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ADOPTED TERRITORY: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging. By Eleana J. Kim. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. xviii, 320 pp. (Tables, B&W photos.) US$23.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-4695-1.
The full story of South Korea's overseas adoption program, which has been going on since the end of the Korean War in 1953, and which is by far the longest running adoption program in modern history involving perhaps as many as 200,000 adoptions, has not yet been written, although several smaller attempts have been made including a chapter in my own publication Comforting an Orphaned Nation (2006). Even if the annual absolute numbers have decreased after democratization and the record high adoption statistics during the military regimes of the 1970s and 1980s, South Korea is still one of the main sending countries in the world for transnational and transracial adoptees to the West. This massive forced child migration, involving more than 15 Western host countries, has largely taken place in the shadow of South Korea's postwar modernization process, and is today seen as a painful reminder of the country's dependency on the West. Even if North Korea has stopped accusing its southern neighbour of selling Korean children to white imperialists, the overseas adoption program and all its implications-which is usually summed up as...