By Kayla Kuo
Content notes: death of parent, grief, cancer, illness
In 2018, when I first encountered Nicole Chung’s debut memoir, All You Can Ever Know, it was during a period of deep reflection. I was gradually decentering my life from whiteness, uncomfortably learning how to acknowledge and lean into my identity as a queer transracial and transnational adoptee. Chung’s memoir was one of the first publications I encountered by another transracial adoptee; it served as a glaring revelation that adoptee literature exists and it is powerful when our voices are centered. All You Can Ever Know guided my own decisions around searching for my birth family and prompted uncomfortable conversations with my adoptive mom. What I’m trying to say is that Chung’s intimate storytelling has had a prolific impact on my own ever-evolving identity.
Nearly 5 years later, Chung and I share yet another similarity: daughters whose adoptive fathers prematurely passed away. My father’s death was sudden but not shocking given decades of constant disregard for his mental and physical health. He neglected his health despite consistent access to paid leave, livable wages, and affordable health insurance, privileges unfortunately reserved for the middle and upper classes in America. Class identity is essential to understanding Chung’s grief and rage over her father’s early death, the result of an accumulation of financial instability, no paid time off, and skipped medical exams which only exacerbated his health crises. Chung’s pain only deepened when, shortly after her father’s death, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Published in 2023, Chung’s second memoir, A Living Remedy, is an excavation of grief – deeply tied to care work, class, and family – as she intimately grapples with the complicated realities of geographical distance, economic instability, health crises, and a global pandemic.
Chung’s adulthood was firmly rooted on the East Coast after attending college on a scholarship, getting married, buying a home, having children, and pursuing an MFA program. However, these middle-class privileges did not propel her family into financial security with a substantial disposable income or immediate access to wealth. Living across the country from her parents meant she spent the majority of the time watching them age through a computer screen rather than in-person, only able to afford plane tickets once a year, if that. While Chung and her parents’ relationship remained close, their day-to-day lives and decisions were independent of each other. The geographical distance was an unfortunate sacrifice to grow and support her own family.
From a distance, Chung saw her father’s health go through a slow decline to a rapid descent, culminating in kidney failure. This devolution was directly caused by a chronic denial of medical care and routine illness management. His early death was preventable, but became inevitable due to a profit driven healthcare system. Chung did as much as she could from hundreds of miles away while simultaneously supporting her own family – researching community clinics, calling her parents every day to check-in on her father’s health, and encouraging them to apply for social services. More than anything, it was infuriating to witness how her parents’ income, employment status, and age all became barriers to accessing reliable and affordable healthcare, social security benefits, and food and rental assistance. Without a reliable social safety net, her father was deemed disposable by the U.S. government and his early death is proof of that. The grief and rage Chung experienced from her father’s death cannot be separated from her family’s economic struggles.
Only a year into the grief of the preventable loss of her father, Chung was struck with a staggering new form of anticipatory grief when her mother shared her breast cancer diagnosis. Even with the varying treatment options, her mother’s prognosis was less than a year and the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic was quickly withering away any possibilities for in-person time together. It was unclear when Chung would be able to visit her mother given shutdowns and necessary isolations on opposite sides of the country. Even as businesses resumed operations and flights became more available, Chung was forced to navigate an unimaginable decision around COVID-19 safety and her high risk family members: spending quality time with her immunocompromised mother and risk spreading COVID-19 (possibly killing both her mother and herself) or staying at home to minimize any COVID-19 exposure to her nuclear family, including her disabled daughter. Chung’s grief is not just about the physical losses, cross-country distance, and the terror of the unknown, it is also about the exhaustion of having to navigate inconceivable choices on a daily basis.
Chung grapples with the strenuous relationship between caregiving and grieving, feeling the heavy weight of being an only child and a transracial adoptee. She navigates several caregiving roles simultaneously: parenting her own young children, caregiving for her aging and dying parents across the county, and trying to honor the needs of her inner child. In the immediate months after her father’s death, Chung plunged into her work responsibilities – dutifully being productive and being “fine” – which acted as a shield against the heartbreaking pain of her father’s passing. Chung’s grief was invasive; she was distraught that she couldn’t provide more care while her father was alive and then thrust into greater anxiety during her mother’s diagnosis. And yet, during these devastating years of exhaustion and merciless grief, it was her family – adoptive and biological – that gave her the strength to continue moving forward. This support included her birth sister, Cindy, whom Chung reunited with and whose love extends far beyond Chung to her adoptive parents and to her children. Love is a powerful force, especially in the chasms of grief. Chung, eventually, learned how to care for herself while grieving:
I have found similar lessons in learning to take better care of myself and learning to live with grief – both have forced me to gradually awaken to specific needs and limitations, to accept them as reality, and remember that I am not the machine I used to pretend I was.
To care for herself, Chung understands that she must listen to her body and to slow down and rest. Like Chung, I can easily power through my never-ending task list rather than be present with sadness and despair. While I didn’t feel anything but relief after my father passed away, I later learned that I would never be united with my birth father given the lack of information on my adoption documents. This steadfast ache will never go away nor will it ever be filled. Serving capitalism – the same system that deemed Chung’s father disposable and contributes to the system of family separation and adoption – does not protect anyone from being exploited or neglected by the U.S. government. The grief of Chung’s parents may never go away, though it’s transformed from a staggering weight of despair to an act of remembering her loved ones.
A Living Remedy is steadfast in its ability to depict the individual insecurity that Chung’s family faced while connecting their story to the broader systems of class struggle, the severe failures of the U.S. healthcare system, and the lack of a social safety net from the U.S. government. It’s exhausting and expensive to be poor and working class in the U.S., particularly when care – healthcare and medical care – are privatized in our capitalist society. If anything, A Living Remedy is a call to action to ensure that our economy and society ensure all families can thrive. We need universal healthcare and a social safety net that meets the needs of its people, a system based on genuine care and support rather than punishment and employment status.
Kayla Kuo is a queer transracial and transnational adoptee born in Taiwan and raised in the Midwest. She is learning how to embrace slowness and be more creative. Lately, she spends her time sewing, reading too many books at once, deepening her community organizing, and snuggling with her miniature pinscher, Kenny.
You can find her book reviews on Instagram (@ThatBookBinch) and more reflections/essays as an adoptee on her blog.