The First Amerasians: Mixed Race Koreans from Camptowns to America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2024)
In the years surrounding the Korean War, thousands of mixed race children were born to American military personnel and local women in the camptowns neighboring US bases. The First Amerasians tells the powerful, oftentimes heartbreaking story of how Americans created and used the concept of the Amerasian to remove these children from their mothers to adoptive US homes during the 1950s and 1960s. In recovering this history, Yuri W. Doolan reveals how the Amerasian is not simply a mixed race person fathered and abandoned by a US serviceman in Asia, nor a racial term used to describe individuals with one American and one Asian parent like its popular definition suggests. Rather, the Amerasian is a Cold War construct whose “rescue” has been utilized to repudiate accusations of US imperialism and achieve sentimental victories in the aftermath of wars not quite won by the military. From such constructions, Americans established various refugee, adoption, and immigration laws that would lead to the placement of Korean children in the United States and, later, mixed race Vietnamese and their relatives.
“As a biracial Korean American scholar, I thought I was familiar with my own history until I read Yuri Doolan's book. Written in clear, accessible language, The First Amerasians is a meticulously researched analysis of the geopolitical construction of the 'Amerasian' and an incisive critique of US humanitarianism after the Korean War. At turns subtle and scathing, this book exposes the violence beneath the rescue narratives and performs a kind of reparation for the families separated by that violence. It is a loving tribute to a people as much as it is an exceptional work of scholarship.”
— Grace M. Cho, Author of Tastes Like War
“The First Amerasians offers a bold counternarrative to existing discourses about the origins and impact of Korean transnational adoption. Yuri Doolan not only provides an eye-opening account of how mixed-race Korean children were separated from their first mothers, but also how their adoptions by foreign families left a fraught legacy that adopted individuals continue to grapple with today.”
— Deann Borshay Liem, Documentary filmmaker