NONFICTION: Chung writes about her parents' illnesses, the economics of sickness and her separation from them both during the pandemic.
"A Living Remedy" by Nicole Chung; Ecco (256 pages, $29.99)
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In her bestselling memoir "All You Can Ever Know," Nicole Chung wrote about being a Korean American adoptee in a white family and community. In her latest work, "A Living Remedy," she returns to the small Oregon town of her childhood. This time, however, she focuses on the tenuousness of her family's financial resources and access to health care while acknowledging the commonality of her story: "What had seemed like stability proved to be a flimsy, shallow facsimile of it, a version known to so many American families, dependent on absolutely everything going right."
Inevitably, many things do go wrong for Chung's parents, including their ongoing health issues facing diabetes and cancer. As her parents sicken, Chung deals with their changing relationship from the East Coast with her husband and daughters. There she must learn "to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them." Chung's new memoir is about separation, class and grief both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The narrative moves logically and emotionally, laying out what the reader needs even when jumping across generations. For instance, the story leaps from the author's memory of herself as a child with her mother, to her position as a parent to her own children, and then to her mother's own childhood.
The associations work naturally, adding the necessary historical connections or the wisdom of hindsight while also exposing the echoes and lessons lost or learned.
Some of the lessons are stylistically rendered in short list chapters, such as "Things My Mother Sent Me After I Left Home" where her mother's care is shown in scarves and hard candies. Such lists provide a brief respite from the narrative's progression but also artistically reveal Chung's attempts at organization and containment during great hardship.
Other lessons are painful ones, including her father's early death in his 60s: "It is still hard for me not to think of my father's death as a kind of negligent homicide, facilitated and sped by the state's failure to fulfill its most basic responsibilities to him and others like him." Yet the failure of the national safety net is partly counterbalanced by a familial safety net, even when COVID arrives and she cannot visit her ailing mother.
Chung candidly brings readers into her life like they are old friends. There is an ease in her manner of storytelling, and because of that there is joy in each familial connection and a great deal of pain when things go awry. Chung shares her experiences as individually hers and yet representative of so many others in a country where secure jobs, health care and an underlying sense of belonging are so difficult to maintain.
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Abby Manzella is the author of "Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Displacements," winner of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Award.
