Mixed Race Studies

Alternate lives: Korean orphans’ quests for answersAlternate lives: Korean orphans’ quests for answers

France 24
2019-08-23

Seoul (AFP)

On a summer’s day in 1985 a seven-year-old boy sat alone at a crowded bus station in Seoul, sobbing as he waited desperately for his mother to return.

Jo Youn-hwan was wearing a baseball uniform that his mother had bought him a few days before — the only gift she had ever given him.

She told him to wait for her before leaving him at the terminal. So he did, increasingly terrified as day turned to dusk.

“I’ll be a really good kid if only she chooses to return,” he promised himself, over and over again. “I’ll be a really, really good kid.”

She never did…

…International adoption from South Korea began after the Korean War as a way to remove mixed-race children, born to local mothers and American GI fathers, from a country that emphasized ethnic homogeneity.

More recently the main driver has been babies born to unmarried women, who still face ostracism in a patriarchal society, and according to historians, are often forced to give up their children.

Most children remain institutionalised till adulthood as many South Koreans are reluctant to adopt. The country has sent some 180,000 children overseas over the years, mostly to the US…

Read the entire article here.

Are you a halfie?

The Korea Times
2019-05-13

David Tizzard

Sunya (left), Loren (right) and their two children Anika and Neptune.

Since the mid-20th century, South Korea has clung to a message of homogeneity and race as a cornerstone of its national identity. It has advocated genetic purity (and at times superiority) as it looks in the geopolitical mirror and asks the most existential of questions.

Yet the story delivered through school text books and the broader public consciousness has often come into conflict with the reality of history. It also ignores the generations of halfies living both here and abroad, often the product of the tragic Korean War that tore the peninsula in two.

While that particular conflict is labeled “the forgotten war,” many see halfies as “the forgotten race.” Throughout the early years the first generations faced discrimination, sometimes growing up in single-parent households, orphaned, or simply socially reviled.

To be a halfie anywhere is difficult. To be a halfie in Korea is a tale unto itself…

Read the entire article here

Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in South Korean Media

Palgrave Macmillan
2018
231 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-65773-8
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-88102-7
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-65774-5

Ji-Hyun Ahn, Assistant Professor of Communication
University of Washington, Tacoma

• The first monograph to examine mixed-race politics in contemporary South Korean media
• Utilizes a critical media/cultural studies approach that engages with and connects materials from archives, the popular press, policy documents, television commercials, and television programs as an inter-textual network
• Analyzes cases ranging from media representation of globally recognized mixed-race figures to figures on reality television

This book studies how the increase of visual representation of mixed-race Koreans formulates a particular racial project in contemporary South Korean media. It explores the moments of ruptures and disjuncture that biracial bodies bring to the formation of neoliberal multiculturalism, a South Korean national racial project that re-aligns racial lines under the nation’s neoliberal transformation. Specifically, Ji-Hyun Ahn examines four televised racial moments that demonstrate particular aspects of neoliberal multiculturalism by demanding distinct ways of re-imagining what it means to be Korean in the contemporary era of globalization. Taking a critical media/cultural studies approach, Ahn engages with materials from archives, the popular press, policy documents, television commercials, and television programs as an inter-textual network that actively negotiates and formulates a new racialized national identity. In doing so, the book provides a rich analysis of the ongoing struggle over racial reconfiguration in South Korean popular media, advancing an emerging scholarly discussion on race as a leading factor of social change in South Korea.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• The New Face of Korea
• From National Threat to National Hero
• Consuming Cosmopolitan White(ness)
• Televising the Making of the Neoliberal Multicultural Family
• This Is (not) Our Multicultural Future

Kopino Children: Half Korean, Half Filipino, Fatherless

Korea Exposé
2017-12-07

Raphael Rashid

Cover image: Filipino mother holding Kopino child (Source: KBS 1 documentary “Searching for Runaway Father“)

Kristi, 23, met a South Korean man in the city of Makati, Philippines, through a blind date. “It was love at first sight. We were dating for a few months. Soon enough, I found out he was already married with kids. It broke my world so I decided to end it there.”

But things didn’t work out for Kristi: Shortly after their break-up, she realized she was pregnant. “He told me ‘Don’t worry I’m here for you, I won’t leave you,’ but one month before giving birth, he just disappeared.”

It’s a recurring theme: South Korean men go to the Philippines, have relationships of varying degrees of commitment with local women, father children, and then at one point or another flee back to South Korea severing all ties and leaving the mothers alone with the children…

Read the entire article here.

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

Meet South Korea’s first black model Han Hyun-min

BBC News
2017-07-11

In South Korea, children of mixed race can be called “mongrels“. But Han Hyun-min didn’t let racism stop him.

Watch the video here.

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.