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A Living Remedy: A Memoir – A Daughter's Narrative of Adoption, Class Inequality, and Grief in America
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About This Book
A searing memoir of family, class and grief—a daughter's search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives she's lost. In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you'd hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them. Nicole Chung couldn't hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found community and a path to the life she'd long wanted. But the middle class world she begins to raise a family in – where there are big homes, college funds, nice vacations – looks very different from the middle class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week, health insurance is often lacking, and there are no safety nets. When her father dies at only sixty-seven, killed by diabetes and kidney disease, Nicole feels deep grief as well as rage, knowing that years of precarity and lack of access to healthcare contributed to his early death. And then the unthinkable happens – less than a year later, her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the physical distance between them becomes insurmountable as COVID-19 descends upon the world. Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another – and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and grievous inequalities in American society.
Reviews
"As Chung seeks a way to grieve without self-punishment, this open-hearted, unflinching account will be a boon to others."
"Chung's prose hones her grief into razor-sharp insights even as her words interrogate, honor, and celebrate the unbreakable bonds of parenthood."
"Chung provides a rare record of the difficulty of supporting a parent through end-of-life care ..."
"The narrative moves logically and emotionally, laying out what the reader needs even when jumping across generations ..."
"I found this book to be incredibly difficult to read — like unable-to-breathe-at-times difficult — because of its pervasive elegiac tone, its spot-on critique of an economic system that reinforces an ever-deepening inequality in America and, of course, its pandemic-era ending."
"For her, this is indeed a living remedy."
"A Living Remedy is most powerful when Chung frames the story of her parents' deaths as an unnecessary tragedy brought on by the broken health care system in this country."
"With this work, Chung offers a luminous addition to the literature of loss."
"Chung's deeply personal story also highlights the shortcomings of health care in America ..."
"It's not the poetic beauty of her language that distinguishes this memoir, but the accrued power of a story told in plain, direct sentences; a story that can feel overwhelmingly shameful to the adult child living through it."
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