The First Amerasians: Mixed Race Koreans from Camptowns to America

Doolan, Yuri

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-tfmb-we44

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The First Amerasians: Mixed Race Koreans from Camptowns to America

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This dissertation traces the rise and the demise of the Amerasian in the years roughly set by the Amerasian Immigration Act (1950-1982). I argue that an Amerasian is not simply an individual fathered by a US servicemen in Asia, nor is it just a racial descriptor used to term mixed race persons—rather, the Amerasian is a Cold War construct whose rescue has been utilized for three main purposes: (1) to further the master narratives of the Cold War, valorizing US democracy while pointing to communist insufficiency and tyranny, (2) to repudiate accusations of US imperialism, irresponsibility, and immorality in the Third World, and (3) to provide to Americans sentimental victories in the aftermath of wars not quite won—all of which justified further military, civilian, and humanitarian incursion into Asia. From such constructions, Americans lobbied Congress twice—first in the 1950s to establish intercountry adoption laws that would lead to the migration of nearly 200,000 Korean adoptees to the United States and then later in the 1980s, when the plight of mixed race Koreans would emerge again to argue for Amerasian immigration laws that would eventually culminate in the migrations of 23,000 Vietnamese Amerasians and 67,000 of their relatives. While this project examines the construction of the Amerasian in US political culture during the Cold War, it is also interested in the lived historical experiences of mixed race Koreans and their mothers which expose the contradictions, shortcomings, and violence that such popular and governmentally produced narratives of humanitarian rescue obscure. To this, I argue that humanitarianism is central to the maintenance of (US) empire. Primary sources in this study include congressional records, US military documents including memoranda, circulars, correspondences, meeting minutes, and reports on military prostitution, venereal disease rates, recreation, marriage, and paternity in Korea; reports and studies conducted by social welfare professionals and adoption agencies about the conditions in camptowns, mixed race children, and Korean mothers; adoption case files from International Social Services housed at the Social Welfare History Archives at University of Minnesota; as well as oral history and memoir of mixed race Korean adoptees who comprised some of the first children sent from South Korea to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. The dissertation is divided into five chapters spanning the following topics: (1) the creation of the camptown in the early years of the US Army Military Government in Korea (1945-1948)—a space where military commanders oriented servicemen away from marriage with Korean women and instead towards military prostitution, (2) the construction of the Amerasian in the 1950s American public’s imagination as a refugee orphan in need of rescue and the establishment of intercountry adoption as a solution to this crisis (central to this were Orientalist depictions of South Korea as static and unwavering in their discrimination towards mixed race individuals, the vilification and subsequent erasure of the Korean mother as a prostitute unfit to raise her own children, and the narrative creation of a welcome home in the United States), (3) the efforts of indigenous organizations in the 1960s and 1970s to absorb and integrate mixed race children into South Korean society (which were ultimately stymied by American humanitarians who remained fixated on adoption), (4) the lives of the first generation of mixed race Koreans who were placed as adoptees in American homes during the 1950s and 1960s, and (5) the role of mixed race Koreans in the aftermath of the Vietnam War as Americans sought to orchestrate a second rescue through Amerasian immigration proposals.

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