Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism

By Kim Park Nelson

The first Korean adoptees were powerful symbols of American superiority in the Cold War; as Korean adoption continued, adoptees' visibility as Asians faded as they became a geopolitical success story—all-American children in loving white families. In Invisible Asians, Kim Park Nelson analyzes the processes by which Korean American adoptees’ have been rendered racially invisible, and how that invisibility facilitates their treatment as exceptional subjects within the context of American race relations and in government policies.   Invisible Asians draws on the life stories of more than sixty adult Korean adoptees in three locations: Minnesota, home to the largest concentration of Korean adoptees in the United States; the Pacific Northwest, where many of the first Korean adoptees were raised; and Seoul, home to hundreds of adult adoptees who have returned to South Korea to live and work. Their experiences underpin a critical examination of research and policy making about transnational adoption from the 1950s to the present day.   Park Nelson connects the invisibility of Korean adoptees to the ambiguous racial positioning of Asian Americans in American culture, and explores the implications of invisibility for Korean adoptees as they navigate race, culture, and nationality.  Raised in white families, they are ideal racial subjects in support of the trope of “colorblindness” as a “cure for racism” in America, and continue to enjoy the most privileged legal status in terms of immigration and naturalization of any immigrant group, built on regulations created specifically to facilitate the transfer of foreign children to American families. 
Invisible Asians offers an engaging account that makes an important contribution to our understanding of race in America, and illuminates issues of power and identity in a globalized world.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Mar 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9780813570686

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Invisible Asians

Asian American Studies Today

This series publishes scholarship on cutting-edge themes and issues, including broadly based histories of both long-standing and more recent immigrant populations; focused investigations of ethnic enclaves and understudied subgroups; and examinations of relationships among various cultural, regional, and socioeconomic communities. Of particular interest are subject areas in need of further critical inquiry, including transnationalism, globalization, homeland polity, and other pertinent topics.

Series Editor: Huping Ling, Truman State University

Stephanie Hinnershitz, Race, Religion, and Civil Rights: Asian Students on the West Coast, 1900–1968

Jennifer Ann Ho, Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture

Haiming Liu, From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express: A History of Chinese Food in the United States

Jun Okada, Making Asian American Film and Video: History, Institutions, Movements

Kim Park Nelson, Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism

David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu, eds., Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media

Invisible Asians

Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism

Kim Park Nelson

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data

Park Nelson, Kim.

Invisible Asians : Korean American adoptees, Asian American experiences, and racial exceptionalism / Kim Park Nelson.

pages cm.—(Asian American studies today)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–8135–7067–9 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–8135–7066–2 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–8135–7068–6 (e-book (epub))—ISBN 978–0–8135–7373–1 (e-book (web pdf))

1. Interracial adoption—United States. 2. Korean Americans—Ethnic identity. 3. Asian Americans—Ethnic identity. 4. Adoptees—United States. 5. Intercountry adoption—Korea (South) 6. Intercountry adoption—United States. 7. Cultural pluralism—United States. I. Title.

HV875.64.P36 2016

362.7'78957073—dc23 2015021886

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2016 by Kim Park Nelson

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu

For my husband, Peter, without whom none of this would have been possible

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Text

Introduction: A History of Korean American Adoption in Print

Chapter 1. A Korean American Adoption Ethnography: Method, Theory, and Experience

Chapter 2. Eligible Alien Orphan: The Cold War Korean Adoptee

Chapter 3. Adoption Research Discourse and the Rise of Transnational Adoption, 1974–1987

Chapter 4. An Adoptee for Every Lake: Multiculturalism, Minnesota, and the Korean Transracial Adoptee

Chapter 5. Adoptees as White Koreans: Identity, Racial Visibility, and the Politics of Passing among Korean American Adoptees

Chapter 6. Uri Nara, Our Country: Korean American Adoptees in the Global Age

Conclusion: The Ends of Korean Adoption

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Acknowledgments

A project like this can never be completed without lots of help, and this one is certainly no exception. Many thanks to my mentor, Erika Lee, who took on me and my project many years ago. Thanks also to Jo Lee, Rich Lee, and Sara Dorow for their encouragement, feedback, advice, and support.

I never could have completed this project without the support of colleagues, some of whom have become good friends. Thanks to the many scholars who have discovered and rediscovered Adoption Studies with me and worked to critically think about adoption in the United States and around the world, including Tobias Hübinette, Lene Myong, Jae Ran Kim, Laura Briggs, Kim McKee, Sarah Park Dahlen, Hollee McGinnis, Lee Herrick, Liz Raleigh, and Kit Myers, whose insights on transnational adoption have much sharpened my own. I also so appreciate having been included in the community of adoption scholarship that is the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture (ASAC). The biannual ASAC conferences began around the time I began studying adoption, and they always challenge and inspire me. Many thanks to Marianne Novy, Cynthia Callahan, Emily Hipchen, Mark Jerng, and Marina Fedosik.

The research in this project included field work in Minnesota, the American Pacific Northwest, and Seoul, South Korea. I was based in Minneapolis, but I could rely heavily on many friends who supported me while I was traveling. Thanks to Su-Yoon Ko for her generous hospitality in Seoul, to Tim Holm and Jane Mauk for introducing me throughout the Pacific Northwest, to Kate and Mike Donchi for hosting me in Portland, and to Mark Ruebel for hosting me in Seattle. Thanks also to Dae-Won Wenger and Nicole Sheppard at GOAL Korea for supporting my travel to Seoul in 2006.

Special recognition goes to everyone at the International Korean Adoptee Associations (IKAA) for supporting the first, second, and third Korean Adoption Studies Research Symposium, and to everyone from AK Connection, Asian Adult Adoptees of Washington (AAAW), and Also Known As for supporting me in my work in the States.

Work in an interdisciplinary field such as Korean Adoption Studies requires meeting with colleagues in faraway places, so I owe a debt of gratitude to those who invited me to speak at conferences, meetings, summits, and lectures that doubled as networking opportunities to develop this and other projects. In this regard, I offer my gratitude to Bill Meyer, Peter Selman, Indigo Willing, Sarah Kim Park, and Stephen Sohn.

This project would have looked much different without the assistance of some highly skilled and extremely helpful librarians. I am in particular debt to librarians in the newspaper departments in the libraries of University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and the University of Washington, Seattle. A special thanks to David Klaassen, now retired from the University of Minnesota Social Welfare History Archives. Thanks also to Brian Drischell at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for help finding Korean War films. And a shout-out to the many librarians at Twin Cities–area public and university libraries who expressed their outrage that so many of the runs of our two local dailies are so poorly indexed.

In the time I was working on this project, I also had the opportunity to collaborate on other Korean adoption projects, and working with other artists and scholars certainly helped shape my thinking on this project. Thank you to Deann Borsay Liem, Kim Dalros Jackson, Kim Langrehr, Nate Kupel, and Katie Hae Leo.

I was also lucky enough to get some professional advice for this project from supportive friends, so thanks to Lisa Ellingson and Dainen Penta for their legal advice, and thanks to Paul Lai for feedback on the book proposal for this volume.

Thanks also to all who have taken time to read, review, and give feedback, including Catherine Ceniza Choy and other reviewers of this manuscript, and to Katie Keeran, Leslie Mitchner, and Lisa Boyajian at Rutgers University Press.

Many good friends who have been enormously helpful on this project have also become colleagues; all happen to also be Korean adoptees. Thanks to Lisa Ellingson, Heewon Lee, Jae Ran Kim, Lisa Medici, Sun Yung Shin, Jane Jeong Trenka, and Jennifer Weir for your support and feedback. You have helped me realize what it means to be part of a community of Korean adoptees. Your friendship, laughter, and tears have meant much to me.

Thanks also to the past and present members at Potluck for friendship and weekly sustenance. I’ve broken bread and been in conversation with this group on a weekly basis for over ten years, and its members have provided me both a sounding board for and a respite from the ideas I have worked out in this scholarship.

A special thanks to Eleana Kim, my longest colleague and collaborator. Her friendship has meant as much to me as her fine intellect.

I must also recognize Peter Bischoff, the first other adoptee with whom I discussed my thoughts on adoption, and with whom my critical assessment of the practice of transracial adoption began, many years ago. I am grateful to him for this experience.

A very special thank-you to each of the sixty-six adult Korean adoptees who officially participated in this research as oral history contributors, and to the many other adoptees who unofficially participated. This work would not have been possible without these adoptees and the generosity with which they shared their life experiences.

Finally, I wish to thank and acknowledge Peter Park Nelson, whose faith in me and this project began with its inception and has never wavered. He has read these pages more often than anyone save myself. He has been a precise editor as well as an ardent supporter of this work in every way. He is a cherished spouse who has been both remarkably tolerant of my many absences related to this work, and exceptionally loving, helpful, and supportive. I am so grateful to have found him.

Note on Text

Transracial or interracial adoptions are the adoptions of children of one race by parents of another race; these adoptions take place domestically or in-country (used interchangeably here). Transnational, international, or intercountry (used interchangeably here) adoptions are the adoptions of children with citizenship in one country by parents with citizenship in another, and are often also transracial adoptions. In this book, as in much of the related literature, transracial adoption can refer to both domestic and transnational transracial adoptions; most (but not all) transnational adoptions are transracial.

I acknowledge that the terms adoptee and birth parent are considered politically inappropriate by some when used to refer to, respectively, adopted persons and biological parents of adoptees, and that sometimes adopted Korean or adopted person, and first mother, first family, or biological parent, respectively, is preferred terminology. I use these terms without intent to attach political or social significance to them. I prefer the term adoptee, in particular, partly because it is still in common parlance inside adoption communities and in the general public, and simply because it is a single word that simplifies the task of writing about this population. I use the terms birth family/birth mother/birth father because these are the terms interview subjects used most commonly when referring to biological family. I do not use these terms with the intention of opposing any group or groups of activists in adoption-related communities.

Except where noted, a reference to Korea is meant to indicate South Korea. This is not intended to suggest a primacy of South Korea over North Korea, but instead reflects the way Korean American adoptees, who have only ever been adopted from South Korea, refer to the nation of their birth.

Introduction

A History of Korean American Adoption in Print

On May 25, 1953, during the last weeks of fighting of the Korean War, a pictorial with the headline 100,000 Korean Children Are War Orphans ran in the Minneapolis Morning Tribune. The brief article described the plight of children in Korea separated from their families (orphaned, in the language of the article) during the war (see fig. 1). Buried on page 20 of the paper, the article was as much a call to action as war reportage. The focus on the children of war was nothing new, but articles like this, in newspapers across the country, ultimately led to a completely new method of family building: transnational adoption on demand and without end, supported by a new globalized adoption industry. Overseas adoption from South Korea would continue for the next sixty years—long after the country had recovered from the effects of war—and the South Korean adoption program with the United States would serve as a model for many other countries that sought to send children away for overseas adoption, as well as for richer and more powerful nations where desire for adoptable children would fuel the most privileged form of contemporary immigration to the global West and North. Beginning at a time when Asian immigration to the United States was virtually prohibited, this population of Asian child migrants to America would eventually number over 100,000; advocacy for them as the children of White Americans would give them easy access to immigration and citizenship in comparison to most other immigrants.

Figure 1. Full article layout, 100,000 Korean Children Are War Orphans, Minneapolis Morning Tribune, May 25, 1953.

Newspaper coverage continued to document the arrival of Korean children to the United States as the adopted sons and daughters of American citizens.¹ As the practice of Korean-to-American adoption became more and more common, certain tropes used to explain and normalize the practice of Korean adoption became established: the miserable Asian orphan; the child rescued by a valiant American family; and the completely assimilated Americanized adoptee.² The depiction of the pitiful orphan in Korean adoption discourse is part of a long-established practice of sentimental media depictions of children in order to develop political will around nationalist policies by eliciting sympathies for children caught in far-away conflicts.³ In drawing attention to these victims of America’s Cold War ambitions, who would be invisible otherwise, coverage of the suffering children in postwar South Korea reinforced a narrative of American moral and economic superiority.

Early media coverage of Korean adoption frequently focused on the actions of American military personnel as child rescuers. This accurately reflected the military’s role in the very earliest Korean adoptions, those of so-called mascots, children unofficially adopted by military units in Korea and who went on to be among the first officially adopted into American families.⁴ Emphasis on the humanitarian qualities of American military involvement in Korea also served to drum up popular support for participation in a conflict that divided opinion in an America still war-weary after the end of the Second World War.

In a typical example, from the Seattle Times in 1958, Korean Child Welcomes Rescuer Here⁵ documents the arrival of Korean adoptee Joy Lynn, née Chun Cha, to the United States to join her American new family, but mostly focuses on Army Captain Boyd Clearwater, her supposed savior (see fig. 2). In the article, Clearwater is described as adopting an orphanage in Taegu, Korea, helping to support it by arranging for donations from the United States, then making arrangements for Chun Cha’s legal adoption by the Bollinger family shortly before his own return to the United States. The article highlights a special relationship between Chun Cha and Clearwater, reporting that the child thought that he had deserted her when he was making arrangements for her adoption,⁶ underlining the parental duty of the United States through its army. Appearing five years after the Korean armistice, this depiction of the relationship between the adoptee and the soldier symbolically represents the relationship between infantilized, war-torn Korea and the paternal figure of the American military, at a time when Americans were already beginning to forget the first U.S. failure to achieve military victory in Asia.⁷ News accounts of Korean adoption with similar pro-military overtones continued to appear throughout the Vietnam War and well into the 1970s, reinforcing the narrative of America’s Cold War military engagements as humanitarian acts and contributing to the image of American soldiers as the good guys, despite increasing public opposition to U.S. military intervention in Asia.

Figure 2. Photograph from Seattle Times article Korean Child Welcomes Rescuer Here, Seattle Times, October 26, 1958.

Adopted Koreans Fully ‘Americanized,’ published in 1975 in the Seattle Times, made strong connections both to the military beginnings of Korean adoption and to the successful assimilation of Korean adoptees, positioning them as all-American (though the quotation marks in ‘Americanized’ in the article’s title leaves some room for question), remarking on the kids’ love of baseball and hot dogs (see fig. 3).⁸ The article profiles several Korean adoptees who arrived in the United States in the late 1950s, one of whom is the adult Joy Lynn/Chun Cha from the 1958 article. Six joined the family of U.S. Army Sergeant Ogan, which is positioned as exceptional for taking on so many extra children. Journalist Chet Skreen even lists the amount the Ogans paid in adoption fees, but makes sure to note that the Ogan parents have no regrets. The article, written to compare the Vietnamese Operation Babylift to Korean adoption twenty-plus years before, reassures readers that Vietnamese adoptees will grow up well-adjusted, well-assimilated, and happy. The article ends with a quote from Mrs. Bergstrom, the parent of another profiled Korean adoptee, who recommends adopting additional children from Asia as protection against any problems they might experience. She remarks, They can at least share the hurts. Actually you forget they are adopted.⁹ Calling attention to the Korean-ness of adoptees, in articles like this one, is necessary only to highlight the much more important greatness of the American military and nuclear family; it is the purposeful overlooking of the adoptees’ Asianness that makes the adoptive family heroic. Forgetting the reality of adoption was a key part of normalizing adoptive families, and, to forget adoption, the most visible sign of difference between parents and children, race, had to be overlooked. This forgetting also rendered the stories of adoptees themselves less visible when compared to stories of adoptive parents. In this way, adoptee Asianness is elided, except to remind readers that adoptees were rescued from a bad (Asian) place. By 1975, the American story of transnational adoption was already framed, in articles such as this, as a win-win situation for Asian adoptees and their White American parents: adoptive parents are celebrated, assimilation is easy, and adoptees are happy.

Figure 3. Image emphasizing the Americanization of Korean adoptees in the United States, from Chet Skreen’s August 10, 1975, Seattle Times Magazine article. The original caption reads: Philip Ogen, and his brother, Peter, prepared for a Little League baseball game.

The idea of adoption as win-win for both adoptive family and adoptee had taken shape: adoptive parents gaining much-wanted children and fulfilling the role of American heroes by saving children from backward and faraway places; adoptees, configured as onetime pitiful orphans, enjoying better lives and greater opportunities through adoption, the fortunate fall of their abandonment and displacement allowing them to become Americans. Not surprisingly, in this configuration, Korean adoption fit neatly into larger American ideologies privileging the primacy of the United States and the American family, the backwardness of the global East and South, and the power of an individual to make a difference.

As adoption from Korea to the United States increased throughout the 1970s and 1980s, newspaper coverage shifted from news sections to lifestyle sections. In articles of this period, international adoption in the United States, still dominated by adoption from Korea, was practically sold to the public both through the depiction of the heroism of internationally adoptive parents (as in the 1981 St. Paul Dispatch article Adoptive Parents Find Love Has No Race or Color) and as a way for American families to be culturally enriched at a time of increasing interest in multiculturalism (as in the 1970 Minneapolis Star article Interracial Adoption Could Enrich Lives, Suburb Women Told). Although the focus of reporting remained on child salvation and the heroism of child-saviors, the role of savior shifted from the American military to the (almost always White) American family. Until recently, transnational adoption has been consistently portrayed in feel-good terms, in marked contrast to the treatment of other racial issues in American public discourse. Large multinational and multiracial families were celebrated both for taking in children not biologically related to the parents, and for these parents’ ability to look past race in their choice of family formation. Adopted children are depicted as lucky, and also as normal, largely unracialized in their White families, living just as White children would. Implied is that not only are these adopted children lucky to have been adopted, they are lucky to have escaped race, which doesn’t exist in their adoptive homes. In newspaper articles such as these, transnational adoptees are held up as a racial exception, a rare bright spot in the difficult history of American race relations.

Although much of the news coverage of transnational and transracial adoption from the 1970s to the 1990s emphasized the benefits of multiculturalism and progressive ideology in adoptive families, indications of White privilege, cultural appropriation, and the problematic implications of racial colorblindness can be discerned between the lines. In the 1970 Minneapolis Star article Interracial Adoption Could Enrich Lives, Suburb Women Told, transracial adoption is explicitly configured as an antiracist act. The article details how problems of racism are brought into families by social institutions like schools and churches, and puts forward adopting a non-White child as one possible solution to racism. However, in the same article, an adoptive mother proudly states that any child that doesn’t have a home needs one, and it doesn’t make any difference if they are blue-eyed Caucasians, or curly-haired Negroes, or slant-eyed Koreans.¹⁰

In the 1981 St. Paul Dispatch article Adoptive Parents Find Love Has No Race or Color, reporter Kay Harvey maintains a focus on sentimental, colorblind love (see fig. 4).¹¹ The article opens with the poignant statement Love has a long arm. Harvey continues, And some Twin Cities couples have reached across oceans.¹² The Carter parents are depicted as raising their Korean children using the pro–birth culture attitude that adoption workers had, by that time, come to embrace and encourage. Still, the emphasis remains on the power of love over racial difference. While the Carters themselves mostly speak about the logistical procedures of transnational adoption and the advances in adoption practice (not secretive like it used to be),¹³ Harvey highlights the Carters’ success in family building despite racial differences. The Carters themselves never mention race in the article, but the reportage keeps its focus on the racial dynamics, or the absence thereof, nonetheless.

Figure 4. Full layout of first page of Kay Harvey’s article Adoptive Parents Find Love Has No Race or Color, St. Paul Dispatch, April 21, 1981.

Although news stories about the racial harmony of transnationally adoptive families continue to be published today, a more complex discussion of the racial and cultural identities of Korean adoptees began to appear in the 1990s, when a sizeable number of Korean adoptees had reached adulthood, and adoptees themselves began to figure as primary sources for reporters. Some articles continued to focus on adoption as a method of family building, such as the 1999 article Native Instincts: More Foreign Adoptees Are Returning to Their Homelands When They Choose to Adopt, Themselves, about a Korean adoptee who chose to adopt from Korea.¹⁴ Other articles began to examine questions of identity in the context of transracial adoption. A 1996 article, Now I’m Found (see fig. 5), authored by Star Tribune staff writer and Korean adoptee Crystal Lee Hyun Chappell, provides an early example of an adoptee perspective on Korean adoption. Chappell opens with her own adoption story, which features elements common to many Korean adoptee life stories: tragedy in the biological family, culture shock in the United States, deep feelings of loss, racial awakening, birth search, and return to Korea. The title, evoking the lines I once was lost, but now I’m found, from the well-known spiritual Amazing Grace, represents a reversal of the way Korean adoption stories had been reported in the past, when readers were to understand Korean children to have been lost in Korea and found in America. Chappell’s article is the story of her finding herself by reconnecting with Korea and Korean family, begging the question: was Chappell lost in the United States?

Figure 5. Graphic collage of materials provided by Korean adoptee journalist Crystal Lee Hyun Joo Chappell to accompany her autobiographical story, Now I’m Found, Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 29, 1996.

Accompanying graphics in Now I’m Found are notable in depicting the multiple facets of Korean adoptee identity, rather than a more typical happy family portrait (still included as one part of the collage). Although much past coverage of Korean adoption had focused on the positive impacts of adoption, later adoptee-focused stories turned the spotlight on losses inherent in the adoption process and experienced by both adoptees and biological family. Chappell’s story is accompanied by a list of organizations that assist adoptees in the birth search process, as well as an additional article (also authored by Chappell) about local Korean adoptee-run organizations established to support the large Korean adoptee population in Minnesota (estimated by Chappell to be 12,000 at the time).¹⁵ Although Chappell never makes an explicit critique of Korean adoption policy or practice, the appearance—after forty years of reportage on international adoption as a win-win-win solution for birth countries, birth parents, receiving countries, adoptive parents, and adoptees themselves—of an adoptee perspective that reflects loss of any kind represents a remarkable change in coverage of Korean adoption. Chappell’s article and other early narratives by Korean adoptees presage the arrival of a wave of Korean adoptee voices that would reshape American adoption discourses and foreground adoptee experiences in our understanding of transnational adoption.

In reading news accounts, the dominant narrative of transnational and transracial adoption as a remedy for racism, or at least as evidence that racial divides in the United States are mending, comes into sharp focus. Literary scholar Mark Jerng describes this phenomenon as transracial and transnational adoption implicitly constructing a narrative of racial and national integration, measuring adoption in terms of ideals of racial equality and national integrity.¹⁶ The belief that transnational or transracial adoption could be a cure racism has been strongly critiqued by scholars who trace the racist origins and heavily racialized practice of transnational adoption. Catherine Ceniza Choy points out the ironic fact that the adoptees in question would probably have never experienced themselves as negatively racialized had they stayed in their birth countries, and that a history of racialized American military action created the very situation the media claimed the American military could solve.¹⁷ Recent ethnographic research on Korean adoption makes it clear that transracial adoptive families have not been cured of racism through transracial adoption; many adoptees report racist beliefs and attitudes in their White families. As summarized by Mia Tuan and Jiannbin Lee Shiao, White parents and kin with questionable racial views were able to fully love the nonwhite children in their lives without having to examine their own prejudice or alter their attitudes toward other groups. In fact, they could point to their children as proof of their tolerance without ever owning up to the fact that they had all but recast them as white.¹⁸ Kristi Brian identifies racism toward African Americans within Korean adoptive families.¹⁹

There is another way of thinking about Korean adoption in the context of American racial politics. Through experiences of Korean adoption, I critically examine race, both as it is understood by Korean adoptees within their (usually) White families, and as it is understood and produced in American society. Popular understanding of the importance of race has shifted since the 1950s, and I pay special attention to the mainstream embrace of popular concepts of multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s. As Americans have changed from being color-conscious to being colorblind, Korean adoptees—who often describe themselves as raised White—see themselves racially in every possible permutation of Asianness, Whiteness, and racelessness, even though most grow up in almost entirely White families and communities.

Most Korean adoptees, whether they are part of the small group of biracial adoptees, or are (to the best of their knowledge) so-called full-blooded Koreans, appear to others to be Korean, or at least Asian. Their outward appearance, which is usually markedly different from other members of their American adoptive families, is an important factor in their self-understanding, because it plays a large part in how they are perceived by those around them. When they are seen by people outside the family, they are often immediately understood to have been adopted, for there seems no other explanation for a White family to have Asian offspring. This is especially true in places like Minnesota, where many people either know Asian adoptees or have friends, neighbors, or family members who have adopted Asian children. Away from their adoptive families, Korean adoptees are understood as Asian or Asian American, and are subject to all the stereotypes that accompany that racial designation. Within the family and immediate community, Korean adoptees are often seen as White. Sometimes this can help reinforce the belonging of adoptees as part of White families and communities, instead of placing them in the awkward position of being the racial odd ones out.

There is little agreement on the meaning of racial identity within Korean adoptee communities. Although some adoptees welcome the opportunity to be identified with Asian or Asian American populations, others reject such identities, perhaps because of the heavy burden of racialization in America. Until recently, the discipline of Asian American Studies was largely silent on the existence of Korean and other Asian adoptees, despite the fact that Korean adoptees comprise a significant fraction of the Korean American population in the United States, and Asian adoptees have been made highly visible in the American media.

If we accept race as a social construct, identity formations of Korean adoptees force us to ponder whether Korean adoptees are Asian American, or if they are White if they claim they are White. Similar questions arise for Korean American adoptive families, who claim they are Asian American. In addition, we must question why and how the performance of race (Whiteness or Asianness), or the lack of such a performance, may be beneficial or detrimental to racialized individuals like Korean adoptees. Though an examination of Korean adoption, we can better understand the effects of race and colorblindness on the individuals who are asked to enact it, largely in the absence of a community of people of the same race.

Chapter Descriptions

The participants in my research were adult adoptees born between 1949 and 1983. Although I had not originally intended to look at Korean adoption from a historical perspective, I found that the practice had changed so much over its history that adoptees’ experiences could not be understood without reference to the changes in American culture since the mid-twentieth century. This exploration has led me to understand Korean American adoption in multiple contexts: as a social phenomenon that reflects the evolution of American race relations; as a frequently overlooked yet historically significant aspect of the geopolitical relationship between South Korea and the United States during and after the Cold War; as a bellwether of increasing economic and cultural globalization; and as a foundation of a worldwide community of people deeply touched by personal experiences of adoption.

All these contexts have affected Korean American adoptees’ life experiences as American people of color, as Korean Americans, and as adoptees. The Korean War produced