Adopted Territory
Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging
BookPages: 344Illustrations: 15 photographs, 4 tablesPublished: November 2010
Author: Eleana J. Kim
Subjects
Anthropology > Cultural Anthropology, Asian Studies > East Asia, Asian American Studies
Since the end of the Korean War, an estimated 200,000 children from South Korea have been adopted into white families in North America, Europe, and Australia. While these transnational adoptions were initiated as an emergency measure to find homes for mixed-race children born in the aftermath of the war, the practice grew exponentially from the 1960s through the 1980s. At the height of South Korea’s “economic miracle,” adoption became an institutionalized way of dealing with poor and illegitimate children. Most of the adoptees were raised with little exposure to Koreans or other Korean adoptees, but as adults, through global flows of communication, media, and travel, they have come into increasing contact with each other, Korean culture, and the South Korean state. Since the 1990s, as Korean children have continued to leave to be adopted in the West, a growing number of adult adoptees have been returning to Korea to seek their cultural and biological origins. In this fascinating ethnography, Eleana J. Kim examines the history of Korean adoption, the emergence of a distinctive adoptee collective identity, and adoptee returns to Korea in relation to South Korean modernity and globalization. Kim draws on interviews with adult adoptees, social workers, NGO volunteers, adoptee activists, scholars, and journalists in the U.S., Europe, and South Korea, as well as on observations at international adoptee conferences, regional organization meetings, and government-sponsored motherland tours.View More
Praise
“By examining the dynamic history and relations among the concerned state actors, international and domestic adoption agencies, adoptee advocacy groups, and individual adoptees and their self-governance groups, Kim expands existing scholarship within Korean studies on the geopolitics of intimacy . . . and neoliberal and developmentalist modernity. . . . Adopted Territory may be of particular interest to scholars in the fields of Korean studies, Asian and Asian American studies, and anthropology.” — EuyRyung Jun, Journal of Asian Studies
“Students and scholars of social and cultural anthropology, transnational identity and Korean and Asian American Studies will find Dr. Kim’s ethnography particularly informative. . . . Adopted Territory cogently argues the transformative potential of adoptee discourses on the inaccurate representations of adoptees as orphans and children, and the ideal family as a nuclear unit, and on challenging the state in social welfare provision. At the very least, for readers, it will re-shape conceptualizations of Korean identity and belonging.” — Ann H. Kim, Ethnic and Racial Studies
“This scholarly study is of importance well beyond the Korean context.” — Shurlee Swain, Asian Studies Review
“Adopted Territory is truly a groundbreaking publication. It not only contributes to the new fields of Korean adoption studies, adoption cultural studies and critical adoption studies that have emerged lately, but also to the unfortunately still too territorialized fields of Asian studies and Korean studies, which still need to become transnationalized and not just include diasporic Asians and Koreans on the research agenda, but also embrace such previously discarded, forgotten and ‘non-authentic’ subjects as adoptees living in Western countries.” — Tobias Hübinette, Pacific Affairs
“Adopted Territory, Eleana Kim’s powerful and innovative book about Korean transnational adoption, brings both intellectual rigor and a fresh approach to the study of adoptive kinship.” — Barbara Yngvesson, American Ethnologist
“Eleana Kim’s is a rare book: a remarkable history unfolded before her ethnographic eyes. . . . Adopted Territory should enjoy the scholarly attention of those with interests n kinship, family, globalization, and nationalism. . . . I am confident that readers will stand convinced that it tells a very large story about our times and cultural predicaments. I look forward to teaching it in courses on the anthropology of the family, Asian America, and the contemporary Koreas.” — Nancy Abelmann, Anthropological Quarterly
“The many strengths of Adopted Territory are solidified by Kim’s lucid and stylishly crafted prose. One is propelled through the book by a beautiful balance of detailed empirical accounts and judicious use of cultural theory. . . . Kim’s work is an altogether new treatment of a number of themes known to transnational adoption scholars, defamiliarizing territory we thought we knew. At the same time, it will familiarize scholars from a number of other fields with the importance of adoptees’ stories and histories to transnational counterpublics.” — Sara Dorow, Contemporary Sociology
“The reviewer, the father of two adopted Korean–British sons, found this work to be rich in its many observations and comments, its anecdotes and personal stories. . . . [A] worthwhile read for anyone with an interest in the social history of contemporary East Asia, transnational adoption, and North American–European social issues.”
— James H. Grayson, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
“Adopted Territory is a tour de force, masterfully traversing a complex transnational terrain that is at once overtly public involving multiple vested interests and competing agendas, and intensely personal and emotive.” — Jessica Walton, Anthropological Forum
“Adopted Territory is the best and most thorough treatment of transnational adoption that I have seen. Eleana J. Kim provides sophisticated analyses of Korean overseas adoption to the United States, and South Korean history and state politics, within the contexts of cold war geopolitics and the rise of the American empire, while also attending to issues of nation, race, citizenship, gender, social class, and culture. The breadth, depth, and scope of Kim’s analyses contribute importantly to our understanding of the people and the phenomenon. Her well-contextualized and sensitive discussions of adoptee subjectivities are of particular interest.” — Elaine H. Kim, University of California, Berkeley
“This truly remarkable ethnography chronicles the birth and first generation of the global Korean adoptee movement. Adopted Territory brilliantly asserts that the movement is born of a powerful historical conjuncture among: the U.S.’s millennial culture of multiculturalism; South Korea’s aggressive globalization regimes and emergent democratic civil society; and adoptees coming of age. Adopted Territory offers also a sophisticated study of family, kinship, and nation through the challenging lens of adoption which Eleana J. Kim declares a veritable ‘catalyst for social transformation.’ A beautifully crafted multi-sited ethnography, Adopted Territory will no doubt enjoy a vibrant intellectual life.” — Nancy Abelmann, author of The Intimate University: Korean American Students and the Problems of Segregation
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Author/Editor BiosBack to Top
Eleana J. Kim is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Notes on Transliteration, Terminology, and Pseudonyms xiii
Abbreviations xvii
Introduction: Understanding Transnational Korean Adoption 1
Part I
1. "Waifs" and "Orphans": The Origins of Korean Adoption 43
2. Adoptee Kinship 83
3. Adoptee Cultural Citizenship 101
4. Public Intimacies and Private Politics 133
Part II
5. Our Adoptee, Our Alien: Adoptees as Specters of Family and Foreignness in Global Korea 171
6. Made in Korea: Adopted Koreans and Native Koreans in the Motherland 211
7. Beyond Good and Evil: The Moral Economies of Children and Their Best Interests in a Global Age 249
Notes 269
Works Cited 291
Index 311
RightsBack to Top
Sales/Territorial Rights: World
Rights and licensing
AwardsBack to Top
Winner, 2012 James B. Palais Book Prize in Korean Studies, Northeast Asia Council, Association of Asian Studies
Winner, 2012 Social Sciences Book Award, Association of Asian American Studies
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Top reviews from the United States
Shaleen
4.0 out of 5 stars Not Kindle Friendly- An App Issue
Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2018
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Eleana Kim's work is worth reading and I definitely recommend it to all. However, amazon needs to work on their Kindle Application, it is completely and utterly useless. I cannot see the page numbers and it is so glitchy
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Etienne RP
4.0 out of 5 stars From War Orphans to First World Citizen
Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2013
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Recently Fleur Pellerin, a junior Cabinet member of the French government led by president François Hollande, made her first visit to Korea. To the French, she is known as an elite public servant-turned-politician and put in charge of the digital economy and entrepreneurship portfolio, and also as the only minister with an Asian face. In Korea she is known as "one of us" or a "blood relative", and during her business trip to Seoul she was welcomed as if she was the homecoming queen. She had a chat with president Park Geun-hye, and featured in many television shows and media articles. Her first name, Fleur ("flower"), led to a crazed "Fleur-mania", and her Korean name, Kim Jong-suk, was also made public.
Like about 12 000 French citizen and 160 000 persons worldwide, Fleur Pellerin is a Korean adoptee. She left Korea when she was six months old, never met her biological parents again, and knows next to nothing about her birth country. For Koreans, she is the poor immigrant who made it abroad, and on top of that in a country known for its high culture and glamour - the conclusion of Korean TV dramas usually has the heartbroken heroin go to France to "refashion herself". But she also reminds Koreans of darker times, and of a phenomenon of transnational adoption that many feel awkward about. Not so long ago, the nation's pride in hosting the 1988 Summer Olympics was bruised by reports in the American press asserting that children constituted Korea's "largest export". Reaching out to adopted Koreans abroad, incorporating them in the community of overseas Koreans, and heralding their success was therefore a way for the Korean public to turn a sore spot into a matter of pride and celebration.
As Elena Kim reminds her readers in her ethnography of adopted Korean communities, Korean adoptees came to the West in distinct waves. First came the war orphans and mixed-blood children of US soldiers and Korean women. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, American and West European families adopted the offsprings of single mothers or poor households who were convinced to relinquish their newborn baby in exchange of a hefty sum. Today, nearly all the children adopted overseas are infants born to unwed mothers in their late teens and early twenties. Meanwhile, the Koreans adopted in the past decades have become adults in their country of adoption, and today form a global community composed of subsets of regional and online groups with distinct histories and concerns. Internet and globalization have brought them together, and many are claiming voice and agency as a particular public with shared experience and common bonds.
The propinquity of money and children in transnational adoption and the attendant suspicion of human trafficking have made Korea's overseas adoption program a target of criticism throughout its history. It has been argued that orphanages (which were largely funded by Western relief organizations), and, later, state-subsidized adoption agencies, functioned as a surrogate welfare system and a conduit for foreign exchange. It has been further advanced that Korea's international adoption system not only retarded the development of domestic adoption and child welfare policies, but also provided a quick-fix solution that has been complicit in the social disenfranchisement of Korean women. Today South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world, with fast increasing numbers of abortion and divorce. The "problem" of adoption (ibyang munje) has become a matter of public debate in which adult Korean adoptees and Korean birth mothers of an earlier period increasingly have a say.
What is unique about Korea's adoption program? First, conventional wisdom in South Korea and in the Western countries to which adoptees are sent blames the persistence of Confucian family values and preoccupations with patrilineal bloodlines for the reluctance among Koreans to adopt "their children". This is changing fast, with placement agencies now under the obligation to encourage domestic adoption first and famous media figures making a public gesture of adopting their own children. Second, the Korean state has so far failed to promote extended models of family arrangements, provide adequate financial support for single mothers, or tackle the problem of inadequate sex education. Adult adoptees such as Fleur Pellerin and lesser-known figures could help challenge dominant representations and policy outcomes, especially when they come from Europe, where the social security system is well developed and recomposed families are almost becoming the norm. Third, the long shadow of stigma associated with unwed motherhood in Korea is slowly eroding as Korean society enters a phase of globalized modernity.
But the most distinctive feature of Korea's adoption program is that it came first, and therefore became the template for subsequent programs. Korean adoptees represented a "social experiment", the outcomes of which were subject to intense scrutiny and debate since the practice began in the mid-1950s. Korean adoptions, determined to be largely successful by social workers and academic experts, expanded dramatically in the 1970s and paved the way for subsequent waves of adoptions of children from the developing world into white Western homes. By the 1970s, largely due to the success of the Korean model, transnational adoption became an institutionalized social welfare practice into many nations and a naturalized "choice" for individuals in the United States or in Europe. As Elena Kim notes, the adoption model is built upon the archetypal figure of the orphan who is construed as the ultimate figure of global humanitarianism, permitting Americans in particular to "save" children who are themselves often victims of American foreign policy decisions.
Not all adoptees were raised in wealthy, happy families with caring surrogate parents. Some experienced hardships and rejection by siblings and relatives; a significant number faced racism and bigotry at school or in their community; and most of them had to cope with the awkward feeling of being "yellow outside, white inside". Adoption is based on separation, and the traumatic scene of abandonment sometimes lingers. According to adoption specialists, loss and grief are inescapable aspects of the adoption experience for all members involved in an adoption. Adoptees and their relatives construct "what if" scenarios and "phantom lives" of what they would have become if they had stayed in Korea. Some adopted Koreans dream of a more authentic self in their birth country, while foster parents or agency workers sometimes construct cautionary tales about girls being forced into prostitution or reduced to a dehumanized treatment. For the most politically oriented adoptees, crafting a germane public discourse for discussing the politics of adoption is a difficult process. Typically, the adoptee can only feel gratitude and indebtedness for having been given "life" and "opportunity" through inclusion in the bourgeois nuclear family, and more complex feelings of ambivalence, mourning, or resentment are suppressed, condemned as ungrateful, or pathologized.
Faced with the taboos and emotionally charged issues that adoption raises, some adoptees simply choose to ignore their roots and go on with their lives. Others, increasingly, go on a quest for origins to discover the country of their birth and, for some of them, to try to meet with their biological parents. Since 2012, adopted Koreans can choose for double citizenship, or they can apply for a visa that allows them to live and work in Korea. But language and, sometimes, prejudices, remain a problem and put a barrier between them and the rest of the population. A social event known as The Gathering allows them to get together and share experience. Meeting other adoptees can feel like rediscovering one's lost tribe: "None of us had real peer groups growing up," notes one adoptee. "When we found each other, it was an electric thing." Self-exploration through shared storytelling is central to adoptee social practices and can be seen as a performative negotiation of self and world. The misadjustment or lack of fit with dominant national, ethnic, and cultural models forms the basis for creating a space where, as more than one adoptee has stated, "there's less explaining to do".
Adopted Territories is a work of cultural anthropology that comes loaded with theoretical concepts and abstract discussions. For Elena Kim, drawing on social theorists such as Judith Butler and Aihwa Ong, adoption blurs and unsettles the categories of race, nation, and family. Not unlike the forms of gay and lesbian kinship identified by queer theory, adoptees' experiences with nonnormative family forms lay the ground for alternative forms of personhood and kinship, contributing to the production of a shared global imaginary that has taken on transnational dimensions. "Adoptee kinship" is defined as "a form of solidarity based upon radical contingency rather than biologically rooted certitudes". From this perspective, kinship is not a preexisting truth that is discovered or found, but rather a set of relationships actively created out of social practice and cultural representation. It is a model of kinship that is not exclusive but additive, transnational, and expansive. "Public intimacy", another oxymoron, designates the potential sites of identification and association that extend beyond the biological family, thereby producing new kinds of identities and intimate relations.
The notion of "counterpublic", a term coined by Nancy Fraser in her critique of Habermas' model of the public sphere, "highlights the fact that the adoptee social imaginary exists in diacritical relation to dominant publics - whether in the United States, Europe, South Korea, or an increasingly transnational public sphere." The adoptee counterpublic is organized around a discursive process of identity construction in which adoptees endeavor to define themselves as a group that is distinct from others yet exists in relation to the wider public. By coining the notion of "contingent essentialism", the author points to the fact that "adoptee identity is at once essentialized as something natural and also construed as something cultural and socially constructed." Contingent essentialism is distinct from the biologism or genetic essentialism that characterizes much of the public discourse about adoptees and their "real" origins, identities, or families. Elena Kim defines "adopted territories" as "networks of adoptees and their activities, situated in a range of virtual and actual locations, that comprise the transnational Korean adoptee counterpublic."
Borrowed from Judith Butler, the notion of "constitutive outside" points to the legal fiction of the orphan that leaves behind an excess of relationship, which "enchains" the child givers and recipients and "haunts" adoptee subjectivities. "Adoption not only makes children into orphans, but, over time, also produces missing persons," writes Elena Kim, who illustrates her writing with artworks from internationally adopted artists. The book cover, a community artwork conceived by artist and activist Leanne Leith, features numbered tags bearing travel certificates delivered by the Republic of Korea, each tag representing one South Korean gone missing through international adoption. Much as the abstract conceptualizations, the live testimonies of adoptees and art pictures displayed in the book illustrate the potent message of longing and belonging that addresses a constitutive dimension of our shared humanity. Korean adoptees or not, "we all negotiate contingencies of personhood out of insufficient and mutable categories of the biological and the social."
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Mike
5.0 out of 5 stars The definitive book
Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2015
Tremendous book providing the history and roots of transnational Korean adoption, and why it isn't so simple to stop it. It is easy to read (for an academic book) and is wonderfully personal.
My favorite part of this book, and something i have not found in any other book on this subject, is that it provides details on behind the scenes organizing of adoptees themselves - how they came together to create an international movement to change korea's policies from the inside. A fascinating look at one of the earliest uses of social media and shared identity to transcend national and cultural backgrounds for social change on a huge scale. Provides a full view of perspectives, including how even various adoptees think differently about these issues.
This book is the definitive review and integration of the multitude of challenges, emotions, politics, and sensitivities involved in Korean adoption. We are lucky to have someone invest their life's time and effort, and produce such a coherent and complete work.
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Clare Bonetree
5.0 out of 5 stars Readable intermingling of scholarship and personal stories. Read this ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 10, 2018
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Readable intermingling of scholarship and personal stories. Read this to try to understand the cultural and historical context of my little brother's extraordinary life, and found it fascinating.
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Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (review)
Article in Journal of Asian American Studies · January 2012
DOI: 10.1353/jaas.2012.0004
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Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (review)
Jiannbin Lee Shiao
Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 15, Number 1, February
2012, pp. 131-134 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/jaas.2012.0004
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jaas/summary/v015/15.1.shiao.html
Accessed 4 Jun 2013 21:22 ======
Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging, by Eleana J. Kim. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. Xviii + 321 pp. $23.95 paper. ISBN 978–0–8223–4695–1.
REVIEW ESSAY JAAS 15:1
Adopted Territory is a multisited ethnography of how a growing number of adult Korean adoptees have come to adopt each other as family and to project their perspectives into public debates about adoption across three continents. The author, Eleana Kim, tells a living history of breathtaking scope from the origins of “intercountry” adoption in World War II to the aftermath of the third “transnational” gathering of adult adoptees in Seoul, South Korea, in 2004. The incredible comprehensiveness of her research is matched by a restrained reflexivity that validates her ethnographic insights while successfully avoiding the pitfalls of advocacy, voyeurism, or narcissism. However, its comprehensiveness also raises more questions than can be answered without violating the author’s choices to “resist the taxonomic desire to catalogue adoptees” (19), “avoid sociological or psychological profiles” (86), and accommodate her activist subjects’ media strategy of refusing to attribute their political goals to personal histories.
The greatest strength of Adopted Territory is its scope of evidence. Kim spent six years, from 1999 through 2004, “trailing and tracking the adoptee community” (15), including eleven months of fieldwork in Seoul and seven months interviewing members of adult adoptee organizations in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and New York. Even as she recognizes how her exclusion from adoptee-only spaces limited her observations, she negotiated enviable access as a trusted volunteer for both adoptee- and government-run programs. Indeed, she recognizes that her immersion in the field was so deep that her activities helped to constitute the very network she was studying.
132 • JAAS • 15:1
Kim presents her study in three sections: an introductory chapter followed by two multichapter parts. The introduction begins with a revealing account of how legislative proposals in South Korea for reforming adoption have transnational repercussions, describes her methodology, and unpacks the book’s deep theoretical toolkit to frame the topic of transnational adoption within the literatures on stratified reproduction, Korean adoption history, the biopolitics of state power, and the influence of neoliberal modernization on family values.
In Part I, chapter 1 provides a thorough, binational history of Korean adoptions to the United States through an analysis of U.S. print media and South Korean state archives. This chapter contextualizes the popular attribution of these adoptions to the figure of Harry Holt by raising other essential elements: the dual role of U.S. servicemen as both the original abandoning fathers and the main supporters for early international charity, the entitlement expressed by certain American adoptive parents to remove children promised to them, the willingness of the South Korean government to fulfill those desires, and the resulting demand for Korean children that exhausted the supply of mixed-race war orphans by 1962, shifting overseas adoption to the full-Korean children of poor families and single mothers. The chapter effectively illustrates the de-politicizing sentiments that attach to orphaned children, the tragic irony of international adoption, and the incompleteness of spectacles that commemorate the humanitarianism motivating early adopters.
In chapters 2 and 3, Kim turns to her adoptee interviews to examine, respectively, the experiential basis for their sense of adoptee kinship and the historical formation of their organizational field. Critical to her analysis is her participant observation at adoptee-related events, where she could directly observe the formation of the adoptee “counterpublic.” Kim argues that adoptee kinship is based not only on shared childhood experiences with racial marginalization and ethnic essentialism but also on the lived understanding that it takes work for kinship, whether biological or adoptive, to feel natural. She also argues that the “mid-1990s revolution in home computing and the Internet was the key factor” (105) in scaling up adoptee kinship from local organizations assisted by Korean immigrants in Europe to a global network with a predictable seasonal calendar, annual leadership meetings, and a council of organizations that programs semiannual international “Gatherings.”
Chapter 4 provides an in-depth examination of the practice of adoptee kinship through an ethnography of the Gatherings, which have “emerged as the main forum for the collective production of Korean adoptee history and shared memory” (139). Kim observes that a core feature of these conferences has been
the adoptee-only workshop, which sorts adoptee attenders into discussion groups by birth year. Kim argues persuasively that these discussions have become “rites of passage for adoptees who, through talk and testimony, become initiated as adult adoptees” (151). She also argues that while the Gatherings are counterpublic alternatives to dominant assumptions about adoptees, they fall short as counterhegemonic projects that question the continuation of transnational adoption, an issue raised particularly by adoptees who have visited Korea.
Accordingly, Part II focuses on adoptee experiences in South Korea, using Kim’s interviews with both adopted and nonadopted Koreans. Chapter 5 examines adoptees’ experiences of “return” in the context of Korean attitudes about adoptees and societal changes associated with the state-sponsored economic globalization project. Kim insightfully characterizes the adoptees’ returns as effecting a disorienting sense of time-space compression that, if prolonged, replaces “fantasies of national or familial integration” (176) with an identification with South Korea, albeit through membership in an expatriate adoptee community. Crucial to the emergence of this community has been the South Korean government’s invitation to adult adoptees via motherland tours since the 1980s; the rise of an adoptee organization in Korea; the passage of the Overseas Koreans Act in 1999, which included adoptees among those eligible for privileged visa status; and the rising demand for English-language teachers. These factors counter the frequent experiences of adoptees with cultural censure, epitomized in their encounters with taxi drivers whom Kim identifies as “the unacknowledged legislators of Korean ethnic identity” (187).
Chapter 6 examines in further depth the wide-ranging, uneasy, yet necessary relations between adopted and native Koreans, this time in the context of South Korean democratization since 1993 and its associated expansion of civil society. These relations include, above all, the “powerfully emotional yet peculiarly impersonal” interactions between adoptees visiting an adoption agency to review their files and the agency social workers who control access to the files (219). Kim argues that adoptee advocacy nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have filled the gap between the needs of returnees and the services provided by state agencies. This role expresses the emergent culture of South Korean democratic citizenship that defines personhood through volunteerism but also includes adoptees as objects of civic paternalism into a hierarchy of valued overseas assets, arguably below international Korean CEOs but above Korean Mexicans.
More an epilogue than a conclusion, chapter 7 turns to the increasing visibility of Korean birth mothers in South Korean media to cast in relief the figure of the humanitarian orphan and how it continues to limit the voice of adult adoptees.
Unfortunately, this choice for a closing signals a weakness of the book: while there are many places in Kim’s study where she identifies the broader significance of a finding, these isolated moments are not synthesized into a coherent reconceptualization of what Korean adoptions (much less adoptee identities and adoptee returns to Korea) are cases of. Admittedly my preference might be grounded in a disciplinary bias for positivistic contributions to knowledge, but I believe the book would have been better served by a conclusion that revisited, and empirically integrated, the theoretical tools surveyed in its introduction.
Overall, Adopted Territory is an excellent contribution to Asian American studies, ethnic studies, Asian studies, and adoption studies, especially as a model for multisited social research on transnational relations and cultural production. Its style is well suited for course adoption in interdisciplinary, upper division, and graduate seminars. Its unique approach would complement more traditional accounts of transnational and transracial adoptions, social movements, racial/ ethnic identities, and online communications.
Jiannbin Lee Shiao
UniverSity of oregon
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