Korean Quarterly book review

The First Amerasians: Mixed Race Koreans from Camptowns to America ~ By Yuri W. Doolan

(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2024, ISBN #978-0-1975-2329-7)

Review by Alice Stephens (Summer 2024)

Though Americans first left behind their mixed race offspring in countries such as the Philippines and Japan, according to Yuri W. Doolan’s groundbreaking study, The First Amerasians: Mixed Race Koreans from Camptowns to America, it was not until the U.S. involvement in Korea that the demographic earned a designation: Amerasian. Doolan reports the term was popularized by Pearl S. Buck, who advocated for the removal of Amerasian children from their countries of birth (and their mothers) to be raised in America. Buck was but one of several Americans who saw adoption of mixed race Koreans by American families as a moral, and often a religious, imperative.

Born in Korea in 1967 to a Korean woman and an American soldier, I was adopted into an American family through Pearl S. Buck’s Welcome House agency. I grew up familiar with the term Amerasian. And yet, in America, I was seen as Asian first, American second, if I was seen as American at all.

Doolan argues that the Amerasian is “a Cold War construct” created to disseminate “a master narrative [that] the U.S. government was not motivated by imperialistic ambition but embarked on a global crusade to spread democracy and freedom to all those willing to take it.” In the fight against communism, “mixed race Asians were transformed from bastard children of little significance into Amerasians worthy of rescue.”

An assistant professor of history and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and the child of a Korean woman and an American soldier, Doolan traces the origins of the concept of the term “Amerasian” to 1945, when Americans first arrived in Korea after decades of brutal Japanese occupation.

Settling into the Japanese Imperial Army’s facilities, the U.S. military filled in the footprint left by the Japanese, which included “a well-established system of regulated prostitution, developed by the Japanese during the colonial era.” Circular No. 9, issued by military leadership on January 25, 1947, instructed troops to refrain from romantic relationships with the local women and to only mingle with them “through the lowest form of prostitution.” Thus, the author maintains, the military established a template for interactions with Korean women that reverberates today, resulting in sexual exploitation, family separation, and the development of a robust intercountry adoption system that soon spread to Vietnam and beyond.

As the American military presence in Korea grew, so did the prevalence of sexually-transmitted diseases in the population local to military bases. The solution was to introduce rigorous, invasive monthly “health checks” for women who worked in the camptowns, confining them for treatment if they were found to have venereal disease.

The Korean War brought a huge influx of soldiers. Because an armistice was never signed, America maintains a large military presence in South Korea to this day, the heavily-militarized boundary between the two Koreas the frontline between communist and capitalist ideologies.

In the camptowns, prostitution was allowed to flourish. “In the 1950s, the camptown military sex industry would continue to grow alongside the establishment of semi-permanent military installations, transforming from large populations of camp followers servicing troops out of tents and cardboard houses in shantytowns into small cities complete with commercial entertainment districts catering to a stable troop presence.”

My adoption papers state that my mother was married to a school teacher, but ran away from him due to his ill treatment. The social worker noted, “Accordingly she began to associate with American soldiers.” 

Anti-Asian immigration policies made marriage between an American citizen and a Korean almost impossible. Additionally, marriages had to be approved by the U.S. military, and many soldiers were denied permission by their superiors, who had the power to transfer soldiers away from their Korean fiancées and wives.

My mother and father were in a 13-month “common law” marriage. I believe he would have brought her, and me, back to America but history, which brought them together, also conspired to keep them apart.

Inevitably, children were born of liaisons between American military personnel and South Korean women. As one of those children, I have been told, and in turn have asserted, that South Korea had no place for mixed race citizens. Without a Korean father, we mixed race children were excluded from family registries, and therefore ineligible for South Korean government services. Socially, we were targeted for discrimination and abuse.

However, Doolan contends that mixed race children were largely tolerated, with growing acceptance of them by the general population, before American evangelicals and aid workers intervened. He cites International Social Service case records that observe changing attitudes toward mixed race children, with some caseworkers claiming that there was no observable discrimination against them. As they became more common in towns and cities close to army bases, people accepted them and their mothers were less willing to relinquish them.

This was counter to the narrative that was being employed by adoption professionals working for agencies like Holt Adoption Program and Welcome House that were marketing mixed race Korean children as the abandoned offspring of lowly prostitutes who faced a life of exclusion and misery unless they were saved by adoption. Indeed, my own adoption papers say, “Recognizing her difficulty in providing care for the baby because of her limited financial situation and the baby’s different coloring and appearance, she has decided to release her baby for adoption abroad.”

In order to facilitate American adoptions, evangelical Harry Holt established a method “whereby the prospective parents signed a power of attorney that allowed for a proxy in South Korea to complete the adoption on their behalf.” Without having to leave the comfort of their own country, adoptive parents could obtain a Korean child. This method also meant “Holt parents had bypassed the lengthy background checks, home studies, and mandatory period of adjustment whereby the emotional and physical needs of adoptive children were carefully observed in their new homes before social welfare professionals made a legal recommendation for adoption.”

When my mother relinquished me at approximately two weeks, I became the ward of Paik Kun Chil, the director of Korea Social Service, Inc. (KSS), which then authorized Welcome House to arrange for my adoption and immigration. KSS was not involved in investigating my adoptive parents. Though my parents had to fill out reams of paperwork, they do not recall being visited by a social worker. By the time I left Korea at nine months old, I had had a mother, a foster mother, and a legal guardian. My mother visited me during the eight months I languished in foster care.

According to Doolan’s research, the stark choice that Harry Holt presented to the American public was to leave these mixed race orphans to starve and die in a backwards, barbaric nation, or welcome them into Christian homes. He states that Pearl Buck framed Korean adoption in even more urgent terms, as a propaganda triumph against communist nations. The American public, alerted to their patriotic, Christian and humanitarian duty, responded with unanticipated enthusiasm, creating a demand for adoptable mixed race babies that eventually encompassed all foreign “orphans” in need. This fervor and the lack of proper screening, the author contends, resulted in many children being placed into inappropriate homes.

My own parents were motivated to adopt due to concern about overpopulation. Moved by the plight of unwanted mixed race Korean children, they decided to adopt through Welcome House. Though we were matched in October 1967, it was six months before I left Korea. During that wait, disturbed by a February 6, 1968, New York Times article, A Legacy of the Korean War: Outcast Children, my parents sent a desperate plea to Welcome House “to speed the issuance of visas to all of the children, including our own, who have their applications approved.”

As Americans clamored to adopt mixed race Koreans, Doolan reveals that American entities undermined South Korea’s effort to integrate mixed race Koreans into its public school system through a program called Eurasian Children Living as Indigenous Residents (ECLAIR). Recognizing that many mothers gave up their children because they were ineligible for education, ECLAIR gained admittance for mixed race children in schools and helped with fees and other incidentals.

But due to the narrative of marginalization and abuse that adoption agencies had successfully used to encourage Americans to adopt, it was in their interests to perpetuate the segregation of mixed race Korean children. The author lays the failure of ECLAIR on Pearl S. Buck and her foundation, which was raking in donations for their work with Korean mixed-race children.

In 1965, enough money had been raised to open an office in South Korea. “In doing so, they had set their program up in direct competition with ‘three established social agencies’ already concentrated ‘on helping mothers of racially mixed children.’” The foundation lured these mothers away from Korean programs with monthly payments of $25. “Ultimately, the foundation’s activities upended the progressively successful integration and rehabilitation work of local organizations.” Subsequently, the Korean government defunded ECLAIR because the Pearl S. Buck Foundation ran a similar program.

Through an exploration of the Amerasian adoption experience, the author exposes “the various ways mixed race Koreans became American and how adoptive parents — bolstered by the institutional power of professional social work and the ideological power of U.S. empire — furthered the problematic work of humanitarians, the military, government officials, and other adoption advocates in the making of the Amerasian.”

The first Amerasian adoptees immigrated to a country still under anti-Asian immigration and Jim Crow segregation laws. Many were placed in families who had no experience with Korean culture or Asian people; some prospective parents even expressed a desire to have their adopted children undergo plastic surgery to make them look less Asian. Parents were urged to practice “complete and total assimilation,” and adoptees who could remember were urged to forget the past.

The racism that these mixed race children were supposed to have escaped in South Korea also occurred in America, with adoptees reporting incidents of assault, taunting, and sanctioned discrimination. Some entered emotionally and physically abusive households, especially those adopted by proxy. Doolan cites the testimony of one adoptee who “ran away from home, ‘slept under bushes,’ and ‘ate out of garbage cans’ just as Americans alleged mixed race children did in South Korea.” The author states that adoptees were told their mothers were prostitutes and were hypersexualized by adoptive family members in ways that manifested from sexual abuse to an extreme preoccupation with the adoptee’s chasteness.

I grew up in isolation from other Asians. I was never taught about Korea and had little knowledge of my birthland, even as I explored Chinese and Japanese culture. I always felt safe with my family, but on the street I was relentlessly cat-called and harassed as American men felt free to project their sexual fantasies on my Asian body. When people asked me about my adoption, I said it probably saved me from prostitution.

When America withdrew from Vietnam in spring 1975, the Korean Amerasian story regained urgency, and was used to promote the rescue of Amerasians left behind in Vietnam, recasting Americans as saviors after a humiliating defeat. The author writes: “Saving the Amerasian was framed in congressional testimony as a Cold War imperative and a matter of American prestige.” Congress passed the Amerasian Immigration Act of 1982, granting entrance to America for certain Amerasians — excluding those born in Japan, the Philippines, and Thailand — as long as they were sponsored by a U.S. citizen and born before October 22, 1982.

The act “marked the first time that the federal government named and legally defined any of the nation’s mixed race populations born from its many military incursions across the globe.” A subsequent act and later extensions have allowed approximately 100,000 Amerasians and extended family members to enter the U.S. by 2002.

I was one of only 317 mixed race Koreans adopted out of the country in 1968. As a percentage of humanity, the Amerasian demographic is miniscule, but we hold enormous significance as living examples of the complexities of American empire, abandoned by our American fathers only to be adopted to America (Amerasians were also adopted to other Global North countries) as foreign orphans, propagandized by evangelicals, humanitarians, and politicians.

I very much value and appreciate Doolan’s scholarship on the damaging role played by American adoption agencies such as Holt and the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, but I am skeptical of the assertion that South Korea could have integrated mixed race children into a welcoming society if not for the meddling of those organizations.

Should South Korea get credit for that small attempt represented by ECLAIR before going full throttle on exporting babies well beyond the Amerasian population? From my standpoint as a mixed race adoptee searching for my mother and experiencing seemingly insurmountable obstacles due to draconian privacy laws, I say no. South Korea under a military dictatorship (overseas adoption flourishes under authoritarian governments) found it convenient and profitable to send its unwanted Amerasian citizens away, which worked so well that the adoption program quickly expanded to Korean nationals born of two Korean parents. Doolan’s excellent scholarship does not change my mind about Korea’s culpability in the ethnic cleansing of its mixed race children and systematization of a rapacious solution to an inadequate national welfare system.

Nonetheless, The First Amerasians is an eye-opening investigation into the conversion of the Amerasian from an empire’s shameful by-product to proof of the open-hearted benevolence of American democracy and Christian charity. Doolan painstakingly exposes the rotten foundation of the narrative of American saviorism, as thousands of children deserted by their American fathers were then irrevocably separated from their Korean mothers in order to complete American families.

According to the limit set by the Amerasian Immigration Act, the Amerasian demographic ends with those born in 1982. Doolan closes by describing the mixed race adoptee community today, emerging from the shadow of an imposed identity to define our own place in history. The First Amerasians is an essential resource for understanding the heavy burden of empire that mixed race Korean adoptees have had to bear, and the power we have to reshape our own narrative.