| This year marks the 50th anniversary of adoption from South Korea and
during the past half century since the end of the Korean War, an estimated
200,000 children have been adopted into Caucasian families in the West;
more than half are now adults. Many of them today share stories of being
raised in white neighborhoods with very little exposure to Koreans or
other adoptees. Since the early 1990s, however, an active and growing
Korean adoptee subculture (including an efflorescence of cultural productions
in tandem with a self-conscious expansion of social practices) has taken
shape around this collective identity. Moreover, with a few thousand adoptees
returning to Korea every year, the proliferating connections among adoptees
have now become truly global. In Korea, the resignification and revaluation
of Korean adoptees, from pitiable orphans to enviable transnational subjects,
has emerged out of the conjuncture of Korea's rapid modernization and
adoptees coming of age as relatively privileged "flexible citizens."
Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted in South Korea and the U.S.,
I examine the translocal processes and practices that make this collective
Korean adoptee social formation a distinct diasporic and transnational
phenomenon.
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