| Between 1950 and 1965, an estimated 2000 Korean children, 3500 mixed-race "GI babies," and 7700 military brides entered the United States as the sons, daughters and wives of predominantly white, middle-class families. 2 Together, they signaled the corporeal return of U.S. neocolonial endeavors in South Korea stateside, and embodied the possibilities and limits of Cold War liberalism. Through analysis of U.S. and South Korean government records, archival documents, mainstream and minority press, and interviews with Korean wartime orphanage employees, this dissertation focuses on the living legacies of a "forgotten war." It traces the roots and routes of Korean and mixed-race adoptee and war bride immigration that were intimately shaped by ordinary Americans at work in South Korea between 1950 and 1965, and the complex political, social, and legal effects that this gendered and raced immigrant group had upon both countries.;This dissertation argues that the U.S. servicemen, missionaries, social workers, and voluntary aid workers, the latter three that flooded South Korea to spearhead the postwar recovery campaign, advocated for the legal and binding formation of mixed Korean/American families and brought empire home. Ironically, by adhering to its government's cultural policy of integration intended to bolster U.S. expansionist and Cold War efforts, enthusiastic internationalist citizens tethered Americans at home to South Koreans in sentimental, material, and, eventually, familial ways that unraveled the government's ability to contain its neocolonial objectives "over there." Thus, by being American, U.S. citizens profoundly affected both sides of the Pacific---they forever changed the lives of thousands of Korean women and children, permanently shaped South Korea's child welfare system, and unexpectedly forced openings in U.S. national and familial borders subsequently challenging Americans at home to broaden their conceptions of race, kinship, gender, sexuality, and national belonging during the tumultuous Cold War/civil rights era.;1I borrow the title from a magazine article covering the arrival of Korean adoptee, Lee Kyung Soo; Jon Brenneis, "A New American Comes 'Home'" Life, November 30, 1953, 25--29. 2In the 1950s, popular media problematically described the children born from U.S. servicemen and Korean women as "GI babies." Statistics culled from various sources as exact figures remain unknown; U.S. Department of Justice statistics in Won Moo Hurh, The Korean Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 33; Korean Ministry of Health and Social Affairs statistics in Central Theological Seminary, "Measures for the Welfare of Mixed-Blood Children in Korea," 8 August 1967, p. 4, box 35, folder 6, SW109, Social Welfare History Archive, University of Minnesota; and U.S. Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization statistics in Bok-Lim C. Kim, "Asian Wives of U.S. Servicemen," Amerasia 4 (1977): 99. |
