By Ellen Wu
If academia was mapped like a family tree, then dissertation advisors would be akin to parents. By that logic, advisees under the same tutelage would be brothers and sisters. As someone aspiring to become a professional researcher and teacher of Asian American history, I was extremely lucky to find a tribe of kindred spirits who shared the same passion in graduate school.
Recently, I caught up with one of my academic “siblings,” Arissa Oh, assistant professor of history at Boston College. Dr. Oh is the author of the new book To Save The Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Stanford University Press, 2015). She’s also a #twitterstorian, one of the most prolific and progressive expert voices on history, Asian America, race, gender, migration, family, Korea, and the cheese-on-ramen/ramyeon debate.
1) What sparked your interest in this topic? Are you yourself adopted?
I am not adopted though, like many Koreans and North Americans, I don’t have to look too far to find a connection to adoption or international adoption. I came to this topic because of my interest in race and immigration in US history. In graduate school, when I was searching for something to write a paper about, my advisor suggested I look into Korean war orphans. I started looking for secondary sources and very quickly discovered that there was little research done. Luckily for me, I found the subject really fascinating and kept working on it.
2) What’s the most surprising thing that you found in the archives?
Not the most surprising thing but the thing that I really wanted to find that I wasn’t able to find much of was the voices of the birth mothers. I had hoped there would be more that was recorded about their thoughts and feelings, but I actually found very little. There are some anthologies and other ways to get at the voices of women who have given up their children in the past few decades – but the women who relinquished their children in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s have been mostly silent/silenced. I truly hope that there are scholars and activists who are recovering the stories of these women, and that they will share them with us.
3) Tell us about the photo of the little girl on the cover of the book. 
There are a few images that have become standard on the covers of books about adoption, whether they are academic books or how-to guides for adoptive parents: an adult & a child’s hand (it’s usually clear they are of different races), an adult hand holding a baby’s feet (again, different races), or a baby. I wanted to be sure that the face on the cover of my book was of a specific person, someone who was actually an adoptee, and not a generic child or stock photo. I found Jenna’s passport photo online because she had posted it on her Tumblr. Thanks to the power of social media I found her on Facebook and had her permission to use her picture within an hour.
4) What was your biggest challenge that you faced bringing this book into being?
Adoption is surrounded by secrecy. In most places adoptees can’t even get access to their own birth certificates, or information about the circumstances of their birth. There is even more secrecy in international adoption. So when I began this project, I didn’t know if I’d be able to find the sources I would need to tell this story. I definitely ran into some brick walls – unsurprisingly, adoption agencies don’t want to share too much information or allow access to their records, even the administrative files – but eventually I think I found what I needed.
5) How does the story of Korean adoption change what we know about Asian American history?
Korean adoption and international adoption in general has been missing from Asian American history. Even in scholarship where you do see passing mention of Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese adoptees, you don’t see mention of Japanese adoptees, for example. And very little coverage of mixed-race ‘GI babies’ from Asia. So there’s the simple fact that hundreds of thousands of adoptees and the circumstances of their migration and settlement in the US over decades are part of Asian American history.
Adoption also highlights several other important aspects of Asian American history, such as the refiguring of Asian-ness that happened after World War II. In the context of the Cold War, the US was very interested in proving its racial liberalism abroad, and win hearts and minds. It knew that American racism, such as lynching, was very bad for America’s image. So the US displayed its acceptance of Asian orphans and war brides as proof that it wasn’t racist. This was a fairly quick reversal given all of the stereotypes of Asians as a yellow peril (and worse) up to and during WWII. Asian women and children offered a new kind of Asian-ness that went together well with Asian American efforts to show that they were more than worthy of full inclusion as American citizens: hardworking, family-oriented, etc. Adopted Korean children were part of this refiguring of Asian-ness and benefited from it too.
6) Did becoming a mother yourself during the course of writing this book shape the way that you ended up telling the story?
At the beginning of my research I identified with the adoptees quite a lot. I think I automatically put myself in their shoes and tried to imagine what it would be like to grow up in the kinds of circumstances they grew up in. But becoming a mother myself made me much more aware of the Korean birth mothers, and what they must have gone through to bear and relinquish a child (or children). At the same time, having friends experience the pain of infertility and turn to adoption gave me a deeper understanding of adoptive parents, and what people will do in order to create the family they want if they can’t do it biologically. On the whole, becoming a parent really made me empathize with everyone in the adoption triad much more.
7) Ramen/Ramyeon: Cheese or no cheese?
NO.WAY.
Follow Arissa Oh on Twitter: @arissaoh
Arissa Oh is an assistant professor of history at Boston College. She focuses on the 20th Century United States; U.S. immigration and race; Asian-American history; family and kinship; Cold War social policy; & gender.
Follow Ellen Wu on Twitter: @ellendwu
Ellen Wu is an associate professor at Indiana University, Bloomington in the Department of History, Department of American Studies, Asian American Studies and Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society. She is the author of The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton, 2014)
