Nationalism, Subalternity, and the Adopted Koreans

Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, more than 160,000 Korean children have been adopted to fifteen Western countries. The United States has taken in two thirds, while the rest are spread out in northwestern Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. During recent years, overseas adopted Koreans have increasingly turned up in various Korean popular cultural works including musicals, comics, pop songs, television dramas, and feature films. This article looks specifically at representations of female overseas adoptees in four Korean feature films: Chang Kil-su's Susanne Brink's Arirang (1991), Park Kwang-su's Berlin Report (1991), Kim Ki-duk's Wild Animals (1997), and Lee Jang-soo's Love (1999). At the end, the adopted Koreans are conceptualized as subaltern bodies, once commodified and disposable and now deprived of their voices and turned into mute artifacts of patriarchal nationalist ideology.

International Adoption from Korea and the Korean Adoption Issue

International adoption from Korea originated as a rescue mission after the Korean War, organized by Western individuals and agencies to adopt mixed race children, who were the products of large-scale sexual exploitation caused by massive foreign military presence.¹ Under the authoritarian regimes between 1961 and 1987, when Korea's rapid and brutal modernization process took place, children of young factory workers who were relinquished and abandoned because of urban poverty replaced the war orphans.² International adoption was used as a method of decreasing the numbers in an overpopulated country, as a child welfare practice to avoid costly institutional care, and as a goodwill strategy to develop political ties to and trade relations with important Western allies. Particularly during the 1980s, the military government created a thriving and profitable adoption industry with close to 70,000 international placements, and the Korean adoption agencies were allowed to compete with each other to track down unrestricted numbers of adoptable children. In the 1980s, Korea had accomplished a reasonable economic wealth, and from then on, the children dispatched overseas were increasingly categorized as illegitimate since they were born to middle-class high school or college students.³

In 1988, the Seoul Olympic Games showcased a newly democratized and industrialized Korea to the world. Western journalists suddenly started to write about the country's adoption program and designated Korea as the leading global exporter of children. The unexpected attention was deeply humiliating and painful for the proud host country, and as a result of the negative foreign media coverage Korean society was finally forced to address the problem in public. Ever since, the adoption issue has been haunting Korea as a recurrent subject in media and popular culture, turning up time and again in editorials and columns, and in such diverse genres as novels and poems, children's books and comics, television dramas and plays, and popular songs and feature films. Still, every year more than 2,000 Korean children leave the country for international adoption, all born at secluded maternity homes belonging to the adoption agencies both to secure a steady supply of healthy infants for an insatiable adoption market in the West and to uphold the norms of a rigid patriarchal system within the country itself.

Representing Adopted Korean Women in Korean Feature Films

The very existence of adopted Koreans threatens Korean patriarchal values, as the adoptees in their Westernized state challenge prescribed Confucian ideals of female chastity. This is the point of departure for my analysis of the four feature films. These readings are based on nationalism studies by Nira Yuval-Davis and other feminist scholars, who argue that modern nation-states are profoundly gendered in the sense that the nation is often embodied as a woman.⁴ The nation imagined as a female body gives rise to strong familial connotations and it becomes the task of male power to rescue and defend her. As international adoption is perceived to intrude upon and disrupt both the nation and the family, especially female adopted Koreans become a matter of strong nationalist concern.

Susanne Brink's Arirang, released in 1991 and directed by respected filmmaker Chang Kil-su, is the most famous of all...