- Author: Kim, Eunkyung
- Title: Doing Family, Undoing Family - Mixed Race Migration to the United States as a Cold War Event, Transnational Family Formation, and Performative “family practice”
- Language: Korean
- Journal: SARIM, The Historical Journal 87: 75-114
- Publication Year: 2024
- Publisher: Susonsa Hakhoe (Soosun Historical Association)
■ Abstract The conclusions of this study through the life histories of the interviewees are as follows. First, this study places the history of mixed-race migrants to the United States in the context of Cold War child migration and family separation, and critically explores its political and social context. In other words, their departure from their native Korea was not a natural outcome of the war, but a Cold War event. Second, I examined how migration to the United States was experienced as a family separation in their world of experience, and analyzed the reasons for the different motivations for migration. This shows that the abandonment or adoption of mixed-race children was not just a matter of Korean racism, unethical maternal attitudes, or the fact that the camp town was an unsuitable space for raising children, but rather a matter of non-normative family survival rights. Third, this study explores the lights and shadows of the postwar transnational family. It also examines the interviewees' “search for roots” in terms of the performative dimension of “doing family,” noting that their family reunions are not just “imaginary originals” that restore the family but create a new world. “Doing family” for the interviewees is the act of creating relationships such as HAPA community, which in turn is a “undoing family” that challenges the existing normative image of family.
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