Mixed-Race Children and Their Korean Mothers

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.

Conclusion

The conclusion centers upon the legacies of US empire. The immigration of Korean adoptees and military brides to the United States, now numbering over 250,000 combined, evinces the paths of migration stemming from the war. South Korea also bears the legacies of US intervention, with a current social welfare system that mirrors the Western practice of institutionalization, and has relied upon transnational adoptions as a solution to an array of problems from rapid industrialization to overpopulation. As well, the permanence of a US military force in South Korea and government-sanctioned prostitution near US military bases marks the indefinite place of the US military in South Korea. The chapter closes with a look at how Korean adoptees, mixed-race individuals, and Korean women are creating their own kinship structures and support systems, as well as taking the South Korean government to task for its role in producing their circumstances. The chapter ends with a call to readers to take the United States to task, as well. It urges readers to grapple with the many things left outside of constructed Cold War family frames, and to understand how care and violence became partners in American empire and dare to unravel that union.

US Aid Campaigns and the Korean Children’s Choir

This chapter focuses upon US aid efforts spearheaded by nongovernmental agencies in wartime and postwar Korea. It examines the work of the Christian Children’s Fund, the American-Korean Foundation (AKF), and World Vision, among others. The chapter pays special attention to the AKF-sponsored Korean Children’s Choir, which toured fifty American cities in 1954 to raise over $10 million for postwar recovery. While images of war waifs in US media helped Americans imagine Korea in the context of rescue and the choir furthered these scripts, the choristers also helped to reframe Korean children as anti-communists with radical democratizing potential. The singing choristers promoted healing and understanding between Korea and the United States on the heels of the war, and, perhaps inadvertently, helped American audiences who witnessed the performances imagine what it might be like to have Korean children in the United States permanently.

Introduction

The introduction establishes the question at the heart of this book: How did Korean women and children become critical to the making of US empire in the early Cold War? It begins by situating Korea in the longer trajectory of US empire, which dates back centuries before US occupation of South Korea in 1945. Focusing on how children and intimacy historically played a role in empire building, the chapter describes how during the Korean War family frames were deployed to transform devastation into a tale of salvation, a cultural reconfiguration that enabled America’s reach to the Pacific. Yet Americans who anchored this project soon put internationalism into practice in ways that exceeded government intentions. Initially heralded for their humanitarian efforts, US servicemen, missionaries, and philanthropists transformed a rescue project over there into an immigration problem over here. Pushing to permanently bring Korean women and children into the United States, they were responsible for a return of empire that disrupted existing US gatekeeping policies and the domestic racial status quo. The introduction places the book in conversation with the fields of postcolonial studies, American studies, Asian American studies, critical adoption studies, and critical refugee studies to better understand these transnational processes.

Producing Model Korean Adoptees

This chapter complicates popular visions of the model Korean adoptee. It begins by examining how the Immigration and Naturalization Service monitored which Korean children were fit for entry, and sought to assure that they would not become charges of the state once they arrived. Hiring the International Social Service to manage the placement of Korean children, the INS transferred its responsibility to adoptive parents, a move that laid bare the interconnectedness of state and private entities. The chapter also shows how Harry Holt found ways to circumvent the red tape. His crusade to bring Korean GI babies to the United States necessitated their racial management, since existing domestic adoption policies precluded the crossing of black-white lines. What resulted ranged from state agencies denying African American couples’ adoption applications to South Korean prejudice against mixed-race children, particularly those “mixed with black.” The chapter closes with a look at the model construction of full-Korean adoptees in popular media as a way to reveal how making Korean children Christian, well-behaved, and assimilable was not happenstance, but rather a transnational process that began in US-administered orphanages in South Korea and was later overseen in the United States.

Missionary Rescue and the Transnational Making of Family

The war resulted in over three million Korean deaths and an estimated 100,000 children left homeless. The scale of need opened the door wide to nongovernmental US citizens who flooded South Korea to spearhead recovery efforts. American missionaries led the call. They set up over five hundred orphanages by the war’s end and administered care in a country that, unlike the United States, did not have an established national welfare program. The chapter examines how US officials initially welcomed the work of missionaries because they helped to resolve the civilian crisis while promoting Cold War visions of American benevolence, but were soon at odds with missionaries who openly criticized US servicemen for abandoning their mixed-race children in Korea. What began as a humanitarian and proselytizing effort in South Korea turned into an adoption movement that spanned the Pacific. Missionaries like evangelist Harry Holt and internationalist Pearl Buck connected constituencies back home to Korean children, imbuing Americans with a perceived First World responsibility over Third World children. The mobilization of Americans interested in seeing these adoptions through pressured the US and South Korean governments to create permanent adoption laws that set the stage for large-scale transnational adoptions the world over.

Managing Korean War Brides

This chapter examines the relationship between Americans and Korean women, both real and imagined. It begins in 1945 in South Korea with US militarized prostitution and its effects on Korean women. From assaults to regularization intended to protect US servicemen (but not Korean women) from sexually transmitted disease to US military efforts to prevent its men from marrying Korean nationals, the first part of the chapter establishes the uneven parameters placed upon Korean women. The chapter then moves to the United States to consider the cultural efforts made to uncouple the association between Korean prostitutes and brides. The chapter argues that US media’s hyper-focus on the purportedly docile (and, with US-occupied Japan a democratic stronghold in the Pacific, politically safe) Japanese bride supplanted an acknowledgment of Korean brides who arrived concurrently. It then looks to the popular singing, dancing, and instrument-playing Korean Kim Sisters, who through their celebrity and contained sexuality offered a safe alternative to the fraught figure of the Korean war bride. From military control to media representation, the chapter addresses how Americans tried to manage Korean women and how Korean women attempted to find security and autonomy amidst these pressures.

GIs and the Kids of Korea

This chapter centers upon the US military in Korea between 1945 and 1953. While Koreans experienced war violence firsthand, American and international audiences grew increasingly aware of and concerned about the devastation wrought by the US military as the war raged on. It was in this context that US military officials actively paired US servicemen with Korean orphans to help narrate the unpopular war. This chapter demonstrates how the American soldier was transformed from the bringer of bombs to the rescuer of children. Using US military records, army chaplain logs, Department of Defense raw footage, newsreels, photographs from popular US magazines, as well as US and Korean newspapers, this chapter traces how violent soldiers were transformed into caring fathers. Mandated by the US military and perpetuated through media, these relationships helped to recoup the losses of war and deflect international accusations of US imperialism, while drawing Americans together with Koreans in intimate ways. The chapter closes with a look at the symbolic purposes of these actions, goals made clear by military officials who blocked Korean houseboys from living in the barracks and stopped servicemen from formally adopting Korean children, intimacies that exceeded the intentions of these rescue narratives.