Korean Looks, American Eyes: Korean American Adoptees, Race, Culture and Nation A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Kim Ja Park Nelson IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Erika Lee, Adviser December 2009 © Kim Park Nelson 2010 Acknowledgements A dissertation can never be completed without lots of help, and this one is certainly no exception. Thanks to the Office of International Programs at the University of Minnesota for funding a year of the writing of this dissertation. Many thanks to Erika Lee, my advisor, who took on me and my project many years ago. You have been my best first and last reader, and a great source of support, resources and inspiration. I also thank my committee members, Jo Lee, Rich Lee and Sara Dorow for their feedback, advice, and support. Thanks to Gabrielle Civil, who was an exceptionally generous reader as I revised Chapter 6. Also thanks to David Klaassen at the University of Minnesota Social Welfare History Archives and to Jennifer Pierce for introducing me to the art and science of ethnographic method back in 2003. Thanks also to Gabrielle Lawrence at Macalester College for pressuring me to quit my job in 2002 to go back to school. Thanks also to Brian Drischell at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for help finding Korean War films. The research in this dissertation included field work in Minnesota, the American Pacific Northwest and Seoul, South Korea. Though I was based in Minneapolis, I relied heavily on many friends who supported me while I was traveling. Thanks to Su-Yoon Burrows Ko for your generous hospitality in Seoul, to Tim Holm and Jane Mauk for introducing me throughout the Pacific Northwest, to Kate and Mike Donchi for hosting me in Portland and to Mark Ruebel for hosting me in Seattle. Thanks also to Dae-Won Wenger and Nicole Sheppard at GOAL Korea for supporting my travel to Seoul in 2006. A special thanks to Kate Anderson, for letting me use your boss’s office, where I finished an initial draft of this document. I never could have completed this project without the support of colleagues, some of whom have become good friends. Thanks so much to Tobias Hübinette, Lene Myong Petersen, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, and Laura Briggs, whose insights on transnational adoption have much sharpened my own. Thanks also to the many scholars who have come with me in discovering and rediscovering Korean Adoption Studies. Special recognition goes to everyone at IKAA for supporting the first and second Korean Adoption Studies Research Symposium, and to everyone at AKConnection for supporting me in my work at home in Minnesota. Thanks to Elizabeth Larson, Sasha Aslanian, Kim Dalros Jackson, Amy Anderson and Seiwoong Oh, for helping me to get the stories of Korean adoptees out to a wider audience. A special thanks to Eleana Kim, my longest colleague and collaborator. Your friendship has meant as much to me as your fine intellect. i I also could not have completed this project this project without the support of good friends, some of whom have become colleagues, all of whom happen to also be Korean adoptees. Thanks to Heewon Lee, Jae Ran Kim, Sun Yung Shin, Jane Jeong Trenka, and Jennifer Weir for your support and feedback. You helped me realize what it means to be part of a community of Korean adoptees. Your friendship, laughter and tears have meant so much to me. A very special thank you to Hangtae Cho, who called me into his office, sight unseen, to tell me that he’d been waiting for years to find someone to teach a class at the University of Minnesota on Korean adoption, and that’d he’d finally found me. Many thanks to Sonjia Hyon, Jill Doerfler and Heidi Stark for getting me though graduate school. Thanks also to the crew at Team Potluck, for your friendship and weekly sustenance. Many thanks also go to Dina Kountoupes, for helping me to keep my feet on the ground and sticking with me for these last 20 years. A very special thank you to each of the 66 adult Korean adoptees who officially participated in this research as oral history contributors, and to the many other adoptees who unofficially participated. This work would not have been possible without you and the generosity with which you shared your life experiences. Finally, I wish to thank and acknowledge Peter Park Nelson whose faith in me and this project began with its inception and has never wavered. He has been a precise editor as well as an ardent supporter of the work in every way. Most importantly, he has been a most attentive husband who has been both exceptionally tolerant of my many absences related to this work, and exceptionally loving, just as I would wish a partner to be. ii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to two Peters, one who inspired this work, the other who made it possible. iii Abstract This project positions Korean adoptees as transnational citizens at intersections within race relations in the United States, as emblems of international geopolitical relationships between the United States and South Korea, and as empowered actors, organizing to take control of racial and cultural discourses about Korean adoption. I make connections between transnational exchanges, American race relations, and Asian American experiences. I argue that though the contradictory experience of Korean adoptees, at once inside and outside bounded racial and national categories of “Asian,” “White,” “Korean,” and “American,” the limits of these categories may be explored and critiqued. In understanding Korean adoptees as transnational subjects, single-axis racial and national identity are challenged, where individuals have access to membership and/or face exclusion in more than one political or cultural nation. In addition, this work demonstrates the effects of American political and cultural imperialism both abroad and domestically, by elucidating how the acts of empire-building nations are mapped onto individuals though the regulation of immigration and family formation. My methods are interdisciplinary, drawing from traditions that include ethnography, primary historical sources, and literature. My dissertation work uses Korean adoptees’ own life stories that I have collected and recorded in three locations: 1) Minnesota, home to the largest concentration of Korean adoptees in the U.S.; 2) the Pacific Northwest, home to the many of the “first wave” of the oldest living Korean adoptees now in their 40s and 50s; and, 3) Seoul, Korea, home to hundreds of adult Korean adoptees who have traveled back to South Korea to live and work. In addition, I use Korean adoptee published narratives, iv archive materials documenting the early history of transnational adoption, and secondary sources in sociology, social work, psychology and cultural studies to uncover the many layers of national, racial and cultural belonging and significance for and of Korean adoptees. v Table of Contents Page Introduction………………………………………………………………………………2 Chapter 1: A Korean American Adoption Ethnography: Method, Theory and Experience………………………………………………………..…20 THE DECISION TO COLLECT ORAL HISTORIES……………………………………...23 Accessing Korean American Adoptees………………………………..29 The Oral History Encounter…………………………………………...35 VARIABLE POSITIONALITIES…………………………………….....44 Insider/Outsider………………………………………….......................45 The Native Informant…………………………………………..............49 The “Adoptee/Adoption Expert” ……………………………………..51 Letting Go of the Illusion of Objectivity……………………………...59 TRANSNATIONALITY YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW………………………... 61 CONCLUSION…………………………………………..........................................67 Section 1: Korean Adoptee Icon……………………………………………………….69 Chapter 2: “Eligible Alien Orphan:” The Cold War Korean Adoptee………...73 A POST-(KOREAN) WAR ADOPTEE …………………………………………….....74 Children of War………………………………………….......................75 ORAL HISTORIES OF KOREAN ADOPTEE “ELDERS”..…………………....................82 Memories of Korea……………………………………..........................85 Immigration Policy for Korean Adoptees…..………….......................91 Eligible Alien Orphan…...……………………………….......................99 CELEBRITY ADOPTEES: SALVATION AND ISOLATION IN THE 1950S….......................102 THE PRICE OF ASSIMILATIVE SALVATION……………………..………...................105 NAVIGATING RACIST MID-CENTURY AMERICA, ALONE…………............................112 CONCLUSION………………………...……………………………......................119 vi Table of Contents (continued) Page Chapter 3: Misrepresentation, Appropriation and Assimilation: A Critical Literature Review of Social Work and Policy Research on Transracial Adoption………………………………………………………..121 REVIEWING TRANSRACIAL ADOPTION LITERATURE: SOCIAL WORK AND SOCIAL POLICY RESEARCH…..……………………………….122 The History of Transracial and Transnational Adoption Research…………………………………………………….125 IDENTIFYING AND DEFINING TERMS OF DEBATE OVER TRANSRACIAL ADOPTION AND POSITIONS WITHIN TRANSRACIAL ADOPTION RESEARCH………….128 Child Subjects, Parent Envoys……………………………………….138 Adjustment and Self-Esteem as Parameters of Adoption Success....145 Transracial Adoptee Identity……………………………...………….148 Race, Class, and Gender Coding in Transracial Adoption…………158 COLORBLINDNESS AND RACELESSNESS: ASSIMILATION IN ADOPTEES……………..160 Positive Views of High Assimilation….………………………………161 Critical Views of High Assimilation………………………..………...166 GENDER AND CULTURAL HIERARCHY ………………….…………………..……169 CONCLUSIONS………………………………………..…………………………170 Chapter 4: An Adoptee for Every Lake: Minnesota, Multiculturalism,