Adoption Wars: American Missionaries and International Adoption in Twentieth-Century South Korea

Since the informal end of the Korean War in 1953, nearly 200,000 South Korean children have been sent to Western nations for adoption, with the vast majority, roughly two-thirds, being placed in the United States. From the beginning, these children were largely assumed to be the progeny of Korean prostitutes and American servicemen, who were subjected to intense discrimination or complete abandonment from their Korean families. By 1960, keen to redeem the image of U.S. intervention into Asia, American missionaries and non-professional humanitarian agencies spearheaded the first international adoption programs in the country and successfully transformed mixed-race Korean children into symbols of humanitarian rescue. In what follows, this thesis advances the following interrelated arguments: first, about South Korean international adoption’s deeply entrenched roots in sites of military prostitution, and second, how that very history conjoined with American missionary activity to build insular characterizations of Koreans as racist, incorrigible subjects to further justify the adoption of Korean orphans. Thus, Chapter 1 analyzes how international adoption was made possible through the ideological erasure of Korean birth mothers and severe distortions in the American press, all to transform mixed-race children into subjects worthy of adoption. Afterwards, with the growth in Korean adoptions throughout the 1960s, Chapter 2 shifts its focus to highlight the ramifications of faith-based approaches created by, broadly speaking, American missionaries, which have become the model for adoption in Western countries across the globe. Ultimately, this chapter showcases how American social workers collaborated with the Park Chung-hee military government to hyperfocus on fiscal growth to silence the voices of Korean welfare workers who sought to combat the coercive tactics employed by humanitarians to “rescue” Korean orphans known as proxy adoption. Lastly, as the number of mixed-race children steeply declined in the 1980s, Chapter 3 searches beyond the confines of economic revitalization that has dominated historical discussions of the 1970s and 80s, in order to highlight the stakes of international adoption to South Koreans themselves. Moving beyond myths of exceptionalism, Chapter 3 argues that the series of dictatorships over the Korean state exploited international adoption for its own political and economic interests, as the industry generated intense foreign revenue for the nation, ultimately showcasing the consequences of rapid industrialization at the expense of Korean children. Alongside these rapid upheavals, the reemergence of mixed-race children in U.S. political culture in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, loomed large over the American populace. Searching for answers, Chapter 3 ends with remarks on how Americans looked to the older generations of Korean adoptees to better imagine a future of their newly “rescued” Vietnamese American children, drawing links between critical refugee studies and critical adoption studies. Ultimately, this project intends to expose the hollowness of American multiculturalism that was percolated through Protestant missionary activity during the Cold War era, and how South Korea laid the foundation for international adoption to develop into the global system we see today.

Author dc:creator

• Brian Seyoon Chun

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Eiichiro Azuma

• History

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/62472

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.upenn.edu:20.500.14332/62472