T. R. Fehrenbach’s classic history of the Korean War, This Kind of War (1962), famously calls the conflict “not a test of power—because neither antagonist used full powers—but a test of wills.”1 Originally subtitled A Study in Unpreparedness, it describes a US that learned the hard way what it took to fight a limited proxy war abroad. The first chapter, “Seoul, Saturday Night,” recounts the eve of the Korean War in anticipatory detail, with the pathos of retrospective knowledge. Surveying the American colony and its embassy bars, the narrator observes:
Over tax-free liquor, the colony laughed over Foster’s [John Foster Dulles] visit, and over the official who had been caught keeping North Korea’s Number One female spy. This man had even bought the woman a short-wave radio, and it was said the ROK’s would shoot her.
In spite of American influence, the ROK’s were still extremely brutal to leftist elements in their midst. Of course, they could not shoot the American official.
There had been a child, towheaded yet, the American wives in Seoul told each other. Some American couple would, of course, adopt it.2
The final sentence of this anecdote appears to end this story of sex, violence, and treason rather matter-of-factly. Though Fehrenbach often sums up other passages with quotable philosophical adages, this sentence is not one. As a line of free indirect discourse, it offers complexity rather than a voice of clear moral insight. Does it belong to the American wives, retaining the previous sentence’s whisper of scandal? Or has the omniscient historian picked up the thread here, returning us to a world of objective fact? And what about the “would” of “would adopt it”? If part of the local gossip, the adoption could range from speculative to probable; if spoken from the narrator’s present, it would be a fait accompli. Regardless, adoption is figured here as a thing taken for granted. As a geopolitical solution, its potential ramifications are dismissed in their very expression.
The vagueness of agency and moral reasoning in this sentence reflects the historical formalization of transnational adoption. Between the dual narrative temporalities of this sentence as character speech and historian’s narration, adoption of these “towheaded,” mixed-race children would transition from an informal possibility to an established practice of moving children across borders, from a collection of ad hoc processes to a matter overseen by social welfare professionals and immigration services. In the years to come, transnational adoption would prove an established option for modern family-making in the West and part of America’s humanitarian repertoire in subsequent conflicts. Korea, too, would continue to be one of the top “sending countries” of children to the US, with an estimated ten percent of all Korean Americans having been adopted from abroad.3