Nicole Chung is the author of All You Can Ever Know (available from Catapult on October 2, 2018), a memoir about her experience as a Korean adoptee raised by white parents. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, GQ, Shondaland, ELLE, Longreads, BuzzFeed, Vulture, and Hazlitt, among others. Chung is the editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine and the former managing editor of The Toast. Find her on Twitter @nicole_soojung.
EB: What first drew you to writing in general and nonfiction writing specifically?
NC: It’s hard to remember all the reasons why I started writing; my first stories were of the classic stapled-together construction-paper variety, and I started making them almost as soon as I could read. I imagine I wrote them for a whole host of reasons: curiosity; escape; distraction; boredom. I was an only child, so I spent a lot of time playing and reading and thinking and writing on my own.
EB: Me too!
NC: I stuck to fiction; a lot of it was semi-autobiographical, or involved some powerful wish fulfillment. I kept a daily journal, I wrote essays when required for school (I did enjoy them), and that’s about as far as I ventured into the realm of nonfiction.
In college I studied history and worked as a research assistant. I was good at organizing a lot of information in writing, and I especially loved taking research and turning it into narrative. I also took some fiction and poetry classes—I had a hard drive full of short stories and portions of novels and some very bad poetry in undergrad—but I had never been in a nonfiction workshop; either there weren’t many nonfiction course offerings at my school, or I just wasn’t looking for them. (I remember I did have to write some memoir pieces in one of my undergrad writing courses, and my professor told me, “I think this is something you could do,” but I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to read about my life if they weren’t required to workshop it; I basically laughed it off.)
A few years out of college, I joined a local writing group. Most people were working on memoir—I have probably always been a little too susceptible to the many unstated pressures within a small group. I didn’t have any memoir pieces to workshop, though, so I wrote an essay in a weekend. That first essay was what got me thinking that maybe I had more to say about growing up in this strange, liminal space between two families; between Koreanness and whiteness. While I never published that piece, or the several that came after it, I kind of caught the nonfiction bug.
EB: I feel like that is how so many nonfiction writers feel—like they caught something they couldn’t shake. Did writing in general feel that way for you, too? In your forthcoming memoir, All You Can Ever Know, you write about how when you found your birth family, you learned that your birth father is a writer and your sister likes to write poems—did your drive to write in general, and about this topic specifically, feel like an innate, inherited thing?
NC: It did feel that way when I was growing up, as if I just had to do it. It came naturally to me. I don’t mean that in the sense that all my stories were great, but I always I found writing itself enjoyable—I never had trouble thinking of what to say or finding motivation to do it. (Would that were still the case.) I mean, I hate early mornings more than I can express, and yet for years I’d get up at six a.m. to write for a couple of hours before school started. When I finished my activities and homework I’d try to fit in a couple more.
I knew it wasn’t something I got from my adoptive family; writing was just one item on a very long list of differences. I felt like I had to do it, and felt terrible when I couldn’t, and it was how I tried to make sense of the world. But I couldn’t really think of it as inherited until I learned more about my birth family as an adult.
EB: Let me just gush for a minute and say how much I loved your memoir. (Everyone read it! It’s out October 2, 2018.) I found your book extremely moving, because you are able to share some deeply personal and complicated truths. What is your writing process like when approaching highly personal material, and what is it like after to have that personal information out in the world?
NC: Thank you so much for reading my book! Not many people have read it, of course, since it’s not out yet, so each and every time I hear that someone did, and liked it, it’s so special and feels like they’ve done me an enormous personal favor—which I realize is not the way you’re supposed to think about people reading your book, but anyway.
Ah, my “writing process” is nothing special, really! I have very little time in which to write (due to a full-time-plus job and children), so I can’t be too precious or picky about any of it. I just write whenever and however I can find the time. I probably wrote most of this book with some sort of Disney movie on in the background.
EB: Haha! I love it.
NC: My first question is always: Do I really have something important to say here, something that justifies the time away from everything else I have to get done? If it’s personal, I also ask myself if it’s worth the slight or great discomfort of putting myself out there in order to communicate that something.
As for what it’s like after—mostly, it’s good. I love connecting with readers. True, there’s usually a point just after a new essay publishes when I feel anxious, and then the day it’s out I watch reactions roll in and end up running the whole day on just coffee and some adrenaline, so I imagine I will feel that times a billion when the book comes out. I hope I get past that feeling, as I have before, so I can enjoy publication and actually feel like I’ve accomplished something. We’ll see! I am really looking forward to meeting and talking with people about the book on tour. That’s not something I’ve ever gotten to experience.
EB: Hurray for book tours! I personally can’t wait for your event with Celeste Ng at Porter Square Books on October 22.
Now, going back to handling the personal, when writing about your own life, so much of it always includes other people’s lives as well, and so much of your story in All You Can Ever Know is also your sister Cindy’s story. How did you figure out how much of her story (and your parents’, and your birth parents’, and your children’s stories) to include, and where to draw the line? How do you approach writing about people you care about, especially when you know that they will read what you’ve written about them?
NC: Ha, well, to write the first draft of the manuscript sometimes I just had to pretend no one would ever read it.
EB: Classic move. Sometimes that feels like the only way anyone can write memoir.
NC: Right? I knew I wanted to give my sister Cindy a chance to read it and tell me if she wanted me to change things—if she asked me to take anything out, I would. If she told me I got something wrong, I’d try my best to fix it. She was so much a part of the story, even more than I imagined when I pitched the book, so I really wanted her to be able to look at it and tell me honestly what she thought.
And I wanted my adoptive parents to have a chance to do the same, even though I felt I was the authority on my own feelings and experiences as an adoptee. I also shared it with my birth father, and he said he didn’t feel he had a right to change anything or ask me to write it a certain way. In the end, no one asked me to edit anything or take anything out; they were incredibly supportive. But giving them the chance to read and react and ask questions and even quibble with my memory, if they wanted to, before it was actually published and out in the world was important to me. As for my kids—due to the nature of this story and when it ends, only my older daughter enters the story as a full character (and then only toward the end). We read the book together, and she likes her parts. She especially gets a kick out of her birth story.
EB: That’s great.
NC: In general, I try to be very careful when I write about my kids. It might be something I’m more aware of because I’m an adoptee—another group of “children” whose stories are often told by parents, even when we are adults. Maybe I think about it, too, because my younger daughter is autistic, and I just can’t imagine writing about her the way some people write about their autistic children. There are so many things I know I’ll just never write about regarding my kids, because they are too young to knowingly consent to those stories being told. So many things are truly no one’s business, and/or not mine to share.
EB: I think that’s so important, what you said about children not having a say in how or whether their parents tell their story. I think about that all the time in terms of social media. (Do kids these days get old enough and then get pissed their parents put their whole lives up on Facebook or Instagram?) Did you feel that writing this memoir gave you a chance to reclaim your own story?
NC: It did, and I think that’s one reason why I so badly wanted to write it. In many ways it is about the power of narrative, especially narrative given to us at a young age—I think a lot of people, adopted or not, can relate to the experience of being told one kind of story about yourself and believing it for so long; being almost afraid to question it because it feels so important. At some point, the simple, tidy myth I’d been given wasn’t enough for me anymore. Searching for the truth (at least as much of it as I could find) was scary and difficult to process at the time, but it was also more empowering than I imagined it would be. And then so often, of course, adoptees aren’t the ones who get to tell stories about adoption, so just having the opportunity to write this book felt like a more radical act than it should have.
EB: When did you first realize that your adoption story was going to become a memoir? In some ways, reading your book, it seems like you were trying to write/figure out your own story for your entire life—and it becoming a memoir seems like a natural step. But when did you really start to think, I need to write about this?
NC: I am glad the memoir reads that way to you! I really wanted to bring readers along on this exploration of what many assume is a settled question for a lot of adopted people. As events in the book did take place years before I sold it, I had a clear sense of where the exploration would end up and where the story would go. So I wasn’t really discovering as I wrote, but I suppose I was rediscovering, in a way—trying to make discoveries I’d already experienced live on the page, and deciding what to include and where and how to end things.
When I started publishing essays about adoption in my early thirties, it took me a couple of years to realize that telling the story bit by bit wasn’t really what I wanted to do. There wasn’t enough space in an essay for the whole complicated story. There wasn’t room to go into why I was reconsidering adoption and my whole origin story, and write the particulars in a compelling way. There was all this bulky but necessary exposition, carried over from piece to piece, phrased a bit differently each time, to orient readers who were new to me or new to reading about adoption—like in the beginning of a Baby-Sitters’ Club book, you know, when you’d read their origin story and get a sentence or two about each babysitter?
EB: Yes. I often skipped that part.
NC: We all did. Anyway, that’s how it felt, a bit of orientation/Adoption 101 in every piece. I wanted to write in longer form, and in more detail, without having to repeat the background. So that’s when I began to think, Well, maybe it has to be a book—it felt like that was the only way there would be space for every question I wanted to ask and answer.
EB: Outside of your memoir, you also write essays and articles and interviews that fall more into a more journalistic/reported category. Is your approach different when you are writing something that is more research-based versus something that is more memory-based, such as your book? (Though, obviously, your memoir had a ton of research in it, too!)
NC: I wouldn’t say I ever find writing easy, but when it’s not personal, it’s a far lighter emotional burden. After I write a personal essay, I usually want to get out of my own head for a while. That’s why I write other types of pieces and do so many interviews. I love talking to interesting people, especially writers and artists; I find it really inspiring.
EB: Me too! Thus this series.
NC: Yes, this series seems like it would be so much fun! Doing research for an essay or preparing for a big interview comes with its own kind of stress, of course. For me, it’s akin to studying for a big exam: I like to do a lot of research and go in with way more information than I’ll need.
EB: Yup, I know what you mean. Before each of these interviews I go deep creep and heavily stalk my interviewees on the Internet.
NC: Usually I come up with a handful of interview questions to start with, but I’ll always follow the natural conversation where it leads. Sitting down with everything I’ve learned afterward, trying to put it in order while telling a compelling story, is always satisfying.
EB: I agree. I love doing interviews so much. Also, in addition to writing, you also work as an editor, currently, I know you are the editor-in-chief at Catapult magazine. When you’re reading nonfiction, as an editor, what do you think makes for really good nonfiction?
NC: There are so many things, and what makes “good” writing can be so subjective—but at the end of the day, I really think it comes down to voice. Is your voice one that readers want to spend time with? Is it one they trust? Will it encourage them to stick with you, even if they can’t guess where you’re leading them? When I return to a particular writer, their voice is the reason why. And I often remember the rhythm and command of a writer’s voice long after I’ve forgotten their exact words.
EB: In general, what do you find most challenging about writing nonfiction?
NC: Hmmm, other than “everything”?
EB: Hahah.
NC: Well, often you know how the story goes, or should go, but you also have to make sure there’s something for the reader to hold onto—something that reaches out to them, even though they cannot possibly share in your full experience because they aren’t you. A piece of nonfiction can be technically beautiful, but that alone might not give an uninvolved reader enough to keep going.
When I struggle with my own work, often it’s because I haven’t yet answered the big Why? questions. Why do I think this story needs to be told? Why tell it this way? Why should readers spend time with it, and with me, specifically? If I can’t clearly answer all those questions, what I’m essentially writing is a journal entry or something just for myself (of course, those exercises can be very important!), not something with broader reach or importance. So the biggest challenge, apart from just writing sentences that don’t suck, is to figure out when and where and how to move beyond the personal and get at those nuggets of truth that are universal, that could help someone who reads you.
EB: And what do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction?
NC: Hearing from readers, connecting with them, finding like minds and people who challenge what I believe. Reading good nonfiction is a way to walk in someone else’s life for a little while—I think it’s made me a more open and thoughtful person. It has helped change my mind when my mind needed to be changed. So when I am really on my high horse about writing (which I’ve gotta say is not very often), it’s in the hope that my work is helping at least some readers the way I know I am personally helped and inspired by reading. I find connection and learn about others’ experiences through reading nonfiction, and I guess that’s also what keeps me writing it.
EB: Thank you. I couldn’t agree more! Finally, what are some of your favorite works of nonfiction by a fellow non-man?
NC: Oh man this is an impossible question! I’m going to cheat and keep it to new works I’ve read just this calendar year: Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, And Now We Have Everything by Meaghan O’Connell, I’m Still Here by Austin Channing Brown, and Litany for the Long Moment by (fellow Korean adoptee!) Mary-Kim Arnold, and Old in Art School by Nell Irvin Painter.
E.B. Bartels is from Massachusetts and writes nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Toast, The Butter, xoJane, Ploughshares online, and the anthology The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35, among others. E.B. has an MFA from Columbia University, and she runs an interview series on Fiction Advocate called “Non-Fiction by Non-Men.” You can visit her website at www.ebbartels.com, see her tweets at @eb_bartels, and read her haikus about strangers’ dogs at ebbartels.wordpress.com