Beyond Belonging: Narrative Identity in Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know

Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know (2018) exemplifies Asian American memoirs that challenge reductive narratives of transracial adoption. This article examines how Chung negotiates embodied difference, fractured kinship, and cultural absence through narrative, and shows how she transforms alienation into resilience and silence into agency. Adopting an interdisciplinary framework, the analysis applies Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity and Hilde Lindemann’s concept of narrative repair to explore how her memoir resists the binary of belonging versus alienation and refigures adoption as a complex ethical practice. The discussion demonstrates that through storytelling, the reclamation of names, and cultural negotiation, Chung converts loss into resources for selfhood and intergenerational responsibility. More broadly, the article seeks to broaden Asian American literary criticism by integrating philosophical and ethical theory into the study of adoption memoirs and highlights how life writing enables adoptees to trans form enstrangement into a narrative of continuity and ethical relation.