Mainlinebooker's Reviews > A Living Remedy: A Memoir

After reading Chung's previous book, All You can ever Know ,I eagerly looked forward to her newest memoir. Chung is an adopted Korean daughter of white parents who grew up in Oregon and couldn't wait to leave the racist environment in which she was raised. Not by her parents but by the community, something her parents were not aware of. Trying to make sense of her parents’ lives and her role within the family constellations, she examines their life of living paycheck to paycheck and often without health insurance. She escapes to the East Coast for college but then has many conflicted feelings about abandoning them out West. As her father develops more and more complicated health issues she feels sandwiched between her own burgeoning family and the one who raised her. Money being tight she was not able to help them out much financially and visiting them was perhaps once a year. When her father dies of kidney disease and diabetes, she is struck with a grief so profound that it consumes the reader. She's angry at the health system that has not allowed him to get health benefits that he so dearly needed. Shortly thereafter her mother dies from cancer that has spread throughout her system. Unfortunately, this occurs in the time of COVID when tight restrictions do not allow interactions with the dying individual and funerals become a long-distance affair. Chung's grief is so robust, devastating, and depleting that I had to stop several times because I felt it seeping into my pores. For those who have been in similar situations this book might be a trigger, but it also could be a wonderful release to identify with someone who has experienced this same tragedy.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for an ARC in return for an honest review.