Mixed-Race Adoptees and Transnational Adoption

Abstract

Mixed-Race Adoptees and Transnational Adoption Kimberly D. McKee (bio) 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). 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. [End Page 231] 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 post-Korean 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...