Global Families

A History of Asian International Adoption in America

Catherine Ceniza Choy

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781479891160
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Customs & Traditions
• Index: Social Sciences

· “Sensitive and absorbing study.” – Naoko Shibusawa, Brown University

“Transformative in the strongest sense… Crafts a unique history.” – Mark Jerng, author of Claiming Others

1
Race and Rescue in Early Asian International Adoption History

When the January 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti brought renewed attention to the international and transracial adoption of Haitian children by white American families, much of the media coverage was controversial and, unfortunately, one-dimensional. The story of ten white Americans who were detained at the Dominican border for “kidnapping” thirty-three Haitian children soon after the worst natural disaster in Haiti’s history dominated U.S. news coverage. Some observers began immediately taking sides for the Americans who, they claimed, had good intentions to rescue the children through international adoption, while others harshly criticized them for infringing on Haitian national sovereignty. There was little mention of previous attempts in our nation’s history to rescue children abroad in the wake of catastrophe by adopting them, of the complexity of processing sound and ethical international adoptions, or even of the significance of racial difference in transracial adoptions. Given the decades-long history of international and transracial adoption in the United States, we can and should have a more informed and productive discussion.

Beginning in the 1950s, American families began adopting children of different racial backgrounds from countries abroad in significant numbers. These pioneers of global family making adopted Japanese and Korean war orphans and Korean “mascots.”¹ However, mixed-race Asian and American children in these countries soon captured the hearts and minds of the American public and became a focal point for the work of international nongovernmental organizations such as the International Social Service (ISS).

The post–World War II U.S. occupation of Japan (1945–1952) and U.S. Cold War involvement in the Korean War (1950–1953) created a population of mixed-race children produced by American servicemen and Japanese and Korean women. Although war had a devastating impact on all sectors of Japanese and Korean societies, the lives of these children were especially bleak. Japanese and Korean societies rejected these children as “improper” because many of them were conceived outside of wedlock, they looked physically different, and even more importantly they embodied the unequal political relationship between occupied and occupying nations. Although an American military presence in Japan and Korea was responsible for these children’s births, the U.S. government bore no official responsibility for the children’s or their mothers’ welfare. Nongovernmental organizations and concerned individuals stepped in to provide some relief to the children and their mothers. Thus, international adoption and humanitarian rescue were inextricably linked during this time period.

As in the recent Haitian crisis, white American individuals rushed to rescue these children via international adoption. And critical concerns about the trafficking of these children also soon emerged. The International Social Service (ISS) was not an adoption agency, but it reasoned that international adoption was a form of immigration necessitating coordinated social welfare work across national borders. Beginning in the 1950s, the ISS focused more of its welfare work on international adoption, with the creation of an adoption division, WAIF-ISS. The international adoption of mixed-race Asian and American children led to the establishment of ISS units in Japan in 1955 and in Korea in 1957. The ISS collaborated with American and Asian government officials as well as nongovernmental organizations to study and to implement practices that benefited the children first. These practices included an investment in social welfare work that focused on the integration of the children within the Asian countries. Simply put, ISS work in this area shows us that humanitarianism does not always have to take the form of the white American savior.

At the same time, ISS workers also successfully placed mixed-race Asian and American children in, primarily, adoptive homes of white Americans. The workers approached this process with caution and restraint, raising thoughtful questions about the meaning of racial, cultural, and national differences for the child and his or her American adoptive parents, and considering the most effective process through which an adoptive child of a different racial background could become a real part of a new family in a new setting. The United States is the world’s leading recipient of adoptive children from many different countries within Asia, Latin America, and Africa, so these questions continue to be relevant today. Contemporary analyses of international and transracial adoption should go beyond stories of adoption rescue attempts gone awry. They need to acknowledge the complex history of our international adoption nation, a history in which race and rescue have played central roles.

The Interracial Ties That Bind: Rescuing Mixed-Race Asian and American Children

In the 1940s and 1950s, Europe was a major sending region of adoptive children, primarily German, Greek, and Italian children, to the United States.² The destructive and chaotic aftermath of World War II in these European countries had left children orphaned and impoverished, while the United States had been largely untouched by war damage.³ By the mid-1950s a demographic shift had occurred. The supply of European children had dwindled, but an increasing number of children from East Asia were available for adoption.⁴

While both European and Asian international adoption arose in the historical contexts of war and U.S. military involvement overseas, race informed early Asian international adoption history in distinct ways. In the 1950s, interracial intimacy between American men and Asian women was a well-known feature of U.S.-Asian relations.⁵ Hollywood films such as Sayonara popularized these interracial relationships to the American masses with hopeful antiracist messages about the possibility of a peaceful coexistence and the integration of East and West. The 1957 Warner Brothers film, which garnered four Academy Awards and received a nomination for Best Motion Picture, starred Marlon Brando as Major Lloyd Gruver, a Korean War pilot who is reassigned to Japan. Initially a staunch supporter of the U.S. military’s opposition to marriages between American soldiers and Japanese women, Gruver falls in love with a Japanese actress, Hana-ogi, portrayed by Miiko Taka. In the film’s conclusion, Gruver and Hana-ogi defy American and Japanese social conventions by deciding to marry one another, but not before Hana-ogi expresses anxiety over the fate of their mixed-race children. “We live in different worlds, come from different races,” she laments, then adds worriedly, “What would happen to our children? What would they be?” Gruver allays her fears matter-of-factly: “They’d be half Japanese, half American. They’d be half yellow, half white. They’d be half you. They’d be half me. That’s all they’re going to be.”⁶

A radio broadcast expressed similar optimism in Japan. Sawada Miki, a Japanese heiress and philanthropist and the founder of the Elizabeth Saunders Home for children of unmarried Japanese women and American servicemen, first learned about these children while listening to the early-morning news on June 28, 1946. According to her biographer, Elizabeth Anne Hemphill, Sawada “heard the announcer say that a child of mixed Japanese and American parentage had been born that morning. He said it was the first time that the two countries had shaken hands, and he called the child a symbol of love to bind the two shores of the Pacific.”⁷

These utopian visions were important because they enabled current and future generations to imagine an interracial world. However, the situation of children born to U.S. servicemen and Japanese or Korean women, also referred to as “Occupation babies” and “GI babies,” was precarious.⁸ The ISS-USA collected magazine and newspaper clippings from Asian countries as well as the United States about various child welfare issues, and the plight of mixed-race Asian and American children figured prominently in print media. According to one American magazine article, these children were “destined, if they remain in Asia, to a life of degradation and misery.”⁹ A Japanese news article characterized the future of these children as “bleaker than that of almost any children in the world.”¹⁰

The distinctive racial features of these mixed-race children made them visible targets for discrimination and abuse. Although the children of American white servicemen and European women also suffered from neglect and abandonment, as the writer Norman Lobsenz noted, “no external sign sets them apart.”¹¹ By contrast, “in the Orient, where their Eurasian features brand them like the mark of Cain, the children are rejected and ostracized.”¹² The discrimination against these children in Japan and Korea, the lack of U.S. and Asian governmental support, and desertion by their American fathers influenced their mothers’ decisions to abandon them, creating a group of children in need of rescue and available for adoption.¹³

Separate orphanages for mixed-race children in Japan, such as the Elizabeth Saunders home in Oiso and Our Lady of Lourdes Baby Home in Yokohama, and special wings of orphanages in Korea, such as the Choong Hyun Baby Home near Seoul, offered better care for these children.¹⁴ Yet the possibility of leaving institutional care was minimal at best. In Japan, discrimination against mixed-race children discouraged their domestic adoption. One news article reported that “a Japanese couple who daringly adopted an Eurasian baby returned it after a few weeks. They could not stand up to the pressure of resentment and prejudice from their neighbors.”¹⁵

Figure 1.1. Philanthropist Holding Infant at Orphanage. Japanese philanthropist Miki Sawada holds an Amerasian infant at the Elizabeth Saunders Home. Another baby lies on a bed next to her. She established the orphanage to care for babies of Japanese women and American servicemen. (© Horace Bristol / CORBIS)

Correspondence among ISS workers corroborated news reports and detailed the critical situation of mixed-race children in Korea. Reports noted the “intense prejudice” in addition to poverty that pressured Korean mothers to give up their children to the Korean Child Placement Service or “any foreign welfare agency who will take them in.”¹⁶ The discrimination faced by mixed-race children in institutional care was compounded by the already “deplorable” state of the care facilities for the estimated fifty thousand homeless children in Korea. One report claimed that these children may have been deprived of food and clothing in orphanages that were already lacking adequate heat, water, clothing, and staff. It concluded dismally that their situation was one of life and death: “Doubtless many of these children will perish during the winter months for lack of food, shelter and mothering.”¹⁷

The plight of mixed-race Asian and African American children was deemed especially tragic. In 1952, the local PTA of Oiso opposed the enrollment of seventeen mixed-race Japanese and American children from the Elizabeth Saunders Home, and the matriculation of the three half-black children in particular. In addition to Japanese parents’ prejudicial claims that the mixed-race children were intellectually inferior disease carriers, their fears that the Japanese and African American children were especially violent fueled their protest.¹⁸ An Ebony magazine feature article on mixed-race Japanese and African Americans was titled “Japan’s Rejected.” Its author, Era Bell Thompson, noted that “in Japan today there are some 20,000 mixed-bloods who were fathered by American servicemen, both white and black. The children of conquerors, and mostly illegitimate, all are unwelcome aliens in the land of their birth. First to be abandoned and last to be adopted, the 2,000 or so who are half-Negro are thrice damned.”¹⁹

A 1957 report claimed that “among the Korean children of mixed parentage, the Korean-American Negro orphans are the most pitiful. Usually Negro physical characteristics predominate and they are very noticeable.”²⁰ Daniel Quinn, the chairman of the Ad Hoc Children’s Committee on Adoption of the American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service, described the problem of mixed-race children in East Asia as “acute.” According to Quinn, “It is quite evident from firsthand observation and experience in the field that a Negro child, particularly in Korea, would never be accepted into the Korean society and there is no future for the child.”²¹ Given this information, Susan Pettiss, the assistant director of the U.S. branch of the International Social Service (ISS-USA) concluded that “the neediest children are the Korean-Americans, especially those of Negro fathers. Although a number of these half-Negros have been placed there are still some in institutions in the Far East, where they are misfits and often discriminated against. Although we recognize the scarcity of Negro adoptive homes in the United States, we cannot help but consider the meager alternatives for those in foreign countries.”²²

Place as well as race informed the tragedy of these children’s lives. A 1959 Manual on Intercountry Adoption noted that the mixed-race background of some children, “unfortunately, makes them unacceptable in their present locality.”²³ This was not the case in Europe where, the writer Norman Lobsenz noted, “virtually no stigma of any kind attaches to an illegitimate child in Europe. The continent has been a battlefield too long to view war babies as part of a problem in morals, and its normal peacetime illegitimacy rate is high.”²⁴ By contrast, social workers as well as journalists conceptualized and represented Japan and Korea as closed, impenetrable places, which encouraged discrimination against mixed-race children. Era Bell Thompson referred to “an inherent Japanese prejudice against those who are ‘different.’” Despite its “unparalleled postwar leap from commercial impotence to the world’s sixth industrial power,” Japan, as Thompson concluded, was still a “racially monolithic nation; its people a closed society.”²⁵ In a paper presented at the 1957 National Conference on Social Welfare about the discriminatory treatment faced by mixed-race Korean and American children, an ISS-USA senior case consultant, Margaret Valk, described Korea as a country “unique and isolated among the countries of the Far East, priding itself on the purity of its racial lineage.”²⁶

Such characterizations about Europe as well as Asia were exaggerated and sensational. They erased the brutal stigmatization of French, German, Czech, and other European women who were suspected of having intimate relationships with occupyi...