I'm Kia Miakana Tis. This is NPR's Book of the Day. It was the grief mixed with anger that got to Nicole Chung. You might remember her name. She wrote a best-selling memoir, All You Can Ever Know, about being a Korean adoptee in a predominantly white community and the search for her birth family. But when both her

adoptive parents died within a year of each other, right next to grief was rage that they died

before their time, crumbling under struggles with money, health, and very few systems of support.

Her new memoir, A Living Remedy, is Chung's search to understand the lives

her parents lived in the systems that failed them. Here she is with NPR's Steve Inskeep.

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Nicole Chung says she grew up not knowing her family's income. She knew her mom and dad didn't have a lot. In high school, she had to earn money to buy her own clothes, but the facts

never hit her until she filled out a college financial aid form. And it wasn't until then that I actually saw our household income there, like in black and white,

and it was significantly less than my freshman year of college was going to cost.

And I saw our family expected contribution was zero.

Nicole Chung had been adopted into that family.

She wrote a popular memoir of her youth and her search

for her birth family called All You Can Ever Know. Now she continues the story with a memoir of what

happened to her adoptive parents. In recent years, both died in their 60s. She mourned them and

wrote about them in the isolation of the pandemic. Her book called

A Living Remedy Tracks Her Parents' Lives in Rural Oregon, where her father worked in restaurants,

her mother worked many jobs, and neither had money to spare. What was the connection, if any,

between their economic circumstances and their health? I mean, there was definitely a connection because we were often, as a family, uninsured or

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