8 More Than an Outcome of WarAdoptions from Asia to the United States Kimberly D. McKee (bio) When adoptions from Asia to the United States began in earnest in the mid twentieth century, it's doubtful that the primarily white adoptive parents caring for children from Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea saw themselves or their children as part of a broader immigration movement or as part of the growing Asian American population in the United States. Transnational adoptions operated outside of restrictive and racist immigration laws, allowing families to bypass immigration quotas as they brought home "their" children. Adoption agencies also instructed adoptive parents to "raise them as their very own" and, in cases of adoptions from Asia, underscored the assimilability of Asian children into white American families. These early adoptions paved the way toward reshaping the category of Asian American in similar yet distinct ways like mixed-race and mixed-ethnic Asian American families, even if adoptive parents of monoracial and mixed-race Asian children did not see themselves as raising Asian American children. To trace the earliest adoptions of Asian children, scholars often point to the first wave of Korean War orphans as laying the groundwork for not only South Korea's more than seven-decade-long participation in international adoption, but also establishing the transnational adoption of Asian children to the United States. Yet, Chinese children from Hong Kong also entered the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, and preceding those adoptions were adoptions [End Page 247] of mixed-race Filipino children following the Spanish American War and mixedrace Japanese children following the Second World War.1 The history of Asian adoption thus tells the story of US militarism. It is woven into US empire and expansion, as US servicemen play a seminal role in transnational adoptions of mixed-race children. Adoption cannot, however, be seen only as an artifact of the past, not only because adoptions from Asia persist in the twenty-first century. Rather, the lingering effects of adoption tell a profoundly Asian American story. Catherine Ceniza Choy notes, "In Asian American studies, the word 'adoption' is increasingly significant for elucidating the breadth and depth of Asian American demographics, cultural expression, contemporary issues, and history."2 The interdiscipline must attend to the ways adoption indelibly shapes Asian American communities and histories of belonging, citizenship, and kinship. Korean adoptees were one of the largest immigration streams of Koreans to the United States in the mid twentieth century. In the mid-1990s, adoptions from China surpassed those from South Korea, and the mass movement of Vietnamese children as part of Operation Babylift in 1975 remains one of the more notable transfers of children to the United States in modern history.3 While these three countries are not the only nations sending Asian children for adoption, adoptees from Korea, China, and Vietnam are overrepresented in memoirs, documentaries, and scholarship on Asian adoption due to markedly lower rates of adoption from other Asian nations. When examining Asian adoptions, broadly, in the last two decades (1999–2019), adoptions from Asia represent 49 percent of all US international adoptions, with Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese adoptees representing 80.5 percent of adoptions from Asia.4 The shift from the adoption of mixed-race Asian children to monoracial Asian children in the early and mid twentieth century illustrates the intersections of adoption and capitalism. The markets of adoption injected much needed monies into national economies, while simultaneously alleviating the state from providing social welfare supports to support low-income, working-class families and single mothers. These adoptions also reflected the tiered nature of adoption economies, whereby Asian children were sought-after due to their "honorary white" status and assumptions about assimilability into American society, as well as the way antiblackness shaped adoptive parents' investments in certain children of color over others.5 In creating new family formations, these transracial, transnational families upended notions of family as predicated not only on genetic relatedness, but also race- and religion-matching as seen in previous iterations of domestic adoptions.6 These Asian adoptees thus found themselves negotiating what it meant to be Asian (American) in non-Asian families, as most of these adoptions...
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Jun 3, 2024
Sunah Marie Laybourn 
Open Access
