The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Ashley Fetters: In the book, you refer to both your adoptive family and your biological family as simply your “family.” Often you’ll write just “parents,” “mother,” or “dad” instead of “birth parents,” “adoptive mother,” or “biological dad.” What made you decide to do that?

Nicole Chung: Some of it was honestly accidental. But I do think about them all as my family, very interchangeably. My relationships with them are all different, but when I use the terms adoptive or birth as qualifiers, they’re almost always for the benefit of other people; I’ll see a quizzical look on someone’s face and realize I said “father” without qualifying it.

It doesn’t mean, of course, that we have the same relationship, or that I feel equally close to all of them. For various reasons, I’m not in touch with my birth mother. But I still feel that innate respect for those family bonds.

Transracial adoption has a lot of critics—from both the left and the right.

Fetters: As an adopted person myself, I always feel a little funny about using the words mother or father, unqualified, to describe anyone other than the two people who raised me. It feels weirdly off-limits to me. Did you initially feel a resistance to calling your biological dad simply your dad, or was that natural to you from the start?

Chung: It was not natural, no. I think maybe there’s a difference in writing versus conversation, but eventually my thinking about family bonds expanded as a result of searching for and finding my birth family. I realized these are real bonds and links that we have—and even if they were broken, they’re still there, in this fundamental way. It was strange to me to deny that.

The few times I’ve talked to my birth mother and the times I’ve met my birth father, I don’t call them to their faces “Mom” and “Dad.” I have different reasons with both of them. With my birth father, who I actually have something of a relationship with, even though I do sometimes refer to him as my father, it’s still not at that point where I feel secure in doing that.

Fetters: In the first part of the book, you describe the first time you spoke to your birth mother. She calls you on the phone and says, “This is your mother”—I’ll be honest, that rattled me to my core, just imagining it.

Chung: I mean, part of that is that English is her second language, and she’s not as familiar with the terminology around adoption. I don’t think she would ever think of herself as my “birth mother.” Maybe that was a term that someone mentioned to her a long time ago, but it’s probably not how she thinks about it now. But yes, that was extremely jarring. That’s not how I was used to thinking about her at that point.

Fetters: You also write that from a young age, people have asked you about your “real parents.”