Mixed-Race Adoptees and Transnational Adoption

2021

Book Reviews: Kimberly D. McKee Mixed-Race Adoptees and Transnational Adoption

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Kori A. Graves. A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 328 pages.

ISBN 9781479872329 (cl); 9781479815869 (ebook).

Allison Varzally. Children of Reunion: Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Family Migrations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 2017. 222 pages. ISBN 9781469630908 (cl); 9781469630915 (pb); 9781469630922 (ebook).

Susie Woo. Framed by War: Korean Children and Women at the Crossroads of US Empire. New York: New York University Press, 2019. 336 pages. ISBN 9781479889914 (cl); 9781479880539 (pb); 9781479827169 (ebook).

Kimberly D. McKee

Photographs shape how American middlebrow culture remembers the earliest transnational adoptions from South Korea and Vietnam. Heartwarming human-interest stories and profiles of adopted children and their parents filled the pages of magazines like Life and Ebony, in addition to local newspapers. Yet these celebratory tales of rescue and assimilation into American society glossed over the losses involved in transnational adoptions.

Recent Critical Adoption Studies scholarship goes beyond the reductive understandings promoted in contemporary media to offer a more complex picture of adoptees’ biological families’ losses, the incongruities and contradictions of the adoption process, and the children and women whose lives were inextricably linked to the adoptees. Kori A. Graves, Allison Varzally, and Susie Woo join scholars who interrogate the limits of adoption and how these particular family formations came into being. In their investigations of the treatment of mixed-race Asian adoptees and their mothers, Graves, Varzally, and Woo reveal the hypocrisy and contradictions of the US military and government. These orphans were simultaneously embraced as mascots or seen as children in need of rescue, even as their military fathers were not required to establish paternity and Asian women encountered difficulty in accessing US citizenship for their children. These monographs reveal what happens when children are simultaneously cast aside and embraced, their affective labor used to further a particular narrative of US humanitarianism.

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Moving chronologically, Susie Woo’s Framed by War situates the Korean adoption project and adoptees in relation to Korean War brides—women who married American GIs in the wake of the Korean War—and the women whose sexual labor supported the rebuilding of the nation in the postKorean War period. Some of those women who engaged in sex work were the mothers of mixed-race Korean children sent abroad for adoption. Other children resulted from consensual relationships between Korean women and military men. Susie Woo’s monograph disentangles these overlapping threads—adoptees, war brides, sex workers—to offer a nuanced depiction of adoption’s lingering effects and its intersections with other facets of US foreign policy. Focused on the intimate encounters between Koreans and Americans, Woo traces the contours and limits of these relationships while exploring the juxtaposition between Korean children’s innocence and Korean women’s purported deviance. Woo calls attention to the ways Korean children and women were cornerstones to American empire building in the early Cold War. Their affective and, in the case of Korean women, sexual and reproductive labor proved instrumental in US foreign policy efforts to contain communism. Yet they are often overlooked or seen as a footnote in Cold War history.

The American public was first introduced to Korean children via rescue scripts with curated narratives emphasizing the children’s salvation. These depictions in Department of Defense stock footage and national magazines featured American GIs forging relationships with Korean children, particularly boy orphans who became military mascots or houseboys. Coupled with media appearances and concerts of the Korean Children’s and Korean Orphans’ Choirs, the images humanized Korean children in accessible ways, whereby Americans could visualize them as part of their families. American GIs were, in turn, transformed through depictions of them forging familial bonds with Korean children. The girls in the two choirs promoted a feminized, innocent image of childhood warranting American paternalism. These media portrayals of Korean children made Americans see them as worthy of rescue.

American missionaries were integral in working with US government efforts to rebuild South Korea, and they were also instrumental in shaping narratives of Korean children abroad. Their efforts ranged from World Vision’s sponsorship of the Korean Orphan’s Choir to the work of Harry Holt and the Holt Adoption Program, a leader in promoting and expanding transnational adoptions from Korea and the rest of the world. These various mission institutions opened up opportunities for everyday citizens to become global citizens and to imagine themselves through the lens of global adoption. Sponsoring and adopting Korean children valorized white motherhood, while simultaneously denigrating Korean women as mothers.

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This position arose from assumptions that all mothers of mixed-race children were involved in sex work, coupled with Orientalist tropes of Korean women’s sexuality. Christian Americanism produced a sharp contrast between the supposed fallen Korean woman and her white American counterpart.

While American opinion deemed Korean women unworthy of motherhood, Korean children found themselves positioned within model minority discourse, becoming potential all-American children. Woo traces the mechanisms that molded the Korean orphan into a future American. Reports to social welfare professionals concerning Korean children focused on the behavior and listening abilities of boys, while girls were primarily described based on their abilities to nurture and clean. These gendered scripts illuminate the importance of American gender norms to the construction of these transnational Cold War families.

The book closes on an exploration of mixed-race children, their mothers, and women who married American servicemen. Histories of Korean War brides and military brides are elided in mainstream narratives of the Korean War and the Cold War more broadly, even as Ji Yeon Yuh and others recover their voices and experiences. This marginalization occurs despite war brides and military brides’ frequent sponsorship of their families’ entry to the United States. At the same time, mixed-race and monoracial adoptees circumvented US immigration law to form one of the largest Korean American subgroups. In comparison to the monoracial Korean children sent for adoption, mixed-race children—and by extension, their mothers—existed in the shadows as they disrupted scripts of Koreanness and revealed the racial fault lines in Korean nationalist ideologies of belonging. American racial ideologies, exported to Korea, also shaped the experiences of mixedrace children and their mothers due to pervasive anti-Blackness. Woo joins scholars Hosu Kim and Shannon Bae in offering nuanced portrayals of Korean women, locating Korean women’s experience as mothers within Korean adoption histories.1 Woo grounds her analyses of mothers of mixedrace children and war brides within the broader ways Korean women’s bodies were disciplined to be seen as acceptable in American society. One way she does this is through an examination of an entertainment trio, The Kim Sisters, and their popularity with American audiences. She reveals the limits placed on Korean women as they navigated unequal gender and racialized dynamics, which curtailed their ability to enact full personhood outside of reductive scripts of Asian women’s sexuality.

While Woo situates Korean adoption in conversation with the broader US Cold War project, Kori Graves decenters whiteness in the understanding of transnational, transracial adoptions in A War Born Family. This monograph closes major gaps in the literature exploring the histories of Korean adoption, since existing scholarship frequently emphasizes the experiences

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of monoracial adoptees and those adoptees who entered white families. In examining Black-Korean adoptees and their adoptions into Black families, Graves also contributes to scholarship invested in understanding how African Americans navigated the foster care and adoption systems during the 1950s and 1960s. Oftentimes, these families departed from the (white) professional norms—the male breadwinner and female housewife—that girded social welfare practices of the mid-twentieth century, as many married African American women worked outside the home to ensure a stable, middle-class life.

Graves illuminates the role of the Black press in shaping African American families’ opinions of adopting Korean children. Publications such as Ebony and the Afro-American offered human interest stories describing the privations and precarity facing Koreans in the wake of the Korean War and the particular hardships faced by Korean-Black children. Coverage by the Black press of African American soldiers’ serving in Korea included stories focused on their humanitarian efforts with Korean children. As with Woo’s analysis of media coverage of US servicemen, Graves underscores the stories of mixed-race children available for adoption that had little regard for the men who fathered these children and their responsibilities. Nevertheless, these stories that crafted narratives about the plight of Korean children were instrumental in influencing African Americans’ decisions to adopt. Graves highlights how Black military couples navigated the adoption process compared to other African American family formations, as these couples appeared to adhere to gendered scripts social workers were accustomed to follow in the 1950s.

A War Born Family examines both African American families’ participation in the transnational adoption project and Pearl S. Buck’s significant role in shaping understandings of mixed-race adoptees and transracial adoptions. Graves’s work complements that of historian Sarah S. Potter, offering a comprehensive account of the racial inequities affecting African American families interested in fostering and adoption.2 Documenting the National Urban League’s work with national and local agencies, Graves explores the contradictions in social welfare agencies’ response to Black adoptions. The agencies initially opposed the National Urban League’s efforts to support the adoption of children by African American families, but later changed course as the need for African American adoptive parents grew. She discusses how anti-Blackness negatively shaped the experiences of African Americans, which in turn affected Black families’ decisions to adopt mixed-raced Black-Korean children. Graves is particularly attuned to the way racial discrimination affected those children in South Korea, but is also mindful of how racial inequities created structural barriers for their

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adoption by African American families as they navigated a segregated child welfare system. She examines Buck’s professional and personal transformation to become an advocate for transracial adoption through Welcome House, her adoption agency, revealing Buck’s efforts to demonstrate that the interracial family was, in fact, an American family. The discussion of Buck and Welcome House illuminates the way systemic racism functioned in the United States to shape the experiences of mixed-race children against a backdrop of liberal, anti-racist efforts, and the civil rights movement at the height of the Cold War.

Allison Varzally’s Children of Reunion examines the ways transnational adoption was tied to other forms of immigration to the United States and connected to US empire in the Vietnam War era. She contributes to the growing scholarship on the limits of the “orphan” category and the slippage between adoptee and refugee migrations with respect to US foreign policy and capitalism. Varzally exposes the uneven levels of support granted to Vietnamese refugees and Amerasian adoptees, as opposed to their families and extended kin networks. This includes those Amerasian children left behind and not adopted and those refugees who entered the United States and sought to locate their adopted kin. Varzally interrogates the ways that US adoption and immigration laws resulted in immigrants receiving vastly different treatment contingent on their status at entry into the nation. This is especially clear when considering how Varzally identifies adoptees as immigrants—an identity that not all transnational adoptees claimed. Varzally explores the relinquishment and reunion of adoptees and their Vietnamese families as well as the experiences of Amerasians who were not adopted, carefully crafting a narrative that underscores the arbitrary nature of adoption and the permeable borders of kinship.

Varzally traces the origins of Vietnamese adoptions to the United States, placing these adoptions against the backdrop of earlier Cold War adoptions of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean children. By the 1970s, the geopolitical context shifted as earlier communist containment strategies appeared faulty, and Americans wrestled with social unrest at home. Varzally argues that Americans were motivated to support mixed-race and monoracial Vietnamese children because of their broader concerns about Americans’ lack of military success. In this regard, Vietnamese children served as proxies in some Americans’ efforts to assuage their consciences concerning misguided American military actions. Yet, as Varzally demonstrates, other Americans critiqued the ethics of these adoptions, which removed children from their country of birth. Perceptions of these adoptions were riddled with contradictions as Americans debated what obligations the United States had to the Vietnamese people, specifically Vietnamese children.

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Varzally challenges the humanitarian discourse surrounding the adoption of Vietnamese children, using Operation Babylift as a turning point to understand how Vietnamese children were situated in the American imaginary. She contends that Operation Babylift—the movement of more than 2,500 children out of Vietnam in April 1975—caused some Americans to raise questions about American humanitarian efforts and whether the mass evacuations of children displayed American arrogance in the rush to “save” Vietnamese children, with little regard for their Vietnamese kin. The subsequent lawsuits in the United States on behalf of Vietnamese families seeking reunions with their children who were trafficked into adoption as part of Operation Babylift reveals kinship’s complexities and the cultural differences in how Vietnamese relied on orphanages to care for children in times of distress, but not necessarily for the purposes of relinquishing children for adoption. The most notable of these cases, Nguyen Da Yen et al. v. Kissinger et. al. (1976), revealed adoption’s harms to Vietnamese families as Vietnamese refugees sought to reclaim their children and repair families devastated by war. The notion that Americans were engaged in a humanitarian rescue project becomes questionable when Vietnamese refugees sought reunion with their children and called into question the veracity of those adoptions.

Children of Reunion discusses not only Amerasian adoptees—their childhood and adulthood, navigating their identities as both Americans and Vietnamese—but also the lives of those Amerasians who remained in Vietnam. Those who remained encountered mistreatment and marginalization similar to that of mixed-race Koreans Woo and Graves discussed. The US government assumed responsibility, not for the treatment of Vietnamese women, but for the Amerasian children left behind. Authorities acknowledged them as their fathers’ children without specifically addressing the role of US servicemen in their births. The passage of the Amerasian Immigration Act and Amerasian Homecoming Act in the 1980s, facilitated the entry of Amerasians into the United States, with little regard for their Vietnamese mothers. As with Vietnamese adoptees decades prior, Americans viewed these adult and young adult Amerasians as unattached to Vietnam, with the possibility for assimilation given their American fathers. Varzally highlights cases of dramatic reunions between Amerasian offspring and their serviceman fathers, but also underscores the disillusionment that accompanied the offspring’s arrival in the United States. In Vietnam they were seen as not quite Vietnamese due to their mixed-race identity, and in the United States they encountered discrimination because of their Vietnamese ancestry and cultural differences. Varzally entwines adult Amerasian experiences with their adopted counterparts’ identity exploration to elucidate the similarities and differences between the two groups, who, for all intents and purposes,

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could have led each other’s lives given the arbitrary nature of adoption and separation of children from families.

These three monographs trace the broader constellation of transnational adoption assemblages. Woo, Graves, and Varzally move beyond thinking about adoption in isolation and weave together the ways in which Korean and Vietnamese women, US servicemen, and adoptees were linked as part of US empire building. These authors explore the erasure of US servicemen fathers and marginalization of the sexual and reproductive labor of Asian women in American efforts to create a narrative of child-saving rescue. In contextualizing the earliest Korean adoptions with histories of women’s sexual labor, racial liberalism, and the civil rights movement, Woo and Graves contribute to scholarship rethinking Korean adoption by accounting for the ways in which that project must be seen in conversation with women’s reproductive and sexual labor. Graves also foregrounds the way mixed-race Black-Korean children and Black adoptive families navigated their Korean transnational adoptions, providing a counterpoint to existing scholarship that focuses on the majority of adoptees who entered white families. Joining these efforts to examine adoption’s intersections with other political and social histories, Varzally provides a forthright and significant analysis of the kinship ties that bind. She juxtaposes the experiences of Vietnamese adoptees and Amerasians entering the United States in the 1980s as part of “homecoming” legislation. Together, these studies capture the complexity of adoption, disentangling the threads and systems that generate the conditions for adoption as well as elucidating adoption’s reverberations in the lives of adoptees in both the sending and receiving countries.

Book Reviews: Kimberly D. McKee

Notes

1Hosu Kim, Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea: Virtual Mothering (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Shannon Bae, “Radical Imagination and the Solidarity Movement between Transnational Korean Adoptees and Unwed Mothers in South Korea,” Adoption & Culture no. 6, vol. 2 (2018): 300–315. 2Sarah Potter, Everybody Else: Adoption and the Politics of Domestic Diversity in Postwar America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014).