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In the immediate aftermath of the Korean War, African American soldiers’ families became a significant pool of adoptive families for Korean black children. Although child welfare officials had considered military families less than ideal adopters, black soldiers’ families enjoyed economic and social benefits that set them apart from many African American non-military families interested in adopting. A soldier’s affiliation with the military allowed some to conform to the gender conventions that appealed to child welfare officials. While a military salary could be meager, soldiers’ access to benefits like base housing and the Post Exchange made it possible for some to function as primary breadwinners and their wives to devote themselves to caregiving. Child welfare officials with organizations including International Social Service devised efforts to increase adoptions of Korean black children by African American soldiers’ families, and especially the families stationed in Japan. These efforts evolved as US military and political officials, Korean political officials, and representatives of sectarian and nonsectarian aid agencies, attempted to devise strategies to care for Korea’s mixed-race children.

Many of the African American non-military families that adopted Korean black children did not conform to the gender and race conventions that child welfare officials desired in adoptive families. Often, these families included wives that worked, and would continue to work, outside of their homes even after they adopted a Korean black child. A number of these adoptive families were also interracial couples or they lived in interracial neighborhoods. Adoptive families that included interracial couples and working wives forced some social workers and child welfare officials to reframe these family patterns as ideal for Korean black children. The reforms that some social workers made to increase adoptions of Korean black children by African American and interracial couples also informed their responses to the small number of white families that adopted Korean black children. Agencies affiliated with International Social Service frequently emphasized the international political implications of Korean transnational adoptions because they understood transracial and transnational adoptions to be liberal and antiracist endeavors. However, many of the African American and interracial families that pursued transnational adoptions did not base their adoptions on political motives. Instead, they imagined a kinship with Korean black children because of the racism the encountered in Korea.

This chapter focuses upon US aid efforts spearheaded by nongovernmental agencies in wartime and postwar Korea. It examines the work of the Christian Children’s Fund, the American-Korean Foundation (AKF), and World Vision, among others. The chapter pays special attention to the AKF-sponsored Korean Children’s Choir, which toured fifty American cities in 1954 to raise over $10 million for postwar recovery. While images of war waifs in US media helped Americans imagine Korea in the context of rescue and the choir furthered these scripts, the choristers also helped to reframe Korean children as anti-communists with radical democratizing potential. The singing choristers promoted healing and understanding between Korea and the United States on the heels of the war, and, perhaps inadvertently, helped American audiences who witnessed the performances imagine what it might be like to have Korean children in the United States permanently.

This chapter complicates popular visions of the model Korean adoptee. It begins by examining how the Immigration and Naturalization Service monitored which Korean children were fit for entry, and sought to assure that they would not become charges of the state once they arrived. Hiring the International Social Service to manage the placement of Korean children, the INS transferred its responsibility to adoptive parents, a move that laid bare the interconnectedness of state and private entities. The chapter also shows how Harry Holt found ways to circumvent the red tape. His crusade to bring Korean GI babies to the United States necessitated their racial management, since existing domestic adoption policies precluded the crossing of black-white lines. What resulted ranged from state agencies denying African American couples’ adoption applications to South Korean prejudice against mixed-race children, particularly those “mixed with black.” The chapter closes with a look at the model construction of full-Korean adoptees in popular media as a way to reveal how making Korean children Christian, well-behaved, and assimilable was not happenstance, but rather a transnational process that began in US-administered orphanages in South Korea and was later overseen in the United States.

This chapter explores how adult children of Korean immigrants view their cultural identity and practice cultural traditions while also reclaiming and re-making their culture and interpreting it in new ways that provide meaning in their Korean American contexts. Focusing on the work of women in continuing and remaking Korean culture, the chapter considers the Korean American children's experiences of familiarity with cultural rituals and their meanings as well as degrees of identification and attachment to their cultural heritage. It also sheds light on the immigrant children's journey towards a formation of cultural and ethnic identity beyond the pivotal college years. Although the cultural experiences of reclaiming and remaking what is Korean vary, the chapter shows that Korean American children have strong desire to retain the value of respect towards elders and to care for their immigrant parents in old age.

Drawing on Holt Adoption Program newsletters, along with administrative files and letters from other adoption agencies from the 1950s and 1960s, this chapter argues that the orphanage became a site of Foucauldian discipline that worked to normalize Korean children in order to make them adoptable through techniques of normalization and Americanization. During the postwar period, orphanages shifted from a site of militarization into “processing stations for children being adopted by foreign families,” as efforts to recruit prospective adoptive parents abroad became prioritized. It is in the processing stations of the orphanage that the subject formation of the adoptee is forged.

This chapter argues that taking care of South Korea’s children during and immediately after the Korean War strengthened neocolonial relations between the United States and South Korea. Soldiers participated in projects such as constructing and financing orphanages, and rescuing Korean children in an attempt to repair the eroding image of the United States as an anti-imperialist force. These acts of militarized humanitarianism not only militarized South Korea’s social welfare system but also fortified American neocolonial power by enabling U.S. military occupation in South Korea to persist under the guise of humanitarian relief and rescue.

This chapter explores how power and privilege based on race, gender, economics, and disability shape the narrative of what is in the “best interest of the child” in the intimate sphere of family making through transracial adoption. The author, JaeRan Kim, provides an overview of the history of transracial and transnational adoption that includes programs such as the orphan trains, Indian boarding schools, and adoption through foster care and their impact on immigrant, Indigenous, Black, and transnational children. Various ways that communities of color resisted the racism inherent in foster care and adoption systems in each historical era are also discussed. After examining ways transracial adoptees navigate and negotiate their identities when their right to know and belong to their racial and ethnic communities is weighed against adoptive parents’ desires to adopt across racial and ethnic lines, Kim offers a framework of transracial adoption justice that centers race, power, and the experiences and needs of transracial adoptees.