kind of in quotes, but I think this was common guidance back then.  Everybody from the social worker to the adoption agency, to the judge that finalized my adoption told them, and just basically assimilate her into your family.  Like race is not really going to be relevant, you know, all that matters is that you love her.  And you know, they did obviously.  It was not a home that was in any way lacking in love or support.  But we weren't really equipped, they weren't really equipped, I don't think they were given the tools or the guidance that they really needed and, to their credit, asked for.  You know, my parents really did push to try to find out what they needed to know about raising a child of a different race than them. There was nothing, really no guidance given.  And so they thought they were doing the best thing by taking this quote/unquote colorblind approach to raising me.  But of course I didn't really acknowledge the reality, and it didn't really acknowledge what I was seeing and experiencing.  I was the only Korean that I really knew growing up in our small town, which was predominantly white, not always the only Asian kid, but  frequently.  It was often confusing, it was often isolating.  And, you know, as I write about a little in the book I experienced a lot of like racial bullying growing up that confused me because I'd been told my race didn't matter at home, and we never really talked about it.  It was this largely unacknowledged, undiscussed topic.  And yet when I went out into the world, like beyond the safety of my family's home, I encountered all these signs and evidence that actually it does matter, or did matter to many people, and had to kind of struggle to figure out how to deal with that and process that kind of on my own because I didn't have anybody else in my life who was like me.  So that was like I think the primary effect was it would've been kind of isolating anyway just growing up in racial isolation, but there was this added layer of I guess like emotional isolation when it came to really grappling with racism, and the reality of my identity and what that meant because I didn't really have any company, and I didn't have the vocabulary often to even explain what was going on.  So I think a lot of times my parents were unaware, like for example of the bullying, I was in my twenties before I told them about that.  So, yeah, I think none of us, neither my adoptive parents -- I mean nor my birth parents, nor I were especially well served by the adoption industry at that time that we were interacting with.

Jo Reed:   Now, let’s turn to your recent memoir A Living Remedy and the circumstances that led you to write it

Nicole Chung:  My adoptive father passed away in early 2018,which was the year actually that All You Can Ever Know was published.  So I go on book tour and I'm grieving, and in between events I'm like going home to see my mother and we're kind of processing our grief together.  And there was this aspect of our shared grief that we talked about a lot, and that kind of surprised me in its intensity, but we both felt a lot of unresolved anger and like some self-blame about not being able to help or save my father.  So as I write about in especially the first half of A Living Remedy, my father's death at 67 was really sped by years of financial precarity and a lack of access to the specialized healthcare that he needed.  He had serious illnesses that neither my mother nor I believed had to kill him at 67 but did because of years spent unable to get the treatment he needed, which is of course a very common story in this country.  We have one of the highest costs of healthcare in the world, and yet so many people go without the care they need, even insured people, but in the case of my parents, they were often uninsured for many years, as I was when I was growing up with them.  And so there was this aspect of our grief that we were really struggling to grapple with.  Like how much were we personally responsible for?  How much was he failed by structural failings, by systems beyond our control, you know, how do we reckon with that?  And especially given what we knew that it was in fact very common in this country.  And so I started thinking about writing this story, like the story of my grief and my mother's grief too, and how we try to care for each other despite these broken systems.  And then I had started working on the book, and my mother was diagnosed with cancer, and so she fought it off once and it came back, and it was terminal.  And at that point like everything changed. If it was even still possible to write this book --  and I didn't know that it was -- I would have to kind of take a big, long break and think about how.  And I was so focused on really trying to care for and support her from afar that I wasn't writing much at all.  And then the pandemic happened.  So my mother started hospice care in the same month as all the coronavirus lockdowns began.  And because of that I wasn't able to be as present in her final weeks as I wanted to be.  So the book was obviously something very different when I picked it up and started working on it again.  You know, I had never anticipated writing a book about the deaths of both my parents in a two-year span.  I never envisioned writing a book that would even touch briefly on this pandemic that changed all our lives.  And it was a real struggle. I think for many months writing was obviously not my priority or my focus.  It was probably six or seven months after my mother died that I even really thought about getting back into this, seeing if I could.  And eventually, I can't tell you when, because it was a long process, but in the midst of grief and in the midst of writing, like this sense of urgency that you feel when you're working on something that you feel is compelling, that is important to you, that you hope will be important to other people and matter to them, like that sense of urgency and almost like wonder and curiosity you feel when you're working on a project like that, I started to feel it again.  And I realized that at the heart of this book is really my relationship with my mother.  And so I rewrote it from the beginning. I think it just took on a lot more urgency and a lot more significance for me.  And I was writing it during the pandemic still at home, so I lived with this book day in, day out, in a way I haven't really done with any other writing project before. So it was a very long and obviously emotionally difficult process, but it required me to learn a new way of writing and to show myself more grace and more care in my work.  And honestly, I wouldn't say this is the reason I wrote it, but it's just a fact.  Like doing that active memory work, spending that time with all those memories and those moments that I was trying to capture in the book, it really summoned my parents in this way.  And I don't want to say it was without pain because it wasn't, but it was really meaningful to get to spend that time with them again in the writing of this book. 

Jo Reed:  You know, in the book you're not only delving into your own loss of your parents, you're also really looking at the way class operates in this country.  Your parents shielded you from sort of the precariousness of their financial lives as best they could.  But when you were in high school that was the first time your mom was diagnosed with cancer, and at least part of that financial truth was revealed to you. 

Nicole Chung:  Yes. This is one of the things I really wanted to write about in the book was part of our coming of age is starting to recognize where we're situated in the world.  Where our family is, what our circumstances are.  And we're often inferring these things based on what we observe as young people.  I don't think it's common for families to like sit down and say, “Okay, like these are the details of our financial situation.”   My parents were, I think, trying to protect me.  I think they also thought it was none of my business as their child.  Right?.  Something that held true even after I became an adult, sometimes they were really hesitant to let me in and to see exactly what their situation was.  But I was picking up, obviously, clues.  And that really started at earnest in high school when my mom got sick my freshman year.  So she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and I mean she did beat it that time.  She went into remission, her breast cancer actually never came back.  It was another type of cancer that killed her many years later.  But the really the financial repercussions of that event, I mean it was just something my family never recovered from.  Again, facing that type of medical emergency as an uninsured or underinsured family in this country, it was really when their medical debt started to accumulate.  And then there were like often layoffs.  My father was actually laid off from his job like six weeks or so after my mother's breast cancer surgery.  And so it was really the start, whereas up till then I had thought things were stable, maybe they even were.  But as I write in A Living Remedy, it was a type of stability known to many people in this country, and it was dependent on everything going right for our family.  And when something went wrong, like when someone got sick, you know, I began to see how quickly things could fall apart.  So by my junior and senior year of high school, again, this was not really stated to me in so many words, but like we were all really struggling.  My parents were sort of trading periods of unemployment.  We'd all been without healthcare for many years.  I was working a part-time job like, you know, 15 to 20 hours a week in high school just to pay basic expenses of mine--everything from clothes to school lunches to like my college application fees.  I didn't know that I would probably have been exempt from a lot of these things, like no one told me.  So I just kind of kept working and kept going, which is what I'd learned from my parents.  But, you know, I knew something was off, I knew something was wrong.  I knew we didn't have enough, and eventually it occurred to me like I'm working in paying for things that I guess a lot of my peers' parents pay for them.  But I was also just doing what I thought had to be done and needed to be done.  And I was so focused on trying to be the first person in my family to go to college and escape this little white town that I'd grown up in.  I think I had kind of that selfish tunnel vision that you have at that age which was just like I need to like get out of here.  And so I wasn't really focused on like the particulars of their financial situation, our financial situation.  It was only years later when I found my first FAFSA, the free application for federal student aid, and like just saw how little we all made combined my senior year of high school.  And that was why my expected family contribution to college was zero, but at the time I really didn't know the particulars.  I just knew I got this scholarship, I'm going to college, you know, that's what's next for me.  So it was sort of a growing awareness that I think is common in a lot of young people of just like putting together clues but not really being told what's going on.

Jo Reed:  Well, you write in the book as an adult, when your father got sick, the guilt you felt not being able to help financially.  And you write "If you grow up, as I did, it happened to be very fortunate, as I was, your family might be able to sacrifice much so you can go to college.  You'll feel grateful for every subsequent opportunity you get.  But in this country, unless you attain an extraordinary wealth, you will be likely -- I'm sorry -- you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you'd hoped.  You will learn to live with the specific hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind yet are unable to bring anyone else with them."  First of all, thank you for writing that.  I thought that was such a clear explanation of one of the ways class operates in the United States with its misplaced emphasis on individual achievement.   And the guilt you felt led you to question even your choosing writing as a career rather than one that would have been more lucrative. Talk about that guilt that you had that many people carry with them about their parents.

Nicole Chung:  Yeah.  I mean, another thing I write in the book is that I was really raised with this bootstrapping myth.  I mean, I think my parents believed in it.  I think it's an insidious myth that we have in this country, that the idea of meritocracy, and if you work hard and work well like eventually you'll be able to take care of yourself and everybody that you care about.  I think that is an insidious, like a false promise that is made to many people.  And so all that time when I was like working and trying to think about college or what came after, like what's next, always is in the back of my mind was this idea I wasn't just doing it for myself. That was never the goal.  I was always thinking, it's going to be your job to take care of your family someday.  Like that's what it means to be the first person to go to college.  Like what is the point of all this hard work?  What is the point of achieving anything if you can't take care of the people you love?  I'm not trying to present myself as like some selfless person, but that was just what I thought.  I thought it was my responsibility.  But individuals -- and I didn't know this at the time, at 18 or 22 or 25 -- but, you know, I was never going to be able to fully compensate for what my parents were up against for the different parts of the safety net, not just the healthcare system that failed to catch them when they needed it.  So, I ended up becoming a writer, obviously, and I have had a career in publishing, I worked as an editor for many years.  And I didn't know really when I started these things, it wasn't necessarily thinking they were the most lucrative, but I didn't quite realize like what an entry or even mid-career publishing salary would be or how far it would or would not stretch, living across the country from my family, especially when I had children of my own with their own needs.  And yeah, I did feel this sense of guilt sometimes or just like questioning my choices, like should I have done something different with my life?  These are by the way basically my only skills, so I'm not sure what else I would've done.  And I'm so grateful, I'm so grateful that this is my life, that I have this career.  But it was and still is hard to think about, would I've been able to do more to help them at this crucial juncture?  Because like a lot of people, part of that bootstrap myth for me was like I'll be able to do this in enough time.   And what I didn't realize is that my parents and I did not have that time. We just didn't.  And I eventually got to a better place in my career, and I was able to help my mother a good deal more than I could help my father, from a practical standpoint. But my success as a writer really came too late to be of any help to him.  And that's -- it's impossible to live with, but I have to live with it.  And at the same time it shouldn't have come down to   I   when I got book royalties or sold my next book or advanced to a certain point in my publishing career. And my parents had this expectation that they would be able to take care of themselves.  And as it turned out, I think it was a reasonable expectation on their part as people who'd worked hard all their lives, but in the end they just didn't have all of the resources and the support that they needed.

Jo Reed:  And then you’re very quickly confronted with a mother who's been diagnosed with a terminal illness who lives across the country, a pandemic, and you’re left need to balance the responsibilities of being a daughter with being a mother. 

Nicole Chung:  Yeah.  I mean this is something I think is also going to be a common experience to many listeners. You know, the so-called sandwich generation where you're caring for your own children while trying to support and care for elders often far away from you, and that was always going to be difficult.  But the fact that it was right on the heels of my father's death, and then the fact that it happened-- her starting hospice care -- as the world went into pandemic lockdowns, it obviously complicated matters a great deal.  So, yes, it often just felt impossible to balance those responsibilities.

Jo Reed:   And she wasn't alone, though, her sister was with her. And her church community was very, very important to both your parents, and you write about that very movingly, I think. 

Nicole Chung:  Thank you.  I was honestly unsure about how to write about it just because I wasn't part of my parents' religious community we didn't share a faith tradition, and I also didn't live nearby.  But I did get to know some of my mother's closest friends after my father died and while my mother was dying, when I was able to visit before the pandemic. They were supporting her in so many ways.  I mean the obvious things, visiting and bringing food, but also I remember one of her church friends was the reason I was able to have these really difficult conversations with her about her will, about end of life care, and advanced directives, just about what her wishes really were.  Because my mother, like many people, and it's so understandable, it was really hard for her to talk about these things.  I was trying to do what I thought was my responsibility and support her in these important end of life decisions, but for her I think it was really hard at first to let me in.  And it was because of her friends from church, I think, that we were able to sit down and have that conversation because they were in the room with us, supporting both of us.  So there were countless ways, practical and otherwise, that that community was there for her and for my father.  I was very moved to see that kind of love in action.  I'm really grateful that they had it. 

Jo Reed:  You write very eloquently about how crushed you were that you couldn't be with her, and that seems so present in the book.  I think one difference between your first memoir and A Living Remedy is the first memoir seems things were resolved, you know, and you were writing about things that had happened a decade or more earlier, whereas A Living Remedy is so immediate, you know, we're watching this process with you. 

Nicole Chung:  I mean one of many reasons this book was terrifying to write was that immediacy.  I've mentioned, of course, I took a lot of time off from writing, from working on this after my mom died, but it was still very fresh grief.  And I think the reason some parts feel like they're happening in the moment is, well, first of all it's how I tried to write those sections.  But also I wasn't exactly working on the book, but I would -- like, I'm a daily journaler, I've kept journals forever and ever. And I was recording a lot of details and conversations, like things my mother said to me, things that I sent her, things I wanted to remember.  It wasn't for the book, it was just because that's always how I've processed those things.  So when the time came to actually write the book, I had these details and like these memories of really visceral emotion, and I guess I was still feeling it, right, because the grief was so fresh.  And I had never written anything in the moment that before it.  As you mentioned, my first book has a lot of emotional resonance for me.  I wasn't writing about easy things in that book either, but they were more settled, they were more resolved.  That book didn't have a lot of surprises for me in the writing.  I knew where it began and ended while I was working on it.  But A Living Remedy, because I had to rewrite it, because it was not the book I thought I was going to be writing, frequently surprised me.  I didn't always know where it was going.  I think one of the better writing days was when I figured out, oh, I know what the last chapter is, I know how this book ends.  But I still had to write more than half the book at that point, I had no idea how I was going to get to that ending, I just knew very clearly what I wanted it to be and still hoped to have that destination, but everything before then I was like how do I get there?  I really had to learn to trust myself as a writer in ways that had never been demanded of me before.  I don't think I could have written this book four or five years ago.  I don't know that I had the trust in myself.  Some of it is skill progressing, but a lot of it is just faith in the process and in yourself as a writer.  And I think I needed to develop that before I could tell a story like this. 

Jo Reed:  Well, memoir is such a unique animal.

Nicole Chung:  Yes.

Jo Reed:  It’s your life, or part of your life, but it's also an art form.  And your book is living at the intersection of your personal loss and belonging, and broader societal issues.  And I'm curious how you navigated the balance between sharing your own narrative and engaging with the larger discussions.

Nicole Chung:  Yeah.  I mean I always knew those larger discussions were going to come into it. I think that stories can often be a way in to issues. Of course, I don't think people who pick up this book are unaware of the problems in our healthcare system or with our safety net and its inadequacies.  But I do think that for a lot of people stories, personal stories, can be a new way into these issues and these topics or like can reframe them in a way and help us reconsider things we thought we knew, or things that we haven't experienced ourselves and feel we need to grapple with.  But the main thing is there was just no writing honestly about my father's death without talking about why he died at 67.  Like I guess I could have tried to write maybe a more traditional grief memoir that was primarily about like just about that loss and the fallout, and that could be very important and really compelling.  I know that.  But for me such a big aspect of my grief, and my mom's grief too, was dealing with the fact that we lost him too young and that we didn't believe it was inevitable. We knew it was because he'd been failed over and over again by these systems.  It just felt I wouldn't have been being honest about what happened or honest about my own grief if I didn't take that into account.  And kind of similarly with my mom--just the fact that I wasn't able to be with her at the end, and I had to live stream her funeral, which again is something so many people lived through during the pandemic.  I didn't want to write a book that included this pandemic. That was very daunting to me.  But how could I write about losing my mother in the spring of 2020 and not talk about what it meant that that was happening against the backdrop of this pandemic, and the ways it kind of kept us apart.  And so, yeah, as you said -- because it is my life, because these were things that just happened, I didn't feel there was any way to write about my grief and the story I wanted to share, and like my family's legacy, without going into some detail about these larger structural issues as well.

Jo Reed:    Nicole, would you read the last paragraph of the first chapter of A Living Remedy?

Nicole Chung:  Okay.  I'm happy to read that. 

.I think of those late afternoon talks with her now that I have my own children, knowing that the days of both of them falling asleep in their rooms down the hall from mine are dwindling, that a time will come when something trivial or life-changing will happen to them.  They'll be hurt, or caught by surprise, or find that they're happier than they've ever been, and I will not be the first person they tell.  That might be why I sometimes let them stay up past bedtime chatting with me or getting silly with each other, why even the brightest moments on the best of days can crack my heart wide open.  But then sometimes I think, well, no matter where they go, no matter how far apart we are, maybe I will always be someone they think to call, someone they want to talk to.  Because my mother's far beyond my sight, beyond the reach of my voice, and not a day goes by when I don't think of something I wish I could tell her.

Jo Reed:  Nicole, the book begins and ends with your mother.  Other than that it's chronological.  But she really is the thread running through it and the foundation of the book.

Nicole Chung:  Yeah.  And it wasn't always that way.  I mean, of course, like our relationship was always central to the story.  I thought she would actually be much more involved in the writing of it.  I remember when I started working on the chapters about my father's illness and death, for example, she was the one I was checking facts with, and she was the one I was talking with and processing it with because it was her grief and mine, you know, more than anyone else's.  And then when she got sick, and when I knew I was going to lose her too, I didn't want to bother her with like book stuff, and it wasn't really top of mind for me either.  But there are some chapters about my dad where you can see my mother's stamp, or you could if you were looking for it, because she was really, I think, the family storyteller before I was.  And almost everything I know about my father's early life, when he met my mother or the early years of their marriage, like that's all from her.  In some sense she's like the bridge between us, you know, especially after his death when I couldn't ask him questions anymore.  So I don't know, once I figured out that really our relationship was the heart of this book, and as you read, when you experience like my father's illness, or my distance from home, or his death, it is very much kind of filtered through the lens of my mother's experience, my mother's telling of it I guess, and she and I are experiencing that together as we experienced her illness together despite the geographical distance.  So, yeah, she definitely is -- that relationship is the heart of the book in many ways. 

Jo Reed:  The title A Living Remedy comes from the poem, “For Three Days” by Marie Howe.  Can you explain that title and what that poem means to you and means to the book?

Nicole Chung:  Yeah.  So, I had written everything but the title, you know, it was the last thing that we really needed to decide on.  And I was reading so many things-- looking through my book, looking for phrases that jumped out at me, I was reading a lot of poetry.  So I was looking at the Bible even though it's not a religious book, and I'm not a very religious person any longer, but religion was so important to my parents that I was kind of looking for inspiration there.  So, Marie Howe's poem “For Three Days,” there's a beautiful line, and I use it as an epigraph in the book.  But it goes, because even grief provides a living remedy.  And I love that phrase.  It spoke to me immediately.  I'm sure there's many different interpretations and meanings, but it made me think about how much of grief is the during and after.  Like there is no really moving on from it, but you do keep living, and when you live you are remembering the people that you lost.  So I like that living, that life was part of the phrase.  It felt like a forward looking phrase to frame this book.  And the idea of how grief can be a remedy, it can be its own kind of solace, kind of spoke to me because I had spent a lot of time after my father's death just running from the grief or trying to not live with it because it was so, so unbearable.  And it was really only when I let myself grieve in this deeper way and an honest way that I began to feel like I could keep going, like I could keep living.  No one looks for grief, it's obviously not something you seek out.  But I don't think it can be avoided either, not without hurting yourself even more.  So much of this book, of A Living Remedy, is about learning to grieve, to live with grief without self-punishment. And so I just felt the title spoke and the phrase spoke really beautifully to that as well.  So I wrote to Marie, actually, and I asked her for permission to use the phrase, and I'm just very grateful to her for allowing me to use it because I think it's really perfect for the book, and her work has meant so much to me for many, many years. 

Jo Reed:  I actually think it's perfect for the book too, and I think it's an extraordinary book, and I truly thank you for writing it. 

Nicole Chung:  Thank you so much. 

Jo Reed:  That was writer Nicole Chung. We were talking about her memoir  A Living Remedy.  Her first memoir is the critically acclaimed All You Can Ever Know. We’ll have a link to Nicole’s website in our show notes. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. We’d love to know your thoughts—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov. And follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating on Apple, it helps other people who love the arts to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.