Another Koreatown Korean Military Brides and Their Forgotten Communities Yuri W

Chapter Five Another Koreatown Korean Military Brides and Their Forgotten Communities Yuri W. Doolan Seldom thought of for its racial diversity or large immigrant presence, the Kentucky-Tennessee border is perhaps the last place one might expect to find a Korean American community center, dozens of Korean churches, clusters of Korean restaurants, grocery stores, karaoke bars, taekwondo and hapkido dojang, among a whole host of other Korean immigrant-owned establishments. Yet it is on Highway 41, running parallel to Fort Campbell Army Base’s eastern perimeter, where tens of thousands of Koreans have lived, flourished, and declined alongside the U.S. military since the middle of the twentieth century. And while their presence gives the Clarksville metropolitan area a cultural and economic identity distinct from its largely rural surroundings, Fort Campbell is hardly an exception in the history of Korean American community formation. In fact, there are over one hundred military bases in the United States with surrounding Korean populations.1 Catalyzed by the over 100,000 military bride migrations that have occurred since the Korean War,2 they are small cities like Fayetteville in North Carolina (Fort Bragg), Killeen in Texas (Fort Hood), Junction City in Kansas (Fort Riley), Augusta in Georgia (Fort Gordon), and Lawton in Oklahoma (Fort Sill), among others, where collectively, approximately one in every ten Koreans in the United States resides today.3 While scholars have long documented the histories of Korean Americans in major urban centers and metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, few have looked to those living adjacent to U.S. military installations like Fort Campbell in Clarksville, Tennessee.4 As communities whose Korean populations comprise mostly intermarried Korean women, a large proportion of mixed race individuals, and very few Korean immigrant men, the lack of urgency to document military bride communities is telling of the 81 20-0064 KIM.indb 81 5/28/20 10:44 AM 82 Yuri W. Doolan field’s own implicit biases privileging patriarchal and ethnic nationalist con- ceptualizations of the Korean diaspora. Indeed, the almost exclusive scholarly focus on mainstream Koreatowns suggests that Korean men are primarily re- sponsible for Korean diasporic community formation through their political, educational, and entrepreneurial ambitions that have set Koreans in motion across the globe. But it was Korean women rather than Korean men, whose marriages, migrations, and subsequent immigration sponsorships accounted for the vast majority of the Korean American postwar population in the twentieth century.5 Furthermore, many of these sponsored migrants settled first into towns like Clarksville, Tennessee, with their military bride sponsors before venturing off to rural suburbs, major cities, or mainstream Koreatowns elsewhere in the United States. Acknowledging these gaps, this chapter examines the oft-forgotten history of Korean military bride migrant-based communities and furthers two main arguments. First, that towns like Clarksville, Tennessee, have sustained Korean immigrant life and culture in the United States since the 1950s and are another Koreatown. Second, that while military bride communities are ethnic enclaves serving Korean Americans, linking them to South Korea, and providing a port of entry into the United States, they should also be understood as camptowns. As such, they remain vulnerable and, oftentimes, subordinated to the U.S. military and its interests and have faced a number of social and economic consequences born from this unequal relation (namely military prostitution). Like the literature on Koreatowns, which has yet to consider military bride communities as extensions of the Korean diaspora, literature on camptowns around U.S. installations in South Korea has yet to understand the camptown as a spatial formation that happens in the United States as well.6 Uncovering the history of military bride communities then has major ramifications for Korean American history. Such a dual understanding of these spaces as both Koreatowns and camptowns challenges us to think of Koreatowns beyond an exclusively urban phenomenon and instead consider Korean American community formation as a legacy of the ongoing process of U.S. militarism in South Korea. MILITARY BRIDES AND KOREAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY FORMATION Korean military bride migrant-based communities can be found around almost every major U.S. military installation in the United States, with the largest concentrations of Korean Americans living near Army bases, such as Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, 20-0064 KIM.indb 82 5/28/20 10:44 AM Another Koreatown 83 and Fort Campbell in Clarksville, Tennessee.7 This is no coincidence, as Army personnel have historically comprised the overwhelming majority of the composition of United States Forces Korea (USFK), currently at more than 70 percent of the approximately 28,000 troops rotating annually in and out of South Korea each year.8 The Air Force is the second-most represented branch of military service in USFK, making up the vast majority of the re- maining 30 percent of troops currently stationed in South Korea. 9 As such, large concentrations of Korean Americans are found in the Midwest around U.S. Air Force installations such as Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and Scott Air Force Base in Illinois.10 Together, these Army and Air Force communities represent some of the largest Korean communities of any kind in the South and the Midwest with populations even exceeding those in larger urban centers within these regions.11 In general, fewer Korean Americans live around Naval or Marine bases (again, due to the historic composition of USFK), which are primarily concentrated on the East and West Coasts. Other large Korean American communities include those around military bases in Seattle-Tacoma, Colorado Springs, San Diego, and Honolulu although it is difficult to discern from census data the proportion of which remain con- nected to military bride migration, given the close proximity to other Korean American ethnic communities. Korean American communities surrounding U.S. military installations grew in tandem with the preponderance of military bride migrations to the United States, which has been inadvertently shaped by U.S. immigration law and military policies surrounding GI marriages with local Asian women. The U.S. military’s initial occupation of southern Korea dates back to Sep- tember 8, 1945, when the Twenty Fourth Army Corps arrived at the port of Days upon arrival, U.S. servicemen met Korean women and took on local girlfriends, much to the dismay of military commanders.12 Some Korean women who encountered U.S. servicemen were employed as typists, transla- tors, clerical assistants, laundresses, hairstylists, and coffee girls among other professions while other women were locals working and living adjacent to U.S. encampments, sometimes out of camptown bars or brothels. At the time, the U.S. military banned virtually all marriages between its servicemen and Asian women, while permitting those with European women in its other occupation zones. This distinction was the result of The War Brides Act of 1945, which allowed “alien spouses or alien children” of U.S. servicemen to enter the United States as non-quota migrants “if otherwise admissible under the [existing] immigration laws.”13 But because the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1924 upheld a virtual ban on immigration from Asia, Asian brides were barred from entry into the United States and denied the same 20-0064 KIM.indb 83 5/28/20 10:44 AM 84 Yuri W. Doolan privileges that their European counterparts were afforded by the 1945 law. In 1947, Public Law 213, an amendment to the War Brides Act of 1945, lifted the racial restrictions on Asian brides to allow for their non-quota entry for a brief 30-day period in the summer of 1947. Although this law allowed for Korean brides’ entry into the United States legally, military officials only ap- plied this policy to Japanese women, and more specifically to Nissei soldiers requesting permission to marry co-ethnic women.14 As a result, no Korean military brides are recorded in immigration statistics as having come to the United States in the 1940s and it was not until 1950, with the passage of Pub- lic Law 717 (another law temporarily permitting Asian brides’ entry into the United States), that immigration statistics record the entry of a single Korean military bride. This law was followed by an extension in 1951, and then, more importantly, the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which repealed racial exclusions for spouses and dependents of U.S. citizens and provided these individuals non-quota visa status. Such a specific provision in U.S. immigration law, yet simultaneously upholding broader racial restrictions, meant that Korean military brides (along with other Asian brides and adopted children from Asia) would constitute the largest group of migrants entering the United States from Asia in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite these changes, the numbers of Korean military brides recorded in immigration statistics averaged only about 200 annually in the 1950s.15 By 1969, this number would increase ten-fold, when nearly 2,000 military brides were recorded as having received visas in immigration statistics that year. These women were among the approximately 10,000 Korean brides in total who immigrated to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. This population of first-wave military brides was split between two main groups: those women whose husbands would retire after their tours in South Korea, and those who were career soldiers and would continue their military service. For those women whose husbands did not reenlist in the military, they oftentimes followed their husbands to their hometowns where few if any other military brides, let alone Asians, existed during an era of virtual immigration restriction from Asia.

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