Korean adoptees and the long arc of Korean American belonging | By Mirae kh Rhee (Spring 2026)
Every year on January 13, the U.S. observes Korean American Day, a day that celebrates those from the Korean American community “who have made immeasurable contributions as small business owners, military service members, faith leaders, doctors, artists, and elected officials,” according to one webpage describing national holidays.
Officially established in 2005, Korean American Day commemorates the first arrival of Joseon citizens to the U.S. in 1903. Back then, there was one Korea; North and South Korea did not exist. Joseon was already weakened after Queen Min was assassinated. King Gojong attempted to maneuver between Russia and Japan, and an imperial dispute over the peninsula was underway. Japan’s victory over Russia soon sealed Korea’s fate. Joseon people survived by being flexible.
Like poor European migrants seeking the American Dream, Joseon immigrants were not diplomats or elites but peasants entering a racialized labor regime. Many sought better livelihoods through American missionary networks that operated within the broader framework of Japanese imperial expansion. The diplomatic alignment between the U.S. and Japan at the turn of the century remains a source of grievance in Korea, particularly President Theodore Roosevelt’s endorsement of Japanese control over the peninsula, negotiated alongside U.S. interests in the Philippines. Roosevelt would later receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
As I write about the migration history of my ancestors, I sit here in Germany as an immigrant whose existence is no longer defined by a single crossing. I write from Berlin, a city shaped by its own reckoning with state violence and ideological extremism, and I am aware of the privileged distance I enjoy.
The images of ICE targeting the immigrant communities in Minneapolis feels both surreal and unbearably familiar to me in a city that has memorialized the dead who were brutally persecuted and murdered for being different.
Across the U.S., communities are organizing volunteer patrols, food distribution networks, and mutual aid systems in response to heightened immigration enforcement. The fear is real. In Minneapolis and other cities like Chicago, Denver, Seattle, volunteers stand outside schools and courthouses, whistles in hand, watching for ICE officers and vehicles. Compassionate folks are delivering food to vulnerable families who must remain indoors, afraid to be seen. But it is not new. And it is not unique.
Conditional citizens
For some, this moment feels unprecedented. For others, including many Korean adoptees, the conditionality of belonging has always been a reality. Political theorist Claire Jean Kim has described Asian Americans as “conditional citizens,” people who may hold legal status yet remain symbolically outside the state because of narratives that cast them as perpetual foreigners. Many BIPoC adoptees experience this layered conditionality, accepted in some circles and questioned in others, because belonging in America or within an ethnic enclave diaspora is constantly interpreted rather than assumed.
With that in mind, what does it mean that the first large-scale Korean migration to the U.S. began under imperial pressure, facilitated by U.S. missionaries, and involved vulnerable rural laborers seeking survival? And what does it mean that decades later, another mass movement of Koreans across the Pacific was also organized through the same missionary networks and geopolitical alignment?
For over 70 years, 200,000 Korean “orphans” crossed borders with South Korean state encouragement, through foreign religious and humanitarian frameworks, that ultimately spoke for us and our families. Those of us who were forcibly relocated to the U.S. make up 10 percent of the Korean diaspora. In Korea historian/author Bruce Cumings’s glowing chapter America’s Koreans (in his historical account Korea’s Place in the Sun, the 2005 reprint) which frames the achievements of Korean Americans, adopted Korean Americans do not appear even as a footnote.
“We saved you. You are so lucky to be adopted to America!” That is the shortcut narrative Korean adoptees often hear.
Korean American belonging is forged not only through labor or migration, but also through what I describe as sentimental kinships: bonds that transformed geopolitical entanglement into intimate narratives of rescue and the idea that “every child deserves a loving (American) home.” These kinships complicate how adoptees are seen within Korean American history.
While many immigrants crossed the Pacific in search of work, education, or mobility, we arrived through a different apparatus. It cast us as dependents rather than migrants, not as children of immigrants raised within ethnic enclaves.
An uneasy alliance and the rescue narrative
Nigerian American writer, Teju Cole, once described a “White Savior Industrial Complex,” a system that “supports brutal projects in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.” He goes on to argue that certain rescue narratives offer emotional satisfaction without dismantling the structures that produce the suffering.
Transnational adoption operates within that terrain, where vulnerability and altruism are emotionally linked and hard to untangle. South Korean overseas adoption practices, often described as an “adoption industrial complex,” emerged from that same historical constellation, shaped by Cold War alliances, missionary networks, and a shared investment in rescue as moral narrative.
Korea became a central site through which the U.S. could consolidate its postwar identity as both military power and humanitarian guardian, with the cooperation of successive South Korean regimes.
The modern transnational adoption system was constructed in South Korea with the support of Americans, but was not about love or rescue. It relied on the unpaid labor and sacrifice of countless Korean mothers for political and moral optics. It was about transforming two nations at once, economically, morally, and symbolically. Our mothers, many of whom were separated from us under conditions that undermine the meaning of consent, were placed on a state-funded assembly line they never agreed to, producing what I have elsewhere described as “K-Orphans” that made the story work.
For decades, our bodies were quietly conscripted into a national project. We were framed as humanitarian success stories, exported to help rebuild postwar South Korea and to “complete” American families into something called multicultural. We were welcomed into a narrative that secured the U.S.’s moral high ground, even as we were deployed as instruments in the fight against communism.
Remembering adoptees in Korean American history
Korean American belonging is forged not only through labor or migration, but also through sentimental kinships: Bonds that transformed geopolitical entanglement into intimate narratives of rescue and the idea that “every child deserves a loving (American) home.” These kinships complicate how adoptees are seen within Korean American history. While many immigrants crossed the Pacific in search of work, education, or mobility, we arrived through a different apparatus. It cast us as dependents rather than migrants, not as children of immigrants raised within ethnic enclaves.
We arrived as symbols: Of alliance, of rescue, of Cold War benevolence. That difference in origin continues to structure our (mis)recognition, rendering it ambiguous and shadowed by shame.
For some first-, 1.5-, and second-generation Korean Americans, the founding narrative centers migration, sacrifice, and community-building under prejudice. The presence of adoptees introduces an uncomfortable truth: That U.S. imperialism and South Korea’s complicity are also embedded in Korean American formation.
However, Korean adoptees belong in this history too. But not as footnotes. Not as grateful orphans. Over the past 70 years, we have become generations of Korean Americans shaped by forced family separation, systemic silence, and extraordinary resilience. We are the forgotten 0.5 generation, who migrated without our Korean families to be given to strangers in a foreign land.
When adoptees began warning that immigration enforcement could affect those of us without secure citizenship status, the response was often disbelief. Adoption, it was assumed, had erased vulnerability. For many raised in white families, proximity to whiteness has long been equated with protection and belonging. But that proximity has always been conditional. Legal status can be questioned. Citizenship can be scrutinized.
Opacity and the Politics of Recognition
And other international adoptees have found themselves subject to the authority of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), even when presenting documentation of legal status and citizenship. Korean American adoptees are still waiting to be fully acknowledged as belonging somewhere. We arrived in the U.S. classified as war refugees and later as “orphans.”
Recent findings by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission have documented systemic irregularities in overseas adoption practices, including falsified records and cases in which parental consent was misrepresented or absent. For many of us, the paperwork that defined our identities was not merely incomplete, but structurally compromised.
In 2010, under the Obama administration, I was detained for hours in a DHS office inside U.S. Customs and Border Protection at JFK Airport in New York. Officials did not believe the passport belonged to me: An East Asian face paired with a Western name. I had gained some weight, and my face was rounder than in the photograph taken a decade earlier.
When they insisted on calling my adoptive parents to confirm my story, I felt reduced, as though my citizenship were provisional. I was no longer an independent adult voicing my own story but a humanitarian gesture expected to perform gratitude, subjected to insistent questions about my identity and entitled demands for transparency.
Political philosopher Édouard Glissant described the “right to opacity” as the refusal of such demands. In colonial systems of power, people are required to make themselves fully legible, to explain and categorize themselves in order to be accepted as legitimate. Opacity asserts a different principle: individuals and cultures do not owe complete transparency in order to exist and be recognized.
But in America, recognition often depends on whether our bodies tell a story that comforts those in power.
Editor’s note: A version of this essay with full citations and references is available at the following Substack link.
