Nicole Chung, author of All You Can Ever Know, has done it again with another wonderful memoir about growing up as a transracial adoptee and then losing both her adoptive parents. A Living Remedy is a story about family love and loss, regardless of how the family is formed.
In this episode, we discuss:
This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them. Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:
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Nicole Chung, author of All You Can Ever Know, has done it again with another wonderful memoir about growing up as a transracial adoptee and then losing both her adoptive parents. A Living Remedy is a story about family love and loss, regardless of how the family is formed.
In this episode, we discuss:
This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them. Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:
Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily
Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily
Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.
Dawn Davenport 0:00
Welcome everyone to Creating a Family talk about foster adoptive and kinship care. I'm Dawn Davenport. I am the host of this show, as well as the director of a nonprofit, creating a family.org. Today I'm going to be interviewing Nicole Chung. Nicole is an adult adoptee and the author of a living remedy. She also her previous book was all you can ever know, her writings have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times Magazine times, Harper's Bazaar, The Guardian, GQ, the slight and probably the list goes on in one, Nicole, welcome to Creating a family. Thanks so much, John. This is truly the most fun part of my job, I love to read, I love books. And to actually get to talk to someone who has written the book is super exciting for me. And I loved both of your books. And I highly recommend them and have certainly recommended your first one, you are honestly just a beautiful writer. And this last one a living remedy. Oh my gosh, it was it was so poignant. And so beautiful. I read it over the weekend, at least I always try to read books very close to the time I'm doing the interview. And oh my gosh, me and a box of Kleenex had a date, I sat there and I cried, I laughed. A mark of a good book to me is one that I've been thinking about ever since I put it down. And I have been thinking about this book ever since I put it down. So thank you for writing it.
Speaker 1 1:28
Thank you so much for reading it. And that's I agree that's very high praise. That means a lot to me.
Dawn Davenport 1:33
It is high praise. So the way we're going to do this interview is I think by way of background, what I'd like to do is to talk briefly about the book all you can ever know, and this was about your growing up but but also really about your search for your birth family. Can you give us kind of a summary version, the crib note version, to lay the groundwork for talking about your more recent book a living remedy?
Speaker 1 1:58
Absolutely. So all you can ever know was first published in 2018. And one thing I actually love about that book is even before I sold it before I even wrote it, I had such a clear vision and intention for what I knew that book was going to be like I've told people, I can sum it up in a sentence and you sort of just did. It's very much about my story growing up as a transracial Korean American adoptee. It's also about what happens when an adoptee grows up and the search for my birth family, which coincided with the birth of my own first child. And it really was so much that pregnancy and becoming a parent myself, as I write in the first book that that pushed me to go ahead and search it was something I had thought about for years, and move through different phases of thinking it's possible, it's not possible, I want to do this, I don't want to do this. And then really it was when I got pregnant and was thinking about my history about medical history too, and about what I had to pass on to my child like how I would explain my adoption and my story and our family history to them. That was really I think the final push. So I think I might have searched without that. But for me those two journeys and like those two expansions of my family were and will always be intertwined. It's
Dawn Davenport 3:11
a fascinating story. It's got a fair number of plots and twists that you don't see coming. One thing I should mention that is you are a Korean American adoptee. However you are a domestic adoptee, which is a little unusual, but you were adopted by a white family. Yes, yes. Okay. So when you searched What did you find?
Speaker 1 3:31
I'll back up just a little bit and explain for your listeners who aren't familiar with my books. It's important to note and I thank you for bringing it up that I am a domestic adoptee just because you know sometimes I will still I've seen it cited in book reviews by people who are supposed to have read the book, but I was born in Korea and in fact that's not true. And it's not that I wouldn't be proud to be from Korea if I were but as you know and as your listeners know, the experiences and the adoptions of domestic adoptees as opposed to transnational adoptees, you know, our experiences are very different. For me the decision to search was different. The opportunities and like avenues open to me were different. And unlike foreign born adoptees, I have the privilege of never having my citizenship endangered or questioned Who am I kind of just tried to mention that because I try hard not to speak for Korean born adoptees, obviously, it's just my experience. But yeah, I'm the only Korean adoptee I know who, who was born here. And my birth parents were immigrants. They moved to the Seattle area a couple years before I was born. So I was the first member of that family born on American soil and my adoptive parents who raised me in southern like rural Oregon. It was an interstate adoption, they drove up to get me and for 18 years, all I knew was like our little family and our small predominantly white town. I wasn't really close to other adoptees, I didn't know any other Koreans. So kind of growing up in this area where I really was very like racially and culturally isolated Not just from like, what it meant to be Korean, but really what it meant to be an adoptee. I mean, I had good loving parents, I grew up, went to school on the East Coast and you know, got married young started a family young ish, like mid to late 20s. And like I said, it was really that experience of like, being pregnant that made me want to search because I think sometimes we can do things for our kids, too, that we find it hard to do for like just ourselves. Yeah,
Dawn Davenport 5:23
it felt like reading the book that it gave you permission to overcome any of your hesitancies because now I have to know this information for my daughter,
Speaker 1 5:31
right? Like we're in it together? Yes. And so yes, what I found when I started, as you mentioned, is very complicated. So I think this is one of the problems with adoption, I think, especially in the era, I was adopted, I don't think my adoptive family or like myself, as an adoptee that we were ever really encouraged to think about my adoption from the perspective of my birth family. And I don't think I knew how to foster a lot of empathy for them. I mean, I wondered about them, I honored them in ways that I could, I wouldn't have said that I didn't respect them, or respect their choice. But they were just completely unknown to me having grown up in a closed adoption, it was kind of a different era to an adoption, I really couldn't begin to imagine what their experience had been. And as I learned, when I searched, they had really been a family in crisis. At the time of my placement, you know, it wasn't a decision that would have been made, if things had been going well, if they had been in a healthy situation, if they'd had like all the resources and support that they needed as a family. So you know, I learned a lot of really hard things about what was going on in that family at the time I was placed. And it was hard. I think, it really shook my views in so many ways of my adoption of the story, you know, that I'd always been told this, like, beloved, almost origin story that I had clung to my whole life. So it really required me to kind of unlearn all of that and think about adoption, my own, specifically, you know, in new ways. But I hope it's not like a big spoiler to say like, I was lucky enough to be able to reconnect with members of my birth family. And I'm still very close to my biological sister. I can't imagine my life without her now. And we've been in Reunion now for gosh, I mean, since 2008. So, and my kids have always known her. She's always been like their aunt Cindy. And I'm just so grateful still to have been able to recover like that part of my family, and to have this connection going forward. So yeah, that's essentially all you can ever know. It was really important to me to to show what happens when an adoptee grows up. Because so often in stories in narrative, we're not really given the space to do that. And also wanted to show the real complications of reunion. I think sometimes reunion like adoption is portrayed in more one dimensional or simplistic terms as though it is the happy ending, and as we all know, is far more complex than that. And so that's really another thing that I wanted to eliminate.
Dawn Davenport 7:57
Yes, we recently interviewed Susan Ito. I love her book. I do too. I absolutely loved her book as well. And it also shows a far more nuanced view of adoption, but also a more nuanced view of, of reunion. And I think we need that, yeah, creating a family. Our mission is to support adoptive Foster and kinship families. But I certainly think we need that for the adoptees that is a part of our mission, simply because they are the essence of who we are supposed to be doing everything for. But I think it's also important for adoptive parents, to have a better grasp of the nuances of reunion if, if only so that they can support their child. And before we leave all you can ever know, your adoptive parents were supportive of your search. Is that right? Yeah, I
Speaker 1 8:49
mean, I write this in the second book too. But my adoptive parents support of and just their faith in me was this rock solid foundation I had as long as they were alive. And even though they're gone now. My life wouldn't be what it is. Without that. I think it made me braver in so many ways than I would have been without it. Let me take risks like searching for my birth family, not knowing what I would discover, because I was always so assured of their love for Me. And, you know, one thing my mother used to say is like, she really couldn't imagine me having a life where I didn't go after everything I wanted. And when that grew to include, like, encompass finding out more about my birth family trying to find answers that I had wanted all my life. I don't know if they fully understood it. You know, I think it was hard for them to understand, because our family was always enough for them. But they were supportive. I mean, they didn't try to stop me. And I think that's important, not trying to stop someone you love from doing something, even if you can't fully understand it. So
Dawn Davenport 9:49
well said it's not required of us as parents to understand why it is important to our child. It's sufficient that it is important to I hope you're enjoying this interview as much as me. I loved the book. But I do need to pause and thank one of our partners and that is hopscotch adoption. Hopscotch is a hay accredited international adoption agency placing children from Armenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Georgia, Ghana, Guiana, Morocco, Pakistan, Serbia and Ukraine. They specialize in special needs adoptions, including placing a lot of kids with Down syndrome. They also do international kinship adoptions, they place kids throughout the US and offer home study services and post adoption support to residents of North Carolina and New York. Now, back to talking with Nicole. A living remedy is about so many different things. So I'm going to touch upon some of the themes that I saw in a living remedy. And the first one was family love. You were well loved, not always perfectly loved, but well loved. And it just the book just shown with that, and I want to read a passage that you wrote, you were speaking about your adoptive mom. And spoiler alert, she died. But you were saying that she this I'm quoting from the book on page 175. She was a kind of mother who deserved to have her child there when she died, knowing that I had her steadfast support that she loved and believed in me, no matter what made me so much braver than I could have been otherwise, it makes risks feel small. It made it possible for me to trust myself a little more. Like any mother and child, we had our conflicts, our weaknesses and our outright failures. But there has never been a serious or lasting rift between us. Her faith in me was a safety net. I couldn't see until it was gone. That last line was so beautiful. May every parent have a child who says that that's what we as parents and you're a parent to so that's what we want, and you are temperamentally different from your parents, especially your dad. And this, it's hard to know, is this more common in adoption? We certainly know some temperamental traits are heritable. But there's also issues when the parents are too temperamentally similar. I am a parent by both birth and adoption and it hasn't played out in my family, that temperamentally I am closer to either my adopted children on my birth kids, however, you could see that it would be I have never seen research that really addresses this, it would be kind of tough to do, and fairly subjective. But nonetheless, how did those differences a temperamental differences impact you growing up?
Speaker 1 12:37
Here? That's a good question. And I think it's kind of hard to answer, just because our memories are not really precise. You know, the hard things about writing memoir, actually, one of many is that it is entirely based on your memories, but it's so subjective, you know, something my parents said to me separately and together, you know, because they were familiar with my writing over the years, even though they both passed before a living remedy was published. But you know, at one point, they said, like, all you can ever know, was not the book, they would have written about my adoption, or our family, you know, or together. And yet, like, it didn't have to be, as my father said, to me, the point is, it's your memories, like it's your life. And that's valid, and it's not for us, or anybody else to tell you that it should be different, or that you should remember it differently. That just really drove home for me how, as a writer, like, the point that I often tell students to is that you should be aware, when you're telling a true story, you're trying to tell it to the best of your ability, and you're trying to be as true to the facts as you know them, of course. But fundamentally, it is your story, told, like through the filter of your experience, it's impossible for anybody else to match that or to tell the story the same way. So I think about that, too, with the responsibility of bringing people like my parents, for example, to life on the page, can feel really daunting, knowing that all I can present to is my view of who they were, and like, my love for each other and our life together. That's all I have. And that's okay. You know, that's the part that I'm equipped, I'm qualified to share.
Dawn Davenport 14:09
And they might differ. And that's hard as a parent, as your children grow, and you're gonna say, no, wait, wait. That's not how it happened, you know, or whatever. And it's not our place to do that. And it's hard. Yeah,
Speaker 1 14:20
I actually find it comforting, though. In what way, as a writer, I find it comforting that I'm not trying to, it's impossible to like present my parents from every possible angle to help you understand who they were to everybody in their life and how they were known to different people. A living remedy is the story of them as my parents and me as their child. And it's very much subjective. And that's all it can be. But that's supposed to be Yeah, and I think it's a specificity of the experience. Sometimes that makes it in a weird way that makes it relatable to other people, because you think about the specificity of your own relationships and what you've learned about them. But yeah, we were quite for it, and like I wrote in the book, I never knew how much of it was because of adoption. You know, I didn't have anything to compare that to. Yeah, I couldn't know what it was like to grow up as someone's biological child. And for what it's worth, my sister thinks she's very different from our parents. And I agree. She was raised by them. And I wasn't, it was so easy when they were allowed to, like categorize our differences. Like my father was always joking when I wanted to be serious. He had a real temper, which I sometimes struggled with my mother, like, I know, she could be really impatient, but she was hilarious. She had a very dry sense of humor. There's like so much actually, that I do think somehow I like inherited from that, even though obviously, not genetically. And if I were to write the book today, I don't know if I would emphasize those similarities more than I did, how I feel about those differences and how Stark they are. It kind of depends on the day to and like what I'm remembering.
Dawn Davenport 15:51
Yeah. Which I think, as you say, is what we all do. All right, I want to read another passage from the book, we're still talking about the first theme I wanted to highlight. And that's family love. And this is from page 232, USA, even when she had been upset with me confused over decisions I've made saddened by the physical distance between us, I never had to do anything to prove myself to her, you're speaking of your Mother, I am enough for her without any action or justification, without proofs, just as I am. That's what she meant when she told me as a child, that I could never disappoint her. That's why she and my father always said it didn't matter where I went, what I did with my life, or what I accomplished, they would always be proud of me. That's why she believes that there is nothing for her to forgive. Now, I can choose to accept her at her words or not keep chastising myself or not. But the truth is that this is what she has long believed I have our daughter. So I am enough. Again, I go back to say that is what I think every parent would want their kids to say is that they are enough. Oprah Winfrey one time in some interview I read ages ago said, I'm paraphrasing horribly, that what she really wanted was that when she was on the stage for any reason that there was somebody in the audience who had their eyes only focused on her, you know, who would smile when she walked into a room, and that there would be somebody in the audience who would be seeking her out, you know, of the crowd on the stage, and you sang and performed and so, your mother who you said something to her once about what you can't possibly hear me she goes as long as I see you, I hear you, which was sweet. One of my favorite parts of the book is you have I think there were three sections where you give a list. One was the things your mother sent you when you moved east to college. It was a typical list that a mother would send their daughter in fact, yeah, I'm sure I received a few of those things. And then towards the end, you have a list of things you sent to her mom when she was dying, and then going to hope I can read this without crying. That at the end you have a list of things my mother left me three wooden jewelry boxes mostly filled with earrings she had stopped wearing after her ear piercing clothes to picture of every house she lived in every card note and drawing my daughter has ever sent her. Her high school yearbook. My father's favorite Cleveland Brown sweatshirt and his bucket hat. Her impeccable taste in musicals and mystery novels. Her stubbornness, her anxiety, a habit of silently reciting Hail Marys when I'm worried and can't fall asleep. A belief that my children will be okay. And expansive definition of the word. Okay, a model of forgiveness. And the hope that I can be half to parents she was I love the inclusion of those lists. I'm not even sure 100% Why? Maybe it goes back to the specificity that you were talking about. Yeah, I love that. That was beautiful.
Speaker 1 18:57
Thank you. I really enjoyed writing them. It was fun to sort of play around with that form. You know, I haven't written a lot of like list type essays before, although I've done a few. But I think it is what you say about the specificity like anyone reading that they're thinking about things their parents or their loved ones have sent them or ways they've tried to feel close to each other across the miles or the years. And exactly, it's also just kind of a neat way to convey a lot of information in a small space. And
Dawn Davenport 19:24
because it's a small space, each item had to be included for a reason. And each item told a little bit of a story. And I would have thought it would have been fun to also pretty hard because that's not long each item had to carry the weight that you were meaning to assign to it. Yeah, I thought that was good. Thank
Speaker 1 19:43
you. I feel like you learn a lot about my mom and about me. Yes,
Dawn Davenport 19:47
exactly. The first one was the one she sent to a college and I've just I mean, I was just smiling going, oh yeah. And I bet half of them you rolled your eyes when we got them. I got
Speaker 1 19:56
more care packages and then like almost anybody else in my life. I'm in dorm. So, like, I mean everything. Eventually people were grateful because she sent enough candy for me to share. So yeah, well,
Dawn Davenport 20:06
okay, so then you became popular. Let me interrupt again, to ask you to make certain that you let your friends know about creating a family dot works podcast word of mouth is how people find out about us. That's the most effective way. And we could really use the words coming out of your mouth. So please let your friends know about creating a family dot works podcast that another theme in this book, a living remedy is that you outgrew the socio economic level you were raised in? I thought that was very interesting. And you were raised. Another theme is what is middle class. So we're going to come to that. I don't want to hit on that yet. But you were raised, your parents would never have said poor, but you were raised paycheck to paycheck, that would be a fair way of saying it. Yes, definitely. Yeah, they were independent, they worked hard. They both worked very hard. But there wasn't a lot of extra, and you got a scholarship to a prestigious school on the East Coast, you left and you weren't able as a result to go home as often because you're playing fights were expensive. And so you are on the East Coast. And you started you've got a great education, you married somebody who came from a upper middle class background, both of you have advanced degrees. So you progressed very firmly into whether you're going to call it middle class or upper middle class, you progressed into a different socio economic, and at times, your mother felt like you were embarrassed by them. Can you give us the example of with your wedding, about how your mom responded and the confusion to no longer be in the same social economic class that you were raised. And it's still
Speaker 1 21:50
hard for me to think and talk about because she was so hurt by the fact that I wasn't getting married at home. And to me, that was not really like a class based status based decision at all. And I never like tried to hide from anybody I was close to in college, and certainly not my now husband, you know, he was very aware of the place I'd grown up in and my family situation, and the fact that I was really proud of my family and how hard they worked and how much they loved me, you know, the decision to get married in my college town was because I was living there, we were still living there. And I was like, I can't really plan a wedding across the country. What I'd really outgrown was my town, like the small white town where I'd grown up, I didn't, I would never say I had a bad childhood there, you know. But as I wrote about a little bit in both books, there was a lot of racial isolation, there was a lot of bullying, bullying is not something I found easy to talk to my adoptive parents or anybody else really about. But I mean, I experienced that for many years. And so when I thought about, like, the most important day of my life, or one of the most important days of my life, there are all these practical barriers, like distance, and all of that getting everybody out there, flying everyone into our tiny airport. But then there was also just like, I didn't really want to start what I thought of as, like my new life in this place. I didn't feel attached to anymore. So practically, and emotionally, it didn't really make sense to me to marry there. And I never knew my mother cared about this. I almost want to laugh now, because it's not like she ever told me, my parents put no pressure on me to like, marry or have children. I mean, I didn't know she was so attached to the idea of if I'm married, like I would get married, like from home. I mean, they didn't even still belong to the church that I'd grown up going to, I didn't even know where I would get married if I went back, you know, but apparently, this was like the one very traditional thing that my mother did care about. And I didn't know that till it was too late. And we were planning the wedding, you know, on the east coast. So I didn't view it at all as being like, embarrassed of them or of where I came from. But that was part of her interpretation of that decision.
Dawn Davenport 23:58
Yeah, I thought she may have struggled more with your growing out of the working class background.
Speaker 1 24:03
It's possible. I mean, I will say I married very young out of college, I was still pretty broke, like I was not. I certainly achieved a degree of like educational privilege that I can't deny. But I don't think I had yet achieved like actual upward mobility and certainly not of the kind that would allow me to, like, help my family in the way I wanted to, you know, that continued to be hard throughout their lives. But yeah, it was also realizing just the way I thought about my home, or I now thought of my home is somewhere else. And the way my parents thought of my home, they still felt like Oregon, like Southern Oregon was my home. And the truth is, it had been years since I felt at home there. I'm not sure I ever really did. So yeah, that I mean, that decision that I didn't think was about class or upward mobility or anything like that. My mother like sort of interpreted that way. And I saw how much of that she meant and how much was like, the emotion of the moment.
Dawn Davenport 24:58
Yeah, and that's fear. Well, that brings up kind of the sub theme. And that is, what is middle class, you say, towards the beginning of the book, there's a big difference between working class and middle class. What is the big difference? Or big differences that you see between working class and middle class? Oh,
Speaker 1 25:18
man, that's such a hard question. Maybe I shouldn't have written that. So I'll give it a try. I mean, I'll say that my parents would have referred to us basically as middle class, I think and like, I believe they did, middle of the road average Americans, they took a lot of pride in being like hard working as they should. What's kind of interesting to me is that like, and I'm not going to talk at length about them, but like my in laws are also would also refer to themselves as middle class. And the difference between their experience and my parents experience is a wide chasm. I think that one of the key differences between like a more middle class stability, and I will say, like, in this day and age, it continues to shrink, like the ability the middle class can expect in this country is besieged on all sides. But like, when I was growing up, the way I came to think about it was like, realizing that we are always one emergency away from like that ragged edge, realizing that, you know, whatever stability we felt like we had, when I was growing up was dependent on absolutely everything always going right. And as soon as someone got sick, or the car needed repairs, or, you know, my parents both experienced frequent periods of unemployment. You know, that's when we began to see, like, how fragile that stability really was. And like this, this played a role as I write in the living remedy. And my father's early death, you know, he died at 67, from diabetes and kidney failure. But these are really health issues that could have been managed and treated for years if you'd had access to health care. But my family was uninsured. Most of my life,
Dawn Davenport 26:53
they were employed, but they didn't have employment that provided health insurance. Quite
Speaker 1 26:57
often they didn't, or they were unemployed, because there were periods where they've been laid off. You know, my father worked in the service industry, and like restaurants closed. My mother also, like worked for businesses that might close. And every time there was some economic shake up in the household, like I remember, like debt with mount, they'd get much more stressed. By the time I went to college, like, there wasn't anything for them to send me to college with, which is why I got those scholarships. But yeah, I think just like realizing how medical and financial crises, like they fed each other throughout my teen years. And then even after I left home, I don't think my father's death at 67 was inevitable, and neither did my mother. You know, we were pretty far apart politically, but like we both felt very certain that he didn't have to die that young if he'd had access to the care he needed, when he needed it. And he might still be alive today. Yeah.
Dawn Davenport 27:49
And you talk about the impact of money on health. And I want to read a quote from page 78. You said, I think how many times I have heard terminal illness and death referred to as quote equalizers, as if they can flatten out our differences and disparities, simply because they come for all of us, sooner or later. Sickness and grief, throw wealthy and poor families alike into upheaval, but they do not trans in the gulf between us as some claim. If anything, they often magnify them, who has the ability to make choices that others lacked, who is left to scramble for piecemeal solutions in an emergency. If you have no rainy day savings or paid medical leave, if your support system is scant or under resourced, if preventative or life saving treatments is harder for you to access are all together out of reach, you will have a profoundly different experience from those who become seriously ill or find themselves caring for a sick or dying loved one, knowing that if nothing else, they can afford to meet the moment. Yeah, we do hear that we're all going to die, you know, but when and how, as you point out, we don't want to believe in our country that money makes a difference, especially with health. But by golly, it certainly does.
Speaker 1 29:08
Yeah, I mean, and this was something to that came up, but to a lesser degree, but it was something that definitely came up when my mother was ill as well. You know, I read that she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and she started hospice right around the time the Coronavirus pandemic was beginning. Yeah, so we all went into lockdown like it was the week I was supposed to go see her actually. But I will never forget trying to manage her like affairs from afar and like especially the finances because I had financial power of attorney at a certain point. And home health care would have bankrupt all of us, like very quickly. I mean, if she'd had longer to live this moment, when I realized we don't have enough money, like to keep her alive, it might be enough to like, help her die and bury her like that. That's the reality that we were thinking about. And so many families alike have to go through those same kind of calculate She's like, how do you get the care that your loved ones need? I'll never forget the week after she died getting a notice from the home health care agency, like, please don't forget to pay your last two bills. And they understand that and we should also value and pay home health care workers more than we do. But it was, again, just such a jarring moment of like my grief, running up against capitalism, and thinking about just the limits that we all live under and how much we want to be able to do for our families. And then, you know, the reality of what is actually possible.
Dawn Davenport 30:30
For sure, before we leave the topic of wealth, socio economic class, this is alluding to something that you said a little bit earlier, as well as what's in the book. And I experienced this as well, when I was in my 20s, I would have said, and I was broke, we didn't have a lot of money. We both had good education's, we both did have jobs when we were starting out, so we had expenses as well. And you say, our broke, and that's within quotes, bore no resemblance to my parents broke, we always had options. I thought that was so true. Yes, you didn't have money, but you had the good education. And you had the financial stability, in many ways of your husband's family, not that they were giving you money, but that there was just stability there that others don't have. Yeah,
Speaker 1 31:20
I mean, I will say at the time, you know, we weren't receiving financial assistance from anyone in those years, nor would I have ever expected it, especially like how I grew up. But like looking back, I think, I try not to talk a lot about him publicly, either. Because it's his experiences, his experience, and his family is his family. Like, my husband was just because I know a lot of people are probably in relationships, or they have partners who have very different economic backgrounds than they do. And I realized, like at 1.0, he doesn't view this risk as like, horrifying as I do. He's not as terrified about our credit card debt, or about the poor financial decision to go to graduate school. Like it's just a fact, it's never a great financial decision. It's a decision you make for other reasons. And we took turns in grad school for a decade. But I realized, at one point, like he wasn't scared by these things. And it was because even though we weren't getting money from his family, he knew he knew there was a safety net there, like a financial one. And I had never had that, like my parents would have wanted to help, but they just wouldn't have been able to. So I never thought of it as an option for someone else. To catch you. I have not lived with any kind of like, family wealth or stability in that regard. So it's just interesting to me, like the day I realized he's not freaked out by a call from the credit card company, you know, because they got our bills mixed up. And I was like, terrified. It said,
Dawn Davenport 32:41
even if he wasn't going to ever use it, and I speak for myself, because I was would have been in his boat, even though no money was ever offered, nor would I have sought it out. I never thought that they would or should. But I did know it existed. And that if worse came to worse, that it would be there. Yeah.
Speaker 1 33:01
Yeah. I mean, if worse, came to worse. Like, I feel like we could have gone to live in their their house. Like I don't think it would have come to that. But you know what I'm saying? Like, yeah, exactly what it had a place to land and like get back on our feet. And the reason I wanted to acknowledge that are broke was so different from my parents broke. And also the reason it bothered me so much at the time, like, I was feeling so guilty, that I didn't have money to send home, or I didn't have money to go visit as often as we all wanted. I couldn't like, I couldn't like save my father, when I knew what he needed was medical care. Like I couldn't, I couldn't shoulder that burden. But like one of the hardest things, but a very true thing is that in a way, that was our decision, like we decided, we're gonna go to graduate school, these are the careers we want. This is the education we need to have these careers, we decided to have kids on the younger side, despite the fact that children are also not a great financial decision. Like, that's not why you do that. I'm actually very grateful that we did because my parents got to meet them got to know them, I wouldn't have wanted to wait. But you know, these were choices that we made. And that's the difference. And maybe that goes back to the question of the middle class and the working class. Like, I think if you actually have some real stability or a safety net, then you feel like you can take those risks. They don't feel as scary. They might still be scary, but it's a different level than if you're taking certain risks making certain decisions. And you know, you don't have other options. I always felt like my parents sacrificed so much to make sure I had choices that they didn't have, like options that they didn't have. And I knew that that was true that I had choices. They didn't have, you know, even in years when I didn't have more money to help them.
Dawn Davenport 34:38
Mm hmm. Let me pause here to quickly tell you about creating a family's interactive training and support group curriculum for foster adoptive and kinship families. We have 25 curriculum. Each curriculum was on a different topic and each curriculum it comes with its own video facilitator guide handout edition No resource sheet. And it can count as continuing education for foster parents, if you need that, check it out at parent support groups.org at parent support groups.org. The last kind of major theme, and I don't really want to go into it in great detail. But the book in general was so universal in that, we all will eventually whether we have or not, most of us will face our parents getting older and our parents dying. And that being in the sandwich generation, regardless of when you have kids, whether your kids are teens, when you're going through it, or they're toddlers, it is still you've got a lot of demands, and your your career is taking off. There is a universality, not everyone will experience it. But maybe those of us who are fortunate to have our parents live a longer period of time, we will experience some portion of that. But the part of the book that didn't feel universal across the board was that all this was happening at the very beginning of the COVID pandemic, back when we were still washing our groceries and setting the mail out, you know, for three days before you touched it, that type of stuff. It's It's been a while it's coming up on four years. And it's easy to forget. And it's easy also to say now. Well, now that we know, you know, didn't have Yeah, but we didn't know that then. So that part was particularly heart rendering. And I know many people went through this in particular, because COVID affected the elderly to a greater degree. That was it was just very hard, because even you could afford at that point to go. But who were you endangering at that point?
Speaker 1 36:42
Yeah, yeah, as I mentioned before, my mother entered hospice care. It was probably February 2020. And so I had been going out to see her pretty regularly. And then my last trip ended up being like late January, with my older daughter. I had another trip planned for like March 13, I
Dawn Davenport 37:01
believe something like that. And the world closed down on March 12. Yes,
Speaker 1 37:05
I mean, I remember calling her and saying they closed the kids schools, we've been asked to stay home. And this was the days when like, medical workers were wearing trash bags, because there wasn't enough PPE. And so I mean, they were really serious about asking you to stay home partly to stop the spread, because the hospitals were overwhelmed. And I remember thinking like, what am I going to get this and give it to my mother gave it to her hospice nurse like, I don't know, I don't know how many people could be affected. And I just remember telling her let's, you know, I'm gonna cancel this trip. Hopefully, we can reschedule. We had another trip planned for the kids spring break in April. And at that point, I was thinking, everyone will stay home will mask will like do our jobs, and then it'll settle down numbers will drop, we'll be able to go see her before the end. Yeah, we were all thinking that we all thought that I thought it was going to be two, three weeks, maybe I'm saying yeah, of course, it was very different. I know. It's not a universal experience. But I think enough people went through like similar things with their loved one more thing. So absolutely think it's important that we remember how many people were separated from SICK AND DYING loved ones, how many people had to live stream funerals,
Dawn Davenport 38:10
or funerals, that just didn't happen? Right. My grandmother, I've never
Speaker 1 38:13
had a funeral, she actually she passed away my mother's mother she passed away in April 2020. And it's hard, I still almost feel like I didn't really get to grieve her because I was worried about my mom. And because we never had anything for her. My mother and her sister weren't even allowed to be present at the burial. They had to watch from a car like several feet away. And so I think it's actually very important, particularly because we haven't had a lot of moments, collectively, nationally, or I guess, like globally, to really acknowledge the depth of these losses, to how many people we all lost, and
Dawn Davenport 38:49
that lack of communal grieving, right, I think it's really important to be able to have for the living not for the person who died, right?
Speaker 1 38:59
I think it's important that we not forget, and that we not look away from that grief that so many people share from the painful things that happened. So I was very conscious of not wanting to write a COVID book. And it really it really only comes into the book in a few chapters. But in the same way that there is no facing my grave from my father without acknowledging like the structural failings of this country and the safety net, the failed him. There was really no grieving my mom and writing about that group without acknowledging like the time and the context in which we lost her. Because if she had been sick and dying at almost any other point in recent history, I'd have been there that ended up really defining how we experienced those final weeks.
Dawn Davenport 39:44
Absolutely. Absolutely. And the untold numbers of people. I think that probably every family on some level My family has was certainly impacted by that. And I think certainly huge numbers of families lost someone during that time. And it was really You know, what, a year and a half period, but it was so intense during that time? Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1 40:05
It feels like a very different era in a way. And then it also feels like it hasn't really ended. You know, it's very different now. But yeah, that year and a half, I think you mentioned before, like before vaccines, it was just a very different time, and a lot of people lost loved ones in that space. And it was very difficult to find ways to, as you say, like communally grieve,
Dawn Davenport 40:26
it was many just did not to all of our detriment. Well, the last question I wanted to ask you is actually probably taking us back to all you can ever know. And that is your sister, Cindy, she is your full biological sister. And she was very much present for you for your mom's death and for your dad's as well. So she was very much a presence in your life. And it struck me reading about her, it brought me back to all you can ever know. And I, and it's been a number of years since I read it. But Cindy, I don't know if you would agree with this, where I said you were well loved. Cindy was not well loved, or didn't feel that way. She experienced a lot of really hard things. And it made me wonder, how did she deal with the differences in her life versus your life? And I'm not asking you necessarily to speak for her because that would be unfair, but you are very close to her. So in so many ways, I would have wished the same for her. Yeah,
Speaker 1 41:27
I try to be really careful obviously about speaking for my family members or speaking to what their experiences must have met them. That's why you should ask mentioned like, you know, Cindy and I are very close. And I'm, I've always been grateful for her. And for that connection ever since we found each other reunion has been complicated. And it hasn't always been easy. Especially with my birth parents and extended birth family. Many of my birth relatives still believe I'm dead, because that's what they were told when I was born. And my birth parents don't want to correct them. So in many ways, and I write about this a little in a living remedy, but I'm kind of a ghost in the family still. But Cindy and me, that's very easy. else to put it I'm really, I'm so like grateful for her and grateful to have had one part of this too, that is effortless and like wonderful and uncomplicated. It just feels like she's another home. She's like another haven for me. And I would agree that she hasn't gotten the treatment from our family that she really deserves. I really hope and I think it's true, because she said so. And I don't think would mind my sharing. Like I think our relationship has been really healing for her too. I think it was something we both really needed, without knowing it. Like she was she was there by my side. When we married my father, she got to meet both my adoptive parents and had a real, like, they had a real love and affection for each other. And that's something I couldn't have dreamed about as a kid growing up in a closed adoption that might have to parents would embrace my biological sister, and then we would all mourn my father together as family. That's what happened. And that's actually like a little bit of a miracle, I think.
Dawn Davenport 43:07
Yeah, yeah. I loved that. I loved how, I don't know if they treated her like a daughter, but I don't know that but it was. They certainly embraced her as family.
Speaker 1 43:18
I think they saw my sister as part of me kind of in the way they saw my husband and my children as part of me. So they were always going to love her. So it really meant a lot to me that they got to meet. Yeah,
Dawn Davenport 43:29
for sure. Well, Nicole Chung, thank you so much. This book a living remedy is for anyone who is a child with adult parents or a parent themselves, I guess in other words, almost all of us reading how one person dealt with the loss of their parents is so helpful. Also, just as an aside it because a lot of our audience is adoptive parents. So if you're an adoptive parent who worries if your child will love you as much as if they had been born to you, you should read this book. Plus, it's just a darn good read. So go out and buy a living remedy by Nicole Chung. And I truly appreciate your time today, Nicole. Thank
Unknown Speaker 44:08
you, Dan. I appreciate yours as well.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai