Framed by War

Reviewed by: Framed by War: Korean Children and Women at the Crossroads of US Empire by Susie Woo Minju Bae (bio) Framed by War: Korean Children and Women at the Crossroads of US Empire, by Susie Woo. New York: New York University Press, 2019. 336 pp. $32.00 paper. ISBN: 9781479880539. For survivors, adoptees, descendants, and critical scholars of US empire and Korea, the “Forgotten War” has become a tired moniker for the Korean War. It is all around us, a precursor to the forever wars’ regime of US geopolitics. But Susie Woo’s Framed by War remembers some of the war’s most forgotten figures: Korean children and women. Rather than a study of battles or military officials, Woo’s work reveals the human impacts of militarism, particularly at the juncture where “violence and care became partners in US rule” (215). Woo demonstrates that “the United States was able to expand its reach to South Korea under the guise of familial care,” and military personnel, social workers, orphanage administrators, policy makers, and many others played a critical role in creating the benevolent façade of US interventionism (30). Woo’s book is a social history of Korean women and children in the wake of the war’s ceasefire that deftly articulates how the scripts about Koreans—as subjects to rescue, adopt, and assimilate—became the bedrock of US imperial dominance in the early Cold War, when the family became both imagined and embodied sites of US empire. Through close readings of magazines, print news, photographs, stock and scripted Department of Defense video footage, films, popular performances, family registries, and government records, Framed by War illustrates how Korean children and women became the subjects and symbols of war. By scripting Korean children as needy orphans, American nuclear families as racially tolerant saviors, and Korean women as assimilationist housewives, these narratives legitimized US intervention. Photographers and camera crew carefully choreographed, erased, or managed Korean children and women. But Woo also unveils unmanageable exceptions to these scripts. For example, the United States had to contend with Korean women who would marry American soldiers, pushing the boundaries of restrictive immigration policies. [End Page 141] Also, mixed-race children and prospective Black adoptive families destabilized notions of the American family. And then, stories about re-adoption were camera shy, unable to cohere to the tidy script of rescue. Woo underlines the intimate thoroughfares between violent juxtapositions: family separation and adoption, colonialism and humanitarianism, love and war. Studying US media portrayals of Korean children and women, Woo writes, “Americans who looked at these images saw hopeful beginnings; yet for the Korean children and women pictured, their arrival to the United States also meant their departure from Korea—a migration sparked not by the American Dream, but by the nightmare of war” (xv). Part 1, entitled “Imagined Family Frames,” reveals how an unpopular war exchanged the bombs of imperialism for the insidious violence of racial liberalism. Soldiers fed, employed, and claimed orphans of the Korean War. Woo writes, “Placing a small orphan under the care of a US serviceman helped to cushion the blow of the costly war” (21). Magazines and newsreels reinforced the imagery of children alone, homeless, and needy, persuading readers that US intervention was necessary. Individuals could sponsor a child—from a few meals to a year of financial support—contributing to the broader geopolitical agenda to thwart communist spread. Some Korean children portrayed tender US-South Korea relations. In the second chapter, Woo studies the role of the American-Korean Foundation’s Korean Children’s Choir and their 50-city tour through the United States, introducing Americans to Korean orphan children. Illustrated by the book’s cover, these choristers performed and invited American audiences to imagine Korean children in the United States more permanently, and the “responsibility of rescue shifted from US servicemen to average Americans” (58). In part 2, “International Cold War Families,” Woo demonstrates how the family became a site of US empire in Korea with the help of Christian missionaries, medical staff, administrators, social workers, individual donors, and wealthy philanthropists. Through adoptions and donations, American women could perform care for the victim-children of communist aggression. Woo points out

Ancient history · Comfort women · Empire · Geopolitics · Media studies · Militarism · Militarization · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies