Disrupting Kinship

Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States

Kimberly D. McKee

• Éditeur: University of Illinois Press
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780252051128
• Sujet: Sciences sociales
• Sous-sujet: Sociologie

Since the Korean War began, Western families have adopted more than 200, 000 Korean children. Two-thirds of these adoptees found homes in the United States. The majority joined white families and in the process forged a new kind of transnational and transracial kinship.

Kimberly D. McKee examines the growth of the neocolonial, multi-million-dollar global industry that shaped these families—a system she identifies as the transnational adoption industrial complex. As she shows, an alliance of the South Korean welfare state, orphanages, adoption agencies, and American immigration laws powered transnational adoption between the two countries. Adoption became a tool to supplement an inadequate social safety net for South Korea's unwed mothers and low-income families. At the same time, it commodified children, building a market that allowed Americans to create families at the expense of loving, biological ties between Koreans. McKee also looks at how Christian Americanism, South Korean welfare policy, and other facets of adoption interact with and disrupt American perceptions of nation, citizenship, belonging, family, and ethnic identity.

CHAPTER 1

Generating a Market in Children

Interacting with Cold War ideology, individuals’ Christian Americanism supported the notion that adoptees would enter “good homes” in a democratic society. By linking domestic intimacy concerning kinship and family ties with Christian values, proponents of Korean adoption sought to build upon the legacy of Christian missionary work in U.S. territories abroad.1 The work of Christian Americans in the post–Korean War period is an extension of early American Orientalism and the “sense of evangelical mission” in the nineteenth century.2 The promise of the American dream positioned adoption as a better alternative to life in Korea.

Transnational adoption reveals the hypocrisy concerning wider issues of the American government and citizens’ paternalism and racism. Tinged by Christian Americanism, individual Americans and the nation at large invoked claims concerning the need to “rescue” children from the “backward East” and bring them to the “progressive West.”3 This allowed white Americans, the primary adopters of children, the opportunity to assert the superiority of Western hegemony. Many children felt the brunt of this rhetoric as they were told adoption was in their “best interests” and that if not for the kindness and generosity from their parents, they would have fallen through the cracks of economic poverty and degradation in the land of their birth. In doing so, rhetorics of gratitude became cemented in international adoption discourse. The detrimental nature of this particular savior narrative affects not only adoptees, but also the adoption industry more broadly. Emphasizing adoption as rescue hyperfocuses on adoptive parents’ actions—their decision to adopt—without systematized oversight on what occurs within the adoptive family postadoption placement. And, as we will discuss in the subsequent chapters, this lack of investment in adoptees’ lives following their entry into the West is problematic and exposes adoptees to potential abuses within their new families.

Implicated in positioning adoption as a method of child rescue were adoptee social studies, which recorded the progress and history of the child, including knowledge of the birth family. These social studies allowed orphanages to promote the popular belief that adoption is the “best option” for mixed race children.4 For example, in the late 1970s, an orphanage worker noted:

The natural mother has worked at American army [since age 19]. She met the natural father, an American soldier and gave birth to this child, but she has never heard from the natural father after the natural father returned to America. … Although the natural mother works in American army, she is so poor that she can not bring up two children [who are mixed blooded]. … [T]he natural mother decided to have both children adopted by a stable and understandable family in America thinking [their adjustment would be easier].5

This characterization of the birth mother’s economic constraints focuses it as a maternal deficit versus considering the ways in which paternal responsibility or the American military generated the conditions of her and her child’s circumstances. Likewise, in an earlier case from the mid-1960s, the intake specialist wrote, “[The birth mother] was unable to give the child the care needed by a baby and that she was the child of an American soldier so thought that it would also be better for the child if she could go to an American home for adoption.”6 Adoption typically resulted after fathers returned to the United States and stopped supporting biological mothers and children. Focusing on the biological mother’s poverty instead of the biological father’s failure to care for his offspring, adoption agencies and orphanages promoted narratives of rescue. Such accounts absolve the American father from wrongdoing and pathologize Korean culture—and, by extension, birth mothers—for being unable to care for these fatherless children.

By advocating the adoption of mixed race children, Americans shored up notions of democracy and liberal equality even as the United States encountered domestic questions concerning de jure and de facto racial inequality. Immediately after the Korean War, Assistant Director of International Social Service–American Branch Susan T. Pettis responded to an adoption inquiry from the Child Welfare Supervisor of the Department of Public Welfare in Greenville, South Carolina, on March 26, 1956:

The American-Korean orphans are not accepted in the Korean culture and are considered outcasts, even left to die. These are the illegitimate children of American serviceman [sic] and the small group of Negro-Korean children are the most needy. The dark skin is completely unknown in this country and carries with it a tremendous stigma. They have absolutely no future in this country and are often discriminated against in the sub-standard understaffed orphanages.7

This communication not only demonstrates the construction of Americans as benefactors but also positions the United States as a place of racial tolerance. Studies and reports completed in the immediate postwar period throughout the 1960s supported the notion that mixed race children faced limited opportunities in Korea.8 An estimated 5,546 mixed race children were sent abroad from 1955 to 1973.9 Mixed race adoptees existed between the Black and white binary girding American race relations, subsumed into language discussing their “whitening” or “browning” of the nation.10 The almost white status of mixed white-Korean adoptees allowed assimilationist beliefs to flourish. These children were assumed to seamlessly enter the white adoptive family. Orientalist assumptions of Korean culture validated the positioning of the United States as a site of racial tolerance.

Yet it would be remiss not to locate this rhetoric in conversation with American racial prejudice. Michael Cullen Green writes, “The Cold War imperatives that encouraged the cultural celebrations of the adoption of Asian orphans and abandoned white-Asian children … did not extend to Afro-Asians.”11 Anti-Black racism impacted the “adoptability” of mixed Korean-Black children by white adoptive parents as many of these children entered Black families and were considered “hard to place” by adoption agencies. Prospective adoptive parents’ requests for children reflect anti-Black sentiment as parents noted their acceptance of any child regardless of race, except for Black.12

At the same time, the American government and prospective adoptive parents overlooked the fact that mixed race adoptees lacked their father’s American citizenship upon birth unless the Korean mother could prove the natal father’s citizenship. This practice was not new in the post–Korean War period, as Green notes, “The United States, beginning with its turn-of-the-century acquisition of the Philippines, had long refused to provide social welfare benefits or citizenship to illegitimate biracial children in Asia.”13 Such complicated access to citizenship led to at least one case of a father adopting his half-Korean child. As the father knew of his paternity, it is unclear why this child was not naturalized as an American citizen upon birth. In February 1958, a white American former serviceman residing in the southern United States wrote to International Social Service (ISS) inquiring about adopting his Korean child. Working with the father, ISS completed the adoption by May 1959.14 Formal legal acknowledgement of paternity remained unattainable outside of the father’s recognition at birth until October 1982, with the enactment of Public Law 97-359, which “[permits] the immigration to the United States of certain illegitimate Amerasian children of United States citizen fathers.”15 This legislation only covered children “born in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, [Cambodia] or Thailand after December 31, 1950, and before October 22, 1982” and not their mothers.16

To better understand how the discrete arms of Korea’s adoption program laid the groundwork for the rise of the transnational adoption industrial complex (TAIC), this chapter investigates the ways in which the limited Korean social welfare state, in combination with the actions of orphanages and adoption agencies, generated the conditions for the nation’s more than sixty-year participation in international adoption. The transnational adoption industrial complex contributes to the sustained, globalized nature of intercountry adoption. The TAIC also evolves in response to policy or legislative changes. As Kelly Condit-Shrestha highlights, the procurement of Korean children shifted from those abandoned due to war or mixed race status to children made available by unwed mothers in maternity homes.17 Korea’s adoption program departed from the other postwar programs of Germany, Japan, and Vietnam in that the Korea program sought out new adoptable children after the initial crisis was alleviated. Whereas the Hong Kong and Cuban adoption programs operated for short periods in response to perceived communist threats, communism was only a factor that spurred interested adoptive parents to join in against the fight against communism and not the reason behind the program’s endurance.18 The longevity of Korea’s participation in the global adoption market reflects how Korea perfected a program that persists even as the nation is one of the world’s global economic leaders.

The continual export of adoptable children reflects Korea’s distinction in perfecting a program that standardized adoption practices. The TAIC offers a unique lens for other countries to model monetary success and a how-to formula regarding adoption as a de facto social welfare option. Standardization underscores how assemblages are also “capable of variable replication.”19 After reviewing the multiple mechanisms informing South Korea’s TAIC, transnational adoption cannot be viewed as a static act without political, economic, or social impact within sending and receiving countries. Varying, and sometimes unequal, power arrangements between adoption agencies, orphanages, and nation-states are sustained and redeployed in other global instances of international adoption. Global attention and governmental limits at the global and nation-state level on transnational adoption encourage smaller assemblages of the South Korean TAIC to evolve into slightly different formations in order to preserve international adoption participation.

Failures in Family Preservation

Narratives concerning unwanted children and patriarchal Confucian culture obscure the other factors that fuel Korea’s continued adoption participation. Decisions to place children for adoption are not only made by biological family members but are influenced by societal limitations reducing lone parents’ and families’ economic situations to raise children in Korean society. Low-income families’ and unwed mothers’ abilities to parent are also curtailed by androcentric legislation concerning children’s access to Korean citizenship, societal stigma against unwed motherhood, and prevailing notions of the male breadwinner/female housewife dichotomy. The intention of this particular line of inquiry is not to elide the agency of Korean women and the societal impact of Korean women’s organizations.20 Yet, Korean women remain disenfranchised as the nation’s overtures toward gender equity are given inadequate resources or personnel. Supporting women as social, political, and economic actors remains critical to ending Korea’s adoption participation.

Even as the 1948 Republic of Korea Constitution established gender equality, a notable gap existed between de jure and de facto gender equality to prevent political equity. The Nationality Law of 1948 classified patrilineal jus sanguinis. While the biological children of South Korean men obtained citizenship regardless of their natal mother’s nationality, “children born to Korean women and foreign men could not.”21 Only when the law was revised in September 1997 to cover bilateral jus sanguinis did the state grant Korean citizenship rights to children of Korean women.22 Operating in conjunction with the Nationality Law is the Family Law, established by Parts Four and Five of the Republic of Korea’s Civil Code. From 1948 to 1991, the Family Law denoted the husband as the family provider and granted a series of rights to the husband regarding family members in his hoju (family registry), including the ability to admit an illegitimate child he begot with another woman into his family without his wife’s consent.23 Korean women lacked the right to enter their children on their family registry. The importance of the family registry in providing legitimate status to the child underscores the gendered nature of citizenship. And as Hosu Kim writes, “South Korea’s patriarchal marriage law did...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Generating a Market in Children
• 2 (Un)documented Citizens, (Un)naturalized Americans
• 3 The (Re)production of Family
• 4 Rewriting the Adoptee Experience
• 5 Adoption in Practice: Adult Adoptee Reflections
• 6 Adoptees Strike Back: Who Are You Calling Angry?
• Conclusion: Considering the Future of International Adoption
• Notes
• References
• Index