Nicole Chung is the web editor of Catapult Magazine, and formerly the editor of the Toast. Her first book, a memoir called “All You Can Ever Know,” will be published in October 2018. You can preorder it now via Catapult Books.
Molly Higgins (MH): Would you like to describe how your career has gotten to where it is?
Nicole Chung (NC): Sure. My name is Nicole Chung. I grew up in Oregon, born and raised in the Pacific Northwest and I currently live in the DC area. I’m currently the Editor-in-Chief of Catapult Magazine, which is part of the broader Catapult mission. They’re publishing my book and we also have a robust writing program now, so it’s a multi-platform company trying to nurture writers at every stage of their careers. And I find that really rewarding. Before that I was at the Toast, and before that I was at Hyphen magazine, which was an Asian American magazine. So I’ve been editing for a while, digital editing, and I really love it.
I’m really excited about this book, but my day job is as an editor and I tend to think of myself as an editor first. I really love my work. On any given day I’m probably much more focused on other people’s stories and writing than on my own.
MH: First off, I want to say thank you so much for writing this.
NC: Thank you for reading it.
MH: I know it describes your experience and is defined by what happened to you, but I think that as a mixed race person whose family has been in the United States for a really long time, I don’t generally think “Oh, yeah. There’s the part of the Asian American narrative where I fit in.” And to read a narrative, yes, about Korean adoption, but not in international terms, and one that’s ultimately not so much about reuniting with your parents but with your sister… Thank you for writing a true story.
NC: Thank you, I’m really honored that anybody spends time with it. I don’t know if that’s the right attitude to have about one’s book or not, but I’m profoundly grateful to you and to anyone who spends time with it. It means a lot to me. I’m glad to hear that parts of it resonated with you even though it’s not your exact experience.
MH: Definitely, the sense of feeling like you are in your family, and they absolutely love you, but they don’t necessarily know who you are or what you experience outside of your home resonated very much with me.
NC: Definitely, and I hope that it will to a lot of people. I know that this is a very particular, unique adoption story, even in the world of adoption stories, because my parents were immigrants and I was born in the US. So, I am a Korean adoptee, but it’s not an inter-country adoption. One thing I’ve tried to be careful about in my writing is not to speak for Korean-born adoptees. I can speak about my own experience and I know there’s a lot of overlap, but we do have different experiences and different issues if we’re interested in finding information about our birth families. I always try to make that really clear. There are so many Korean-born adoptees in this country and while we have a lot in common, it’s not my exact experience.
MH: And even if it was a straight international adoption, there’s such a multiplicity of stories in every universe.
NC: Of course, which is not to say that every Korean adoption story is the same. I feel like sometimes I’m asked specifically about Korean adoptee issues and I do have opinions, but I’m careful to say, “This is what I think.” I’m not a spokesperson for that population of adoptees.
MH: Are there certain conversations that you want to open up through your memoir?
NC: One of the reasons that I wrote it was that the dominant adoption narrative in this country has been so shaped by adoptive parents mostly–and some adoption professionals, people who work in the field–but by and large, it’s adopters. And in the case of transracial adoption you have white adoptive parents primarily speaking about this experience that involves children of color, who grow up to be people of color, adults of color, in this country with everything that means. There weren’t really stories like this that I could read growing up, and I really wanted those stories. I was surprised when I first started writing about adoption, and specifically about growing up as a transracial adoptee. I thought it was so particular and unique that I didn’t know if there would be an audience for it, if people would care, but the early essays I wrote really seemed to resonate, certainly with adoptees, but I heard from a lot of people who weren’t adopted. I heard from adoptive parents, actually, some criticism, but mostly really positive, from people who were really glad that I was sharing the experience, people who weren’t adopted but saw parts of their own experience in it. I did want to open up conversations about race and adoption, but I also think that the story is one that will resonate with people who know what it’s like to have family secrets, who know what it’s like to ask a question about something in your family and have everyone quickly change the subject, and people who know what it feels like to be between a couple of different cultures, even more than two cultures. Part of the memoir is also about parenting and I’m hoping that new parents and parents of multiracial kids might see something in it, in later chapters especially. One always hopes that your work will start, or open up interesting conversations. And another big reason I wanted to get this down was to that representation issue. Certainly it wasn’t the only reason, probably not even the major reason, but I still think about the kid that I was, the reader I was, going to libraries and reading every book I could get my hands on, and never really finding one that was at all like my story, or even about adoption from an adoptee’s perspective. I sort of wrote the book I wish that I had as a kid.
MH: Public conversations are one side of it, but I know that near the end of the book you include a lot about questions that your daughters ask you or questions that you wish you could ask your biological father face-to-face. What is it like to put that into a book? Once you put it out to the world, that you have this desire to talk to your biological father about this, are you hoping that your biological family will read it? Do you have expectations for them?
NC: My birth father and I are still in contact and I did send him a copy of the book early on. He is definitely fluent in English, but it’s not his first language and most often I think he reads in Korean, so I think he’s still reading it. I think he’s purposely going slowly and digesting and processing, and I think the fact that it’s in English makes it more slow going for him. Of course I wanted him to see it. I also sent copies to my sister early on. The story is so much about her and her experience, too, that I gave her veto power. She’s the only person I did that for, honestly, but there was so much of her own story in this that I basically was like, “If there’s anything in here that makes you uncomfortable, we’ll take it out.” And then I also showed it to my adoptive parents.
It’s definitely strange when you write something this personal, about your upbringing, questions you had, and feelings you had about your adoption, when all the people involved are reading it. But everyone’s response has been really positive; everyone’s been really supportive. That has really meant a lot.
There’s a lot that doesn’t make the memoir, too. It’s about one particular part of my life. It’s very focused on adoption, and growing up adopted, and the search for my birth family, and what my life has been like since that search. There are even aspects of my adoption that aren’t in there, or my adoptive family or my birth family. Part of writing a memoir is sifting through memory and experience and trying to figure out what are the most important moments. What are my most important memories? There are probably a lot of instances I could have included, about being bullied as the only Asian kid in my school, right? But I only really had to include the one, the first powerful one, for everybody to understand why that was there and what impact it had. You’re always going to sift through and choose… there are probably a thousand moments that could have gone into this book. I did think very carefully about what to include, and I did let them read it first, and then no one asked me to take anything out. A memoir is definitely laying yourself bare, but there’s a lot of real life that doesn’t come into the story, especially because it was focused on the one aspect of my life.
MH: I know that a lot of your work–the book, but also essays and interviews– deals a lot with pulling apart the multiple strands of Asian American identity and representation. Is that something you intentionally crafted for yourself? How did that happen?
NC: It’s hard to say. A lot of the interviews are because, every time I write a deep, personal essay, I’m tired of living in my head for a while after that and what I want to do is to talk to somebody interesting. I tend to interview people, Asian American or not, because I find them interesting, or my editor finds them interesting and assigns me a story, which is great. To the extent that the interviews relate to issues of race and representation, it is one reason that I enjoy them, but mostly I like talking to interesting people. The essays that I’ve written that have touched on the topic, I didn’t set out to become a cultural critic on this particular topic. Part of it is that, and maybe this is partly because I’m adopted, I don’t actually feel like the best representation of Asian America. When I’m writing essays I am writing to a very particular audience, you know? I’m writing about the fact that I grew up in a white family, in a very white town and what that did and the effect that had. And I can also step back now that I’m older and cast a more critical eye on pop culture and anybody can see, not just me, not just Asian people or Asian writers, anyone can see we have a long way to go in terms of representation. That’s something I felt pretty comfortable calling attention to. Also, I tend to write about, when I do write about Asian American art or artists, it’s just that it brings me joy to see it out there. We have a long way to go, as I mentioned, but in terms of visibility, I feel that things are much better than they were when I was growing up in a lot of ways. I think my kids have slightly more than I had in every area– books and television and movies. Things are getting slowly better. There should be a lot more, but that there’s anything is a source of interest and joy for me. When I write about those topics, part of the reason is I want to celebrate that.
MH: We are librarians. We’re always looking for new people to read. Is there anyone that you’re reading right now that you’re really excited about?
NC: On the plane to ALA I was reading Tommy Orange’s new novel There, There. It’s incredible. I’m about halfway done, but it’s amazing. Everyone should pick that up. I wish I had my Goodreads open in front of me! Right now a lot of what I’m reading has been for interviews, which I guess is OK… I just got a poetry collection by Nichole Perkins in the mail last week, called Lilith, But Dark. I know nothing about poetry. I tried to write it in college and was really bad at it, but it’s a really beautiful collection. I like to buy and read poetry. I’m one of those people who tells bookstores, “Your poetry section should be bigger.” This is despite not knowing anything about poetry. I read R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries, which just came out. Crystal Hanna Kim’s If You Leave Me was great. And I’ve just started Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ Fruit of the Drunken Tree. Those are a few of the things I’m reading. I have way too many books going at once right now.
MH: And on the topic of libraries, you are being interviewed by a librarian for an audience of Asian American librarians. Do you have any thoughts on libraries or their places in communities or what they should be doing in communities?
NC: I wouldn’t presume to say what libraries should be doing in communities. I feel like it’s not my place, but I can say what they meant to me. Librarians were havens, both my school library and also my hometown [public library]. We were not a large town, but we had a big, old Carnegie library downtown. First of all, it was maybe the biggest building I went into routinely as a child, just floors of books. It was magical–it had the smell, the library smell– and I learned to use the card catalog at a very young age, it was very exciting for me. And a little disappointing when it all went to digital. It wasn’t as fun as looking through all the cards, but I’d spend hours there and in my school library. Not to be a bummer, but my school was a really isolating experience because of the lack of diversity and how very, very small it was. The school library was the best thing about it as far as I was concerned. I really did go in there, no exaggeration, to try and read every book I could on the middle grade shelves before I graduated. The librarians were always very kind and welcoming. Librarians can spot a kid who needs a little encouragement. If I were going to say anything, and I don’t mean to be prescriptive, and I do think that a lot of librarians are doing this already in schools and in communities, they’re there for young readers, especially those who might need that space and need these books that will be encouraging and lifegiving havens that they might genuinely need at this point in their lives. Looking for those readers and looking for the kids you might not think are great readers yet, but could be. Making sure that the doors are open to everybody and that you’re looking for those kids, especially the ones who look like they could cause trouble in your library. Give them something to do. Give them something to read instead.
MH: You’ve written for a range of places. You’ve written, you’re an editor, you now have a book. Do you have advice for people who are looking to craft a career in writing and publishing?
NC: I feel like the things I do as a writer and editor are so different. They’re certainly related. I could answer that question in terms of how I became an editor, which was, this is not something I necessarily recommend, but I started out editing for free at Hyphen. When people ask me about that I say that I don’t advise people to work for free. I felt OK about it at Hyphen because it was a foot in the door, it was a really good experience, I felt like I was doing something for the Asian American community, and Hyphen’s a nonprofit, so no one gets paid. I wasn’t laboring on behalf of other people who then were making money. I really loved Hyphen and the Hyphen family. That was my first editorial experience. And I went from there to the Toast. And from the Toast, after it closed, to Catapult. You can pick up a lot from good writing classes. You learn how to read with an editorial eye, but you won’t really know if you’re a good editor until you start sitting down with people’s stories and really seeing what’s working and what isn’t. Some people try it and find that they really don’t like editing. I love editing, which is why I keep doing it.
As for how I started writing, it was much the same with writing classes in college and after. It took me years to get up the nerve to pitch anything. I don’t advise people to wait as long as I did. I think I was thirty when I published my first essay, but I had been writing essays for years. Most of them have never been the light of day. I will never show them to anybody, but it was what I needed to do to figure out what I wanted to say. Finding editors that you like and trust to work with you and make your writing better, finding generous editors and generous readers and writers who care about your work and get what you’re trying to do– you can do it any number of ways– it could be taking classes, it could be a genuine writing group, it could be pitching and getting lucky and working with different editors. I don’t know if there’s any one path. The path I took was weird.
I really enjoy both aspects of my work, and honestly, it’s been a lot of luck. It’s been a lot of work. A lot of people were very generous and open with me and answered my questions when I had them. I can’t stress enough the importance of finding people who care about your work, who you trust to help you make it better.
You can follow Nicole on Twitter @nicole_soojong
Editing assistance provided by Jaena Rae Cabrera.