Nicole Chung’s new memoir ‘A Living Remedy’: ‘I am an expert at grieving under capitalism. Watch and learn.’

Nicole Chung grew up in rural Oregon, an adopted Korean American only child of working-class white parents, an experience that she explored in her bestselling debut memoir “All You Can Ever Know.” She knew she was loved, although she never quite felt she belonged.

A scholarship to an east-coast university thousands of miles away gave her purchase in a world in which her parents would not be able to join her. She writes in “A Living Remedy” of their generosity in letting her go “because their priority was my happiness, even if the pursuit of it took me away from them.” The courage to leave and start over somewhere unknown and new, as her parents also had done, moving to Oregon from the Midwest, remains a cherished legacy to her — “a strand connecting the very different lives we have led, reminding me that I am their child.”

Chung shifts back and forth in the narrative from the recent pandemic years to her childhood when she was raised Roman Catholic, her university days, her married life as the mother of two young daughters, and the publication of her first book, each anecdote a worry bead on a rosary.

When Chung was 14, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer which, in hindsight, becomes for the family, “an upheaval from which there would be no lasting recovery.” A decade later, while she was in graduate school on the east coast and her parents lost their jobs in their late fifties, her mother ended up selling her plasma to cover living expenses.

She plumbs entrenched inequality in access to health care in America, a country that “first abandons and then condemns people without money, who have the temerity to get sick, accusing them of causing their own deaths.”

Chung felt acutely her own frustration and uselessness at not being able to help them out financially, compounded by guilt at being too broke to visit them. They saw each other once a year, at most, and a visit meant taking on debt that no one could afford. Her feelings are magnified when she remembers that they “never accused me of negligence or being a terrible daughter. Sometimes I almost wished they would, because what they did felt even worse: they never asked me for anything.”

This guilt amplifies when her father is diagnosed with late-stage renal failure, compounded by diabetes he could not afford to treat for years. He dies at 67 and Chung notes that since he’d been denied Medicaid and Social Security Disability Insurance, “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.”

Cancer reclaims her mother just as Chung is about to go on book tour. Between managing her mother’s medical care from afar and doggedly keeping her commitment to her publisher she notes, matter-of-factly, “I am an expert at grieving under capitalism. Watch and learn.”

In early 2020, her mother enters hospice care in her own home and Chung, her own finances improved by the success of her first book, plans to fly west to be with her in March, but then COVID-19 kneecaps the world.

Instead of comforting her dying mother, Chung finds herself in lockdown home-schooling her daughters, reduced to communicating with her mother by phone and by Zoom. During those agonizing months she sends to her mother, among other things: watercolour art and cartoons drawn by her daughters, all three seasons of “Slings & Arrows” on DVD, warm socks, nice hand lotion, fresh pears and Mother’s Day tulips.

When her mother dies that spring, Chung dissolves in a torrent of tears, her grief amplified by the outsized loss of the ongoing pandemic. “I cry while I eat or drink. I cry in the shower, and when I lie down to try to sleep.” Regret and anger about not being able to be with her mother as she dies take the shape of a constant ache. It is “fierce and gnawing and deep, so entwined with my grief that I cannot begin to parse where one feeling ends and another begins.”

This elegant, fearless, aching memoir is a balm for all who grieve in this complicated time, joining Joan Didion in the pantheon of the literature of loss.

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