In five succinct chapters, SooJin Pate's From Orphan to Adoptee contributes to recent efforts to historicize international adoptions from South Korea. It stands firmly as a work of “critical adoption studies” (p. 13), an interdisciplinary field that offers crucial feminist, postcolonial, and/or queer interventions into studies of adoption. It also seeks to make a historiographic intervention by situating the origins of Korean adoption in the 1945–50 period of the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK), rather than in the postwar period in which “orphans”—some mixed-race, some literally orphaned during the war or separated or abandoned by parents after the war—proliferated.
Based on congressional documents from the National Archives, adoption-related correspondence and administrative documents from the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota, and films from the U.S. Department of Defense, Pate argues that the foundations of the U.S. empire and neocolonial relations in South Korea were established by the USAMGIK through Cold War relief projects that included interventions into South Korea's social welfare system. As she shows, U.S. Army personnel were actively involved in the planning, construction, and financing of orphanages across South Korea. Linking orphanages to broader processes of militarization in post-division South Korea, Pate identifies what she calls “militarized humanitarianism,” a form of aid that is directly linked to the promotion of the U.S. state's national interests (p. 38). For Pate, Korean children not only served to humanize U.S. servicemen but also, through direct interactions with them, were subjectivized as orphans—gendered and raced objects of benevolence and domination that underwrote American exceptionalism. Pate offers critical readings of Armed Forces Assistance to Korea film reels of U.S. soldiers at Christmas parties and other festivities at orphanages that they supported, framing the camera's “militarized gaze” as an expression and documentation of relations of power and exploitation that rendered the Korean orphan a mere figure of pleasure and consumption for soldiers and, later, for Americans back at home.
Through close readings of visual artifacts, Pate illustrates how the “militarization” of orphans encoded gendered values and norms peculiar to U.S. occupation—boys were turned into little soldiers, dressed in uniforms or playing with toy rifles, and girls were hypersexualized as entertainers and hostesses for their soldier patrons. Pate interprets the children as objects of control, sexualization, and occupation under the U.S. military, but also allows some space for “defiance,” in moments where children “shoot back” at the camera (p. 69). Although Pate sees militarized humanitarianism as a premeditated “guise” or cover for U.S. empire (p. 33), one could argue that there is no cover-up or contradiction here. Rather, U.S. empire has, and continues to be, an exercise of benevolent domination in which humanitarian efforts, especially those targeting children, play a key role.
Pate connects the militarized gaze in South Korea to American citizens' desires to adopt them by suggesting that newsreels, documentaries, and news reports that celebrated the humanitarianism of U.S. soldiers and that summoned Americans to donate to the good cause of caring for orphans turned the Korean orphan into an object of “yellow desire.” “Orphans,” she argues, were one of many “Oriental dolls” in the post-WWII period––highly fetishized, interchangeable children that were also assimilable, adoptable, and lovable (p. 88). She also analyzes the Holt Ilsan Orphanage as a site of Foucauldian disciplinary power, and a final chapter analyzes an adoptee memoir as a counternarrative to the normalizing institutions of adoption.
This book's contribution is not to be found in its treatment of the USAMGIK, which is cursory at best, but in its focus on the militarized nature of orphanages as a precursor to international adoption. It thus extends Christina Klein's groundbreaking Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), as well as feminist histories and critiques of U.S. empire and militarized prostitution such as those of Cynthia Enloe, Katharine Moon, and Patti Duncan. A major limitation, however, is its exclusion of the Korean side. We learn nothing of the attitudes and beliefs of the Korean orphanage directors and workers, for instance. Orphanages were magnets for foreign capital, food, and supplies, and thus a resource for many needy Koreans, not just “orphaned” children. As such, they deserve more analysis as complex sites of social and economic relations among South Koreans, as well as between the South Korean state and the U.S. military.
We will have to await a more detailed historical accounting of the orphanage system in South Korea that includes information from South Korean sources and that might link diplomatic histories with the institutions, policies, and bodies of Korean children, much as Katharine Moon's Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) did to shed light on the open secret of militarized prostitution. Until that time, From Orphan to Adoptee provides an important link between military history and adoption history that has so far been under-elaborated. It should be of interest to scholars of transnational adoption, historians of the U.S. military and the Korean War, and Asian and American studies.
