Arissa Oh's monograph, To Save the Children of Korea, fills in key historical perspectives at a level of detail not present in other published works on the early years of Korean adoption. Her focus on GI babies, the mostly mixed-race offspring of Korean women and American military personnel born during and after the Korean War, limits the scope of her account to 1,500 of what would become over 200,000 child migrants bound for overseas adoption from Korea. However, she argues convincingly that these 1,500 Korean children would become emblematic of Cold War relations between South Korea and the United States and, to a lesser degree, between the United States and other Asian nations.
In six sometimes overlapping chapters, Oh divides this historiography of postwar Korean War “orphans” (most of whom have long been known to have had living relatives) into three sections. The first focuses on the child welfare problem created by the massive devastation of the Korean War and how the US military responded to large numbers of lost, abandoned, and hungry children. The second examines the emergence in Cold War US culture of an attitude that Oh characterizes as “Christian Americanism.” The final section traces the rise of an international adoption industry and explores its outcomes in US and Korean societies.
In her initial section, Oh tells of US soldiers engaging in humanitarian responses on a grand scale; many donated rations and salaries to Korean children, and some solicited donations from their American communities. Some employed Korean boys as servants, and a few of these became the first children adopted into US families. While this history has been previously published, Oh outlines colonial connections between the houseboy—simultaneously property and object of affection—and the affective labor of childhood expected from adoptees. She also notes that the practice of keeping Korean children as so-called “mascots” was critiqued at the time by child welfare workers, as such children were not able to easily return to orphanages and had difficulty in adoptive placements as a result of being socialized within all-male military environments. The widespread support of Korean children by American military is fascinating, but I wondered how this behavior among American occupying forces compares to that of military personnel in previous and subsequent wars; were the conditions in the Korean War particularly harsh for children, or is the devastation of families just the modern state of war? Americans’ response to US involvement in current wars seems apathetic in comparison, though children in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan suffer no less cruelly than those in Korea in the 1950s.
Oh's examination of the phenomenon of “Christian Americanism” describes the equivocation of Christianity with Americanism, whiteness, and goodness by invoking a Christian God to signify high moral fortitude, kindness, generosity, and democracy. Oh describes how the evangelical roots of the international adoption industry intersected with the extended postwar presence of US troops and the emergence of a new Korean industrial state powered largely by female labor.
In her last section, Oh effectively documents how transnational adoption in the 1970s and 1980s served as a tool of governmental control over Korean women in their dual role as producers of both children and goods. The economic “miracle on the Han” was based not only on the reproductive labor of married mothers who produced a new generation of workers for the Korean state, but also on the export of children born to single mothers through a growing international adoption industry, a practice that maintained patriarchal control over the female workforce and racial purity in the Korean nation. With child welfare programs virtually absent in Korea, orphanages became valuable sources of foreign currency as demand for adoptable Korean children was boosted by the image of transnational Korean adoption as a uniquely American humanitarian response to the Cold War in Asia.
To Save the Children of Korea also explores the complicated history of US immigration law for adoptable children, from refugee visas during World War II to the Displaced Persons Act of the Korean War, the 1953 Refugee Relief Act and its 1957 extension, and the designation of adoptable children as non-quota immigrants under “orphan visas” starting in 1961. Of particular interest is proxy adoption, which allowed foreign adoption of Korean children even if the adopting parents were not present in Korea. Introduced in 1956 as a Holt Adoption Program innovation to lessen the barriers to adoption for American adoptive parents, proxy adoption was officially banned in 1961. However, despite opposition from social workers, adoption agencies were able to effectively continue the practice by exploiting (with the collusion of the Korean government) a loophole created by US interpretation of the 1961 law until the South Korean Special Adoption Law was enacted in 2012. This history illustrates how transnational adoptees are positioned as “non-immigrant” immigrants, their ease of access to immigration and US citizenship afforded by their adoptive parents’ white privilege, with little opposition even in the most xenophobic periods of US immigration history.
While the study of Cold War adoption from Asia is well established, Oh's work provides important historical context by documenting that many of the current critiques of transnational adoption as an industry were already in place in South Korea in the 1950s, at the dawn of the transnational adoption industry. Oh's examination of archival material shows that there was deep concern about directing resources toward removing children from South Korea rather than toward supporting them in their families and nation of origin, about choosing adoptive families on the basis of evangelical Christian ideology rather than established child welfare standards, about the tendency for the establishment of orphanages to cause increased child abandonment, and about the reality that anti-Asian sentiment in the United States could affect the well-being of an Asian child living in the United States in total racial isolation.
Like any product of engaged research, Oh's monograph answers many questions while also eliciting new ones; her focus on the removal of the first generation of Korea's mixed-race GI babies made me wonder what happened to following generations, given that the United States has maintained a continuous military presence in Korea since 1950. To Save the Children of Korea provokes many other questions; it is an important contribution to the Cold War history of Asia and the United States, as well as to transnational adoption history and critical adoption studies.
