Jon Dunbar is a copy editor at The Korea Times, as well as editor of the Foreign Community page and curator of the Korea Times Archive. If you have suggestions for possible articles, or wish to contribute articles yourself, contact jdunbar@koreatimes.co.kr.
First wave of Korean overseas adoptees returns
Participants of the 2018 Mosaic Hapa Tour pose for a group photo in the Hotel Bupyeong Convention Center last Friday. / Image by Jon Dunbar
By Jon Dunbar
By Jon Dunbar
A select group of Korean overseas adoptees have returned to Korea for a series of events intended to reconnect them with the land of their birth. These adoptees, many now in their 50s and 60s, were mostly born in camptowns outside U.S. military bases, to a Korean mother and U.S. military father.
Twenty-four adoptees from the U.S., Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands and their families took part in the 2018 Mosaic Hapa Tour from Aug. 31 to Sept. 9. After that, most stuck around for the Camptowns & Korean Adoption Conference from Sept. 10 to 12 at Seoul National University (SNU) to learn more about the country and their own family history.
As part of the tour, they took in the usual tourist sites of Korea, but they also stopped by some of the country's camptowns, known as “gijichon” in Korean, knocking on doors and learning about the conditions in which they came into this world.
During and after the 1950-53 Korean War, these camptowns formed around U.S. bases, creating an enclave economy unseen by Korean society offering all sorts of establishments for soldiers including restaurants and tailors. This included prostitution, and many of the women found in these camps were victims of human trafficking, according to Jung Hyun-joo, an associate professor of environmental studies at SNU.
In June 2014, 122 former camptown prostitutes filed a lawsuit against the Korean government, claiming they were forced to work as prostitutes. Legal documentation related to the case officially called them “comfort women,” the same term used to describe wartime sex slaves used by the Japanese military.
Jung, in a lecture on Monday titled “Constructing?Kijichon?as Sexualized Exceptional Space,” spoke to the adoptees about the conditions some of their mothers would have endured.
The government provided the comfort women to ensure the health and safety of soldiers, to prevent them from roaming far from their camps and offer control of sexually transmitted diseases. Women who contracted diseases were imprisoned in a facility called the “monkey house,” where they would be administered painful and harmful medical treatments.
These women were also put through compulsory monthly “patriotic lessons,” where they would be praised for earning money for the state. “You are patriots and private diplomats who earn dollars for this country!” they were told.
Naturally many of them became pregnant, and after giving birth they were compelled to put their children up for adoption. “Discrimination against single mothers leads to adoption,” Hosu Kim, an associate professor of sociology, anthropology, women's gender and sexuality studies at the College of Staten Island, said in her talk titled “Camptown Mothers: The Secrecy and Stigma of Transnational Adoption.”
Korea entered the international adoption market in 1955, and the first wave of Korean adoptees was mostly mixed-race Amerasian children.
“Originally international adoption was supposed to be this race-based evacuation,” Arissa Oh, an associate professor of history at Boston College who spoke at the Monday conference, was quoted as saying in a Public Radio International article in 2015. “Koreans have this myth of racial purity; they wanted to get rid of these children.”
In attendance on the tour was Theodore Bush Hudson Jr., a Korean War veteran who landed at Incheon and was part of the Chosin Reservoir campaign. The former Marine returned to Korea after the war, moved by the plight of these children, intent on adoption. An African-American himself, he looked through the catalogue and selected the two darkest faces, according to his son Lowell who was with him on the tour. A few years later, he returned to Korea and adopted two more mixed-race children.
Despite such a difficult past fraught with international politics and racism, the adoptees appreciated the warm welcome they received. Some expressed their gratitude at a banquet last Friday at Hotel Bupyeong Convention Center, with Bupyeong-gu head Cha Jun-taek in attendance.
“I felt great love and community from all the people that welcomed us,” said one attendee who was adopted 50 years ago. “I felt great love and community from all the people who welcomed us.”
“Some of us are touched because our mothers are from camptowns,” another participant said. “I heard stories from my mother about how she wasn't accepted because of my father.”
Today, the group is in Paju, northern Gyeonggi Province, to visit Camp Howze, a U.S. base that closed in 2005, for a dedication ceremony of the Paju Omma Poom Park, which is built to acknowledge the approximately 200,000 children born in Korea who were adopted out to be raised around the world. The park is 2,300 square meters and has a highly symbolic statue of a comfort woman.
Visit pajuommapoom.com or meandkorea.org for more information.