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PYONGYANG
WATCH
Adopting, adapting:
Korean orphans
By Aidan
Foster-Carter
"Korea is one." Like most nationalist
pieties, this is false; or at best, it is wishful
thinking. For a start, Korea is two: tragically divided
since 1945. But it doesn't end there. Then comes the
Korean diaspora: 2 million in China, 1 million in the
United States, 700,000 in Japan, 500,000 in the ex-USSR
(mainly Central Asia), and so on. Except in Japan (for
xenophobic reasons), most are citizens of these
countries. After several generations many may not speak
Korean, know much about Korea or feel any identification
with the place. All this is normal, if sad to some eyes.
Just another of the myriad migrations that have shaped
our modern world.
One aspect of this phenomenon,
however, is peculiar to Korea - at least in scale. Of
about 5 million ethnic Koreans living outside the
peninsula, some 150,000 are adoptees. Starting
understandably in the chaos of the 1950-53 Korean War,
but continuing much more questionably to this day, South
Korea has exported babies on an industrial scale
unmatched anywhere else. There are almost 100,000
adopted Koreans in the US, and 50,000 more in Western
Europe. Peaking at 9,000 a year in the mid-1980s, when
South Korea was no longer a poor country, the flow still
continues at about 2,000 annually.
I owe these
figures to Tobias Hubinette of Stockholm University, who
is himself one of the 150,000 - of whom 20,000 are
Scandinavian - and is writing a thesis on the subject.
It is a fascinating tale, if also unsettling in several
senses. South Korea's first official program in the
1950s concentrated on mixed-race children both abandoned
by GI fathers and rejected by their mothers. If the
motive on one side was humanitarian - Harry Holt, a key
figure, founded what would become the world's largest
international adoption agency - then from the Korean end
it might equally be seen as a kind of ethnic cleansing.
To a Westerner, the way both Koreans and Japanese tend
to equate nation, race and "blood" is alarming.
From the 1960s the main source became single
mothers, in the maelstrom of early industrialization and
urbanization. Confucianism abhorred birth out of
wedlock, while notions of family bloodline precluded
in-country adoption even for "pure" Koreans - so abroad
they went. Park Chung-hee, the then dictator, saw South
Korea as overpopulated: he also sent miners and nurses
to Germany, fishermen to Argentina, even farmers to
Paraguay. Those schemes ended, but adoption acquired its
own momentum. Not until the 1988 Seoul Olympics put it
under a harsh spotlight did South Korea seek to cut back
on this particular export.
The shame that had
kept adoption out of the limelight also had a political
angle. North Korea, needless to say, used this trade as
yet another stick to beat the south. Hubinette quotes
the Pyongyang Times as castigating "the traitors of
South Korea, old hands at treacheries ... selling ...
tens of thousands of children going ragged and hungry to
foreign marauders under the name of 'adopted children'."
Of course the Korean War had produced orphans in
the North too. But Pyongyang's line, officially, was to
privilege them as children of heroes. Adoption was
encouraged; elite academies such as Mangyongdae
Revolutionary School trained them to be ultra-loyal to
the "fatherly leader". Hubinette is just as critical of
this policy - regarding it as dictatorial brainwashing
and child abuse - as of the South's export trade.
Moreover, Pyongyang's claiming the moral high
ground was hypocritical. It turns out that Kim Il-sung
too sent orphans to be adopted abroad, if in far smaller
numbers (2,500) and at the height of the Korean War.
Most (1,500) went to Romania - whose own orphanages,
decades later, would become notorious. Two hundred each
ended up in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria
and Mongolia. Hubinette reckons Russia and China took
some too. The latter during the war let more than
200,000 North Korean children go to school in the safety
of Manchuria - among them the young Kim Jong-il, like
his father before him.
That was then. Half a
century on, North Korea is again producing orphans; but
this time it has no plans for them, except repression.
The famine that since the mid-1980s has killed between 1
million and 3 million people - a staggering 5-12 percent
of the population - has created perhaps 200,000 orphans,
even though children and the old alike are its main
victims. These are the kotchebis ("swallows"):
the raggedy kids who scavenge in markets, unless caught
and sent to what are no better than prisons. These dire
places were one reason why some non-governmental
organizations, including Medecins sans Frontieres, have
quit North Korea. Conversely, Holt International is in
there: in readiness, Hubinette suggests, for a whole new
source of supply one day. Other kids, old before their
time, cross into China and hustle for money to send home
to their families - as seen in a searing series of films
by Jung-eun Kim, recently aired in the US on ABC's
Nightline.
I'm most grateful to Tobias
Hubinette for sharing his research (some interpretations
are mine; his paper on North Korean adoption will appear
in Critical Asian Studies). He, and a few others, are a
welcome fresh voice on the Korean scene: rightly
impatient of being cast as a walk-on in other people's
movies, be it liberal Western assimilationism or the
belated bear-hug of pan-Korean brotherhood. Drawing on
postcolonial theory, he wants to create a "third space":
to write his own script. It's well worth reading.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
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