In this essay, I investigate how Korean Children’s Choirs that toured the United States in the 1950s and 1960s helped rewrite America’s relationship with Korea and Asia more broadly. I situate the choristers within the context of transnational adoption to explore the political stakes of the Korean child during the early Cold War. On the heels of the costly Korean War, the young performers represented the democratic possibilities of Korea, thereby justifying US intervention, past and present. For the South Korean government, the choirs were among several carefully crafted cultural productions sent to the United States in an attempt to replace existing conceptions of an impoverished Korea with images of resiliency and capability—critical attributes of a nation seeking sovereignty. Yet while the political agendas of each government remained clear, the children’s choirs also set in motion interpersonal relationships that tied Americans to Koreans in new ways. For the first time on a large scale, Americans saw Korean children in an American context, a juxtaposition that deepened sentimental connections and allowed many to imagine what it might be like to have the children in the United States permanently.
This chapter examines the relationship between Americans and Korean women, both real and imagined. It begins in 1945 in South Korea with US militarized prostitution and its effects on Korean women. From assaults to regularization intended to protect US servicemen (but not Korean women) from sexually transmitted disease to US military efforts to prevent its men from marrying Korean nationals, the first part of the chapter establishes the uneven parameters placed upon Korean women. The chapter then moves to the United States to consider the cultural efforts made to uncouple the association between Korean prostitutes and brides. The chapter argues that US media’s hyper-focus on the purportedly docile (and, with US-occupied Japan a democratic stronghold in the Pacific, politically safe) Japanese bride supplanted an acknowledgment of Korean brides who arrived concurrently. It then looks to the popular singing, dancing, and instrument-playing Korean Kim Sisters, who through their celebrity and contained sexuality offered a safe alternative to the fraught figure of the Korean war bride. From military control to media representation, the chapter addresses how Americans tried to manage Korean women and how Korean women attempted to find security and autonomy amidst these pressures.
The introduction establishes the question at the heart of this book: How did Korean women and children become critical to the making of US empire in the early Cold War? It begins by situating Korea in the longer trajectory of US empire, which dates back centuries before US occupation of South Korea in 1945. Focusing on how children and intimacy historically played a role in empire building, the chapter describes how during the Korean War family frames were deployed to transform devastation into a tale of salvation, a cultural reconfiguration that enabled America’s reach to the Pacific. Yet Americans who anchored this project soon put internationalism into practice in ways that exceeded government intentions. Initially heralded for their humanitarian efforts, US servicemen, missionaries, and philanthropists transformed a rescue project over there into an immigration problem over here. Pushing to permanently bring Korean women and children into the United States, they were responsible for a return of empire that disrupted existing US gatekeeping policies and the domestic racial status quo. The introduction places the book in conversation with the fields of postcolonial studies, American studies, Asian American studies, critical adoption studies, and critical refugee studies to better understand these transnational processes.
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