Mixed Race Studies

A promise kept

The Korea Times
2019-02-02

Kang Hyun-kyung

The late Park Geun-sik (1954-2009) is captured in this photo taken in December 1992 in front of Korean-Amerasians Association in Seoul. He was one of the first batch of biracial Koreans born to a Korean mother and a U.S. soldier. / Noonbit Publishing

Photographer chronicles biracial Koreans living as strangers in homeland

Park Geun-sik, a biracial farmer and human rights activist who died of stomach cancer in 2009, had a dream that remained unfulfilled until his death.

Park, who was called Peter during his childhood for his half-Korean, half-Caucasian appearance, wanted his home country to remember people like him who were born to Korean mothers and American soldiers during and after the 1950-53 Korean War.

They were called “GI babies” when they were young and later “Korean-Amerasians” after they became adults. They were depicted by opinion leaders here as the “tragic outcome” of the war.

GI babies were the first batch of biracial Koreans who lived in this country, decades before the nation saw a surge of biracial children born to Korean fathers and foreign brides from Central and Southeast Asian countries who have been migrating to Korea since the 1990s.

Unlike now, when biracial children are entitled to various types of policy support and protection from the government, back then the GI babies were treated like unwanted children. Without policy support, they were bullied and discriminated against by their classmates in school and racial bias continued even after graduation.

Park’s humble dream ― the nation recognizing GI babies as part of Korea’s traumatic modern history and admitting the country’s mistreatment of them ― came true after his death.

Documentary photographer Lee Jae-gab, 53, chronicled the tragic lives of half-Koreans born during or after the Korean War and published four photo books based on the images he captured over the past 26 years…

Read the entire article here.

Participants Needed for Oral History Research/Dissertation Project: Multiracial Americans in the 1960s and 70s

Marlena Boswell, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of History
Indiana University, Bloomington

2019-02-01

I am a Ph.D. candidate researching the racial politics of multiracial individuals in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. While the scholarly literature clearly establishes how society has historically viewed and racially identified multiracial Americans, I am seeking to understand how multiracial individuals racially identified themselves and how they related to the various race-based movements of the 60s and 70s. Therefore, I am seeking volunteers to share their stories in this oral history project.

I am seeking multiracial individuals who:

• Were born between 1945 and 1965
• Preferably (but not necessarily) have ties to the U.S. military

Because a portion of my research will focus on the U.S. military presence overseas in the post-World War II years and its role in the growth of the multiracial population, I am seeking (but not limiting participation to) individuals who come from multiracial families that grew out of the U.S. military presence in:

• England
• Germany
• Japan
• Korea

Please note: There is no monetary compensation for participation in this project.

If you are interested, please email me, Marlena Boswell, at mrb4@indiana.edu or brown.marlena@yahoo.com.

Mixed Race in Asia: Past, Present and Future

Routledge
2017-06-15
250 pages
1 B/W Illus.
Hardback ISBN: 9781138282674
eBook ISBN: 9781315270579

Edited by:

Zarine L. Rocha, Managing Editor
Current Sociology and the Asian Journal of Social Science

Farida Fozdar, Associate Professor in Anthropology and Sociology
University of Western Australia

Mixed racial and ethnic identities are topics of increasing interest around the world, yet studies of mixed race in Asia are rare, despite its particular salience for Asian societies.

Mixed Race in Asia seeks to reorient the field to focus on Asia, looking specifically at mixed race in China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and India. Through these varied case studies, this collection presents an insightful exploration of race, ethnicity, mixedness and belonging, both in the past and present. The thematic range of the chapters is broad, covering the complexity of lived mixed race experiences, the structural forces of particular colonial and post-colonial environments and political regimes, and historical influences on contemporary identities and cultural expressions of mixedness.

Adding significant richness and depth to existing theoretical frameworks, this enlightening volume develops markedly different understandings of, and recognizes nuances around, what it means to be mixed, practically, theoretically, linguistically and historically. It will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral and other researchers interested in fields such as Race and Ethnicity, Sociology and Asian Studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Mixed Race in Asia / Zarine L. Rocha and Farida Fozdar
• Section One: China and Vietnam
  • Chapter One: “A Class by Themselves”: Battles over Eurasian Schooling in Late-19th-Century Shanghai / Emma J. Teng
  • Chapter Two: Mixing Blood and Race: Representing Hunxue in Contemporary China / Cathryn Clayton
  • Chapter Three: Métis of Vietnam: An Historical Perspective on Mixed-Race Children from the French Colonial Period / Christina Firpo
• Section Two: South Korea and Japan
  • Chapter Four: Developing bilingualism in a largely monolingual society: Southeast Asian marriage migrants and multicultural families in South Korea / Mi Yung Park
  • Chapter Five: Haafu Identity in Japan: half, mixed or double? / Alexandra Shaitan and Lisa J. McEntee-Atalianis
  • Chapter Six: Claiming Japaneseness: recognition, privilege and status in Japanese-Filipino ‘mixed’ ethnic identity constructions / Fiona-Katharina Seiger
• Section Three: Malaysia and Singapore
  • Chapter Seven: Being “Mixed” in Malaysia: Perspectives on Ethnic Diversity / Caryn Lim
  • Chapter Eight: Chinese, Indians and the Grey Space in between: Acceptance of Malaysian Chindians in a plural society / Rona Chandran
  • Chapter Nine: ‘Our Chinese’: The Mixedness of Peranakan Chinese Identities in Kelantan, Malaysia / Pue Giok Hun
  • Chapter Ten: Eurasian as Multiracial: mixed race, gendered categories and identity in Singapore / Zarine L. Rocha
• Section Four: India and Indonesia
  • Chapter Eleven: Is the Anglo-Indian ‘Identity Crisis’ a Myth? / Robyn Andrews
  • Chapter Twelve: When Hybridity Encounters Hindu Purity Fetish: Anglo-Indian Lived Experiences in an Indian Railway Town / Anjali Gera Roy
  • Chapter Thirteen: Sometimes white, sometimes Asian: Boundary-making among transnational mixed descent youth at an international school in Indonesia / Danau Tanu
  • Chapter Fourteen: Class, Race and Being Indo (Eurasian) in Colonial and Postcolonial Indonesia / Ros Hewett
• Afterword / Paul Spickard

Returning to Korea

KBS News
2017-04-04

Decades ago, many children born to Korean mothers and foreign fathers were adopted by families overseas. Now, a growing number of half-Korean adoptees are returning to Korea to find their birth mothers. Here are some of their stories…

Watch the entire story here.

[Interview] If only parents gave DNA samples when they put children up for adoption

The Hankyoreh
2017-04-04

Kang Sung-man, Senior Staff writer

Bella Siegel-Dalton is a mixed-race adoptee who returned to South Korea after 51 years to look for her biological mother’s family. The big Korean letters on her shirt say, “Back in South Korea, my mother’s country.” (by Kang Sung-man, senior staff writer)

More Korean adoptees are organizing to search for their birth parents through DNA testing

Bella Siegel-Dalton is back in South Korea for the first time since being adopted by a family in the Napa Valley of northern California in 1966. When Bella Siegel-Dalton, 56, met a Hankyoreh reporter in a coffee shop on the first floor of the Lotte Hotel in Seoul on Apr. 1, her face was pallid. Because of kidney trouble, she needs to receive a transplant within two years. She’s also receiving chemotherapy after being diagnosed with leukemia.

Seven years ago, Siegel-Dalton identified her biological father in the US through DNA testing, but he had already passed away. During this trip to South Korea she says she wants to find her biological mother. “My 17-day trip to South Korea is challenging, so I’m gritting my teeth and hanging on. But it’s not painful, because this visit is so important to me,” she said.

Siegel-Dalton is a mixed-race adoptee who was born in Dongducheon, Gyeonggi Province, in 1961, to a South Korean woman and an American soldier. Her birth name was Lee Ji-sun. “My adoptive parents were really good people. My mother was an English teacher with a Master’s degree, while my father was a researcher for Shell Oil. They would sometimes let me try kimchi and listen to ‘Arirang’ so that I wouldn’t forget my memories of Korea,” she said…

Read the entire article here.

Korean city to build park for biracial adoptees

Yonhap News Agency
2017-03-08

This image, provided by the Paju municipal government, shows a blueprint of a park to be built in the city for biracial adoptees. (Yonhap)

PAJU, South Korea, March 8 (Yonhap) — A park for mixed-race Korean adoptees sent abroad in the years after the 1950-53 Korean War will be built inside a former U.S. military base on the outskirts of Seoul, officials said Wednesday.

The park named “Mother’s bosom” in Korean will be constructed in Paju, some 30 kilometers north of Seoul, this year to help biracial adoptees feel a sense of pride and affinity toward their motherland, municipal authorities said…

Read the entire article here.

Patricia Park talks about her Korean American spin on Jane Eyre

The Los Angeles Times
2015-05-12

Steph Cha

Patricia Park, author of “Re Jane” (Allana Taranto/Viking)

What if Jane Eyre was a Korean American girl and Rochester was a English professor? Patricia Park on ‘Re Jane‘

Patricia Park’s debut novel, “Re Jane” (Pamela Dorman/Viking: 340 pp., $27.95), is a retelling of everyone’s favorite Gothic Victorian Brontë romance, “Jane Eyre,” transferred to New York and South Korea in the early 2000s. Her heroine, Jane Re, is a half-Korean orphan raised by her uncle’s family in Flushing, Queens, a neighborhood that feels “all Korean, all the time.” When a prestigious post-college job offer falls through thanks to the dot-com crash, Jane takes a job as an au pair in Brooklyn in order to escape Queens and her uncle’s grocery store.

Her employers are Ed Farley and Beth Mazer, two Brooklyn English professors with an adopted Chinese daughter. Ed, as you may have guessed, is brooding and manly, with a strong jawline and a Brooklyn accent—pure Kryptonite for our wide-eyed, 22-year-old Jane. He lives in the shadow of his older, more accomplished wife, an eccentric feminist scholar with an attic office, who takes it upon herself to educate their sheltered au pair.

With her mixed blood and her torn loyalties, Jane embodies the confusion of both young adulthood and the hyphenated American experience. Impressionable and accommodating at the start of the novel, she struggles to find her own identity as the places and people in her life try to claim her. Her journey is a pleasure to follow, immensely rewarding and speckled with humor and romance…

Read the entire interview here.

Re Jane: A Novel

Pamela Dorman Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
2015-05-05
352 Pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0525427407
Paperback ISBN: 978-0143107941

Patricia Park

For Jane Re, half-Korean, half-American orphan, Flushing, Queens, is the place she’s been trying to escape from her whole life. Sardonic yet vulnerable, Jane toils, unappreciated, in her strict uncle’s grocery store and politely observes the traditional principle of nunchi (a combination of good manners, hierarchy, and obligation). Desperate for a new life, she’s thrilled to become the au pair for the Mazer-Farleys, two Brooklyn English professors and their adopted Chinese daughter. Inducted into the world of organic food co-ops and nineteenth–century novels, Jane is the recipient of Beth Mazer’s feminist lectures and Ed Farley’s very male attention. But when a family death interrupts Jane and Ed’s blossoming affair, she flies off to Seoul, leaving New York far behind.

Reconnecting with family, and struggling to learn the ways of modern-day Korea, Jane begins to wonder if Ed Farley is really the man for her. Jane returns to Queens, where she must find a balance between two cultures and accept who she really is. Re Jane is a bright, comic story of falling in love, finding strength, and living not just out of obligation to others, but for one’s self.

Journeying from Queens to Brooklyn to Seoul, and back, this is a fresh, contemporary retelling of Jane Eyre and a poignant Korean American debut.

Biracial Identity Development: A Case of Black-Korean Biracial Individuals in Korea

International Journal Multicultural Education
Volume 18, Number 3 (2016)
pages 40-57
DOI: 10.18251/ijme.v18i3.1193

Hyein Amber Kim, Lecturer in Korean Language
University of Washington

This study examines two cases of Black-Korean biracial individuals and 4 Black-Korean biracial public figures who were playing influential roles in South Korea (Yoon Mi-Rae, Hines Ward, Insooni, and Moon Taejong). The purpose of this study was to understand how Black-Korean biracial individuals construct their identities, how they navigate various identity options, and how they understand experiences they have in South Korea that are significant to their identity development. This study raises a number of issues in the Korean context where the ideology of a “pureblood” Korean race still prevails, and biracial Koreans continue to face implications of racism and colorism.

Read the entire article here.

Eyes Wide Cut: The American Origins of Korea’s Plastic Surgery Craze

The Wilson Quarterly
Fall 2015

Laura Kurek

South Korea’s obsession with cosmetic surgery can be traced back to an American doctor, raising uneasy questions about beauty standards.

At sixteen stories high, the doctor’s office looms over the neon-colored metropolis. Within the high-rise, consultation offices, operating rooms, and recovery suites occupy most floors. Additional floors house a dental clinic, a rooftop lounge, and apartments for long-term stays. This is Beauty Korea (BK), a one-stop, full-service plastic surgery facility in the heart of Seoul, South Korea.

South Korea has an obsession with plastic surgery. One in five South Korean women has undergone some type of cosmetic procedure, compared with one in twenty in the United States. With plastic surgery’s staggering rise in popularity, an attractive physical appearance is now the sine qua non for a successful career. Undergoing surgery to achieve an employable face in South Korea is just as commonplace as going to the gym in America.

The most popular surgery is Asian blepharoplasty, the process of changing the Asian eyelid, commonly referred to as the “monolid,” into a double eyelid. The second is rhinoplasty, or a nose job. The prevalence of these two procedures, especially the “double-eyelid” operation, has led to a delicate question: Are South Koreans are seeking to westernize their appearance? Cosmetic surgeons and scholars tread lightly around the issue. Some argue that Western culture — a broad and imperfect term — cannot claim “big eyes” as unique to its definition of beauty. Others note that only 50 percent of the Asian population is born with monolids. Some practitioners, including Dr. Hyuenong Park of OZ Cosmetic Clinic and Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Kenneth Steinsapir, deny altogether that double-eyelid surgery is intended to make its recipient appear more Western.

The story of an American surgeon in the postwar Korea of the 1950s, however, suggests otherwise…

Read the entire article here.