Mixed-Race Children and Their Korean Mothers

Framed by War ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 148-173
Author(s):  
Susie Woo

This chapter looks at what happened to the Korean women and children who remained in South Korea. It sets the stage by describing how President Rhee’s 1953 directive to remove children with American fathers to the United States heightened the vulnerability of those who stayed. The South Korean government worked closely with Harry Holt and in 1954 established Korea’s first welfare agency, Child Placement Service, expressly to remove mixed-race children. The chapter describes how US racial identification practices used to determine which children were “part-black” were introduced to and became institutionalized in South Korea. It also describes how Korean women were erased in this process. They were coerced to give up their mixed-race children and were offered no support from either government. For the children, solutions ranging from segregated schools to welfare reports that pathologized them as “social handicaps” relegated this population to the margins. The chapter ends with a consideration of how mixed-race children and the mothers who fought to raise them navigated the ongoing legacies of US militarization in South Korea.

Author(s):  
Susie Woo

Korean women and children have become the forgotten population of a forgotten war. Framed by War traces how the Korean orphan, GI baby, adoptee, birth mother, prostitute, and bride—figures produced by the US military—were made to disappear. Strained embodiments of war, they brought Americans into Korea and Koreans into America, intimate crossings that defined, and at times defied, US empire in the Pacific. The book looks to US and South Korean government documents and military correspondence; US aid organization records; Korean orphanage registers; US and South Korean newspapers and magazines; as well as photographs, interviews, films, and performances to suture a fragmented past. Integrating history with visual and cultural analysis, Framed by War reveals how what unfolded in Korea set the stage for US power in the postwar era. US destruction and humanitarianism, violence and care played out upon the bodies of Korean women and children, enabling US intervention and fortifying transnational connections with symbolic and material outcomes. In the 1950s Americans went from knowing very little about Koreans to making them family, and the Cold War scripts needed to support these internationalist efforts required the erasure of those who could not fit the family frame. These were the geographies to which Korean women and children were bound, but found ways to navigate in South Korea, the United States, and spaces in between, reconfiguring notions of race and kinship along the way.


2020 ◽  
pp. 223-234
Author(s):  
Kori A. Graves

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Korean transnational adoption would evolve to place more full Korean than mixed-race Korean children with families in Western nations. This shift was a consequence of political, social, economic, and cultural changes in South Korea and the United States that altered adoption priorities in both nations. As Western nations invested more money in orphanages and facilities to care for displaced, poor, and orphaned Korean children in South Korea, the Korean government embraced transnational adoption as an economic and social welfare solution. This transition helped to make invisible the struggles of Korea’s mixed-race populations and the vulnerable Korean women who became entangled in military prostitution. International media scrutiny has brought attention to the tragic circumstances that shape the lives of mixed-race Koreans and the Korean women who continue to relinquish their children for adoption. Events like the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul and the return of Korean black NFL football player Hines Ward Jr. to Seoul after he received the Super Bowl MVP in 2006 have forced Korean political leaders to reckon with the historical legacies of gender and racial oppression that have contributed to the marginalization of these populations.


Author(s):  
Jaeyong Choi ◽  
Tay Hack ◽  
Julak Lee

Although some studies have focused on immigrants’ fear of crime in the United States, it is important to point out that the number of North Korean defectors to South Korea has rapidly increased since the 1990s. Therefore, understanding factors associated with fear of crime for North Korean immigrants, especially female defectors, is important for ensuring their successful transitions into South Korean culture. The present study used existing survey data from a sample of female North Korean defectors to explore factors related to fear of crime. Results indicate that the number of North Korean friends, language proficiency, and patriarchal attitudes toward gender were significant predictors of fear of crime for the North Korean female defectors. Findings are described and discussed as a potential source for policymaking to reduce North Korean immigrants’ acculturative stress and fear of crime and to encourage smooth transitions into new cultures.


2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shida Rastegari Henneberry ◽  
Seong-huyk Hwang

The first difference version of the restricted source-differentiated almost ideal demand system is used to estimate South Korean meat demand. The results of this study indicate that the United States has the most to gain from an increase in the size of the South Korean imported meat market in terms of its beef exports, while South Korea has the most to gain from this expansion in the pork market. Moreover, the results indicate that the United States has a competitive advantage to Australia in the South Korean beef market. Results of this study have implications for U.S. meat exports in this ever-changing policy environment.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
HYUN KYONG HANNAH CHANG

Abstract Protestant music in South Korea has received little attention in ethnomusicology despite the fact that Protestant Christianity was one of the most popular religions in twentieth-century Korea. This has meant a missed opportunity to consider the musical impact of a religious institution that mediated translocal experiences between South Korea and the United States during the Cold War period (1950s–1980s). This article explores the politics of music style in South Korean diasporic churches through an ethnography of a church choir in California. I document these singers’ preference for European-style choral music over neotraditional pieces that incorporate the aesthetics of suffering from certain Korean traditional genres. I argue that their musical judgement must be understood in the context of their lived and remembered experience of power inequalities between the United States and South Korea. Based on my interviews with the singers, I show that they understand hymns and related Euro-American genres as healing practices that helped them overcome a difficult past and hear traditional vocal music as sonic icons of Korea's sad past. The article outlines a pervasive South Korean/Korean diasporic historical consciousness that challenges easy conceptions of identity and agency in music studies.


Author(s):  
Sung-Ju Kim ◽  
Bok Gyo Jeong

From the early 1990s to the present, the nonprofit sector in South Korea has grown exponentially in size and scope, resulting in increased calls for the development of nonprofit education programs to educate future leaders of the nonprofit sector in South Korea. This article reports on a study undertaking to determine the scope and dimensions of the nonprofit and non-governmental organization (NPO/NGO) education in South Korea, identifying university-based nonprofit education programs in South Korea and analyze curricular content employing Wish and Mirabella’s seven-category model for evaluating curricular content in nonprofit programs. At present, South Korea offers 23 NPO/NGO degree programs at 16 universities with a combined total of 634 courses being offered as part of these degree programs. In addition, there are 45 universities offering three or more NPO/NGO related courses outside of the identified 23 NPO/NGO degree programs among the top 50 South Korean Universities, including the aforementioned 16 universities. Our findings show that South Korean NPO/NGO degree programs are more focused on advocacy and public policy related topics than on other categories of curriculum content, and with very little focus on financial management related topics in particular. The paper concludes with a discussion of the unique structure of NPO/NGO degree programs compared with programs in the United States, highlighting the proportional difference between the internal and external functions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (13) ◽  
pp. 3629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Cho ◽  
Sang-woo Ji ◽  
Hee-young Shin ◽  
Hwanju Jo

The South Korean government is pursuing a national project to use the complex carbonates found in coal ash to capture CO2 and promote coal ash recycling. One possible approach is the use of coal ash as fill material in mine reclamation, but environmental concerns have so far blocked the implementation of this procedure, and no relevant regulations or guidelines exist. In this study, we review international approaches to the environmental management of coal ash recycling and consider how the lessons learned can be applied to South Korea. Each studied country was proactively using coal ash for beneficial uses under locally suitable conditions. The United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan are all putting coal ash to beneficial use following thorough analyses of the environmental impact based on several considerations, including bulk concentration, coal ash leachate concentration, field inspections, and water quality monitoring. Our findings can contribute to the development of proper regulations and policies to encourage the use of recycled coal ash in South Korea as an approach to managing carbon emissions and climate changes. There are currently no relevant regulations in South Korea, so we consider the adoption of the strictest standards at each stage of the other cases at the time of introduction. Based on our findings, detailed and appropriate management guidelines can be developed in the future. Establishing management plans for complex carbonates, verifying their environmental stability, and using them as fill material will provide clear benefits for South Korea in the future.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Woo Chang Kang ◽  
Ji Yeon Hong

AbstractIn this paper, we examine the extent to which wartime violence against civilians during the Korean War affects people's current attitudes toward South Korea and other involved countries. Using a difference-in-differences (DID) approach that compares the cohorts born before and after the war, we find that direct exposure to wartime violence induces negative perceptions regarding perpetrator countries. As many of the civilian massacres were committed by the South Korean armed forces, prewar cohorts living in violence-ridden areas during the war demonstrate significantly less pride in South Korea today. In contrast, postwar cohorts from those violent areas, who were exposed to intensive anti-communist campaigns and were incentivized to differentiate themselves from the victims, show significantly greater pride in South Korea, and greater hospitality toward the United States than toward North Korea, compared to prewar cohorts in the same areas and to the same cohorts born in non-violent areas.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (02) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alwafi Ridho Subarkah ◽  
Ahmad Saifuddin Bukhari

This study aims to discuss the economic impact caused by the COVID-19 virus outbreak, and look at South Korea's steps in suppressing the spread of the COVID-19 virus and diplomatic steps to help three priority countries namely the United States, United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia. This study uses qualitative research methods that use the concept of health diplomacy, and data collection techniques by conducting library research. The results of this study indicate the global economic and health impacts, collaboration of various parties by conducting health diplomacy is a solution in an effort to improve health and relations with various countries. South Korea conducts health diplomacy in the form of rapid test kits to detect the spread of the COVID-19 virus to America because there is an agreement on currency exchange and new virus cases there, the UAE maintains cooperation in various sectors, and Indonesia as an important partner in ASEAN to realize the new vision of South Korea. So health diplomacy is not just about health in the face of COVID-19, but also to improve relations between countries.


Significance Eight months on, there is little progress on the key issues discussed at the Singapore summit: there has been no formal end to the Korean War, and the two sides are yet to agree on what ‘denuclearisation’ means in practice. Impacts As part of a deal in Hanoi, Trump may offer sanctions relief that allows inter-Korean initiatives to proceed. Seoul and Tokyo fear a deal that removes the threat to the United States but leaves Pyongyang’s regional capabilities intact. Serious deterioration of relations between Japan and South Korea strengthens Pyongyang’s position. If inter-Korean initiatives fail, the prospects rise of South Korean conservatives recapturing the legislature in next year's election.


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