Purifying Blood: Scientific Surveys and Medical Definitions of “Mixed-Blood” Koreans Free

Abstract

This article examines the medicoscientific construction of “mixed blood” as a legible racial category in Cold War South Korea to understand how scientists and doctors worked to create a normative “pure-blood” national subject, on the one hand, while marginalizing racially and sexually “impure bloods” on the other. Born from the postwar US military occupation of South Korea, Amerasian “mixed-blood” (honhyǒl) children threatened a postcolonial commitment to ethnic homogeneity that was championed by scientists intent on isolating “Korean blood” by biologically defining, medically pathologizing, and legally disowning “mixed bloods.” This article explores the interconnected racial projects of making “Koreans” and “mixed Koreans” during the Cold War decades in which American military personnel and their progeny transformed from a temporary exigency to a permanent fixture on the peninsula. By concentrating on medicoscientific experiments and surveys conducted on Amerasian children at orphanages, segregated “mixed-blood” schools, and criminal detention centers, the author demonstrates how serological, physiognomic, and pathological studies worked in concert with legal rubrics of citizenship and national belonging to define and exclude these proximate racial others from the putatively homogeneous national body. In so doing, the article integrates and expands on scholarship in Korean studies and science, technology, medicine, and society (STMS) studies that have respectively illuminated the rise of ethnonationalism in modern Korean identity and the role of race science in postcolonial nation-building. A mixed-race–centered narrative of South Korea's Cold War pursuit of scientific modernity reveals how pathologizing “mixed bloods” proliferated newly biologized understandings of South Korea as a “pure-blood” nation that continue to resonate in state policies and personal relations today.

In 1974, a mixed-race teenager named Sue was interviewed by a foreign journalist writing an article on Korea's community of Amerasians—persons of mixed parentage fathered by American servicemen in Asian postings.¹ Described as a “tall, round-eyed and extremely western looking white-Korean girl,” the seventeen-year-old responded to the reporter's questioning by “angrily” protesting the litany of interviews, interrogations, and surveys that she and others like her had been subjected to since childhood. “Why all these questions?” She demanded, recalling a parade of “journalists or social workers or whatever they call them” surveilling Korean Amerasians like “strange animals” throughout their lives. “Why should we always be victims of all this questioning? We have had enough of that during our childhood.” The interviewer, Sue charged, was simply the latest in a long string of “experts” honing their craft on the bodies of exceptionalized mixed-race children. At this point, the journalist regretfully reported, “It was obvious that Sue felt that she was speaking on behalf of her Amerasian sisters and she became very upset and refused to cooperate further” (Moen 1974).

In the decades after Korea's liberation, this regime of routinized examination and intensive surveillance described by Sue expanded in response to the boom of mixed-race births around American military bases in South Korea. The emergence of mixed-race Koreans as a core concern, rather than a peripheral affair, by state agents and institutional accomplices might seem surprising on its face. Ethnic homogeneity, after all, has long been a core pillar of the modern conception of Korean identity, that imaginary distilled into an ever-tighter community in response to waves of foreign invasions and occupations (Pai 2000; Schmid 2002; Shin 2006). Mixed race has little place in the mainstream “story” of Korea, and each generational iteration of mixed race tends to be seen as a novel departure from the purportedly timeless pattern of unadulterated monoracialism in generations past.² Meanwhile, the voices of mixed-race Koreans like Sue addressing their own experiences remain exceedingly rare both in the historical record and among researchers authorized to interpret it.³

Although mixed-race Koreans have historically been excluded from the national narrative by the homogeneous terms of modern Korean identity, they are by no means absent from the archival corpus of state records, medical journals, and sociological surveys. In contrast to the silencing of mixed-Korean voices (and accompanying denial of subjecthood), mixed-Korean bodies lie littered across the archive in segmented and quantified parts, from the sizes of skulls and teeth measured in one journal to the typology of hair and skin charted in another. Far from erasure, the conjoined Cold War projects of defining “Koreanness” in scientifically objective terms and expunging potential racial pollutants from the desired homogeneous national body demanded the careful identification, categorization, and definition of non-Korean otherness. Imbued with the necessary empirical authority, biological and social scientists rose to the task by producing a barrage of data on mixed-race physiognomy and psychology. In the process, these researchers produced not only a pathologized notion of mixed race but also, by corollary, a newly biologized understanding of normative Koreanness.

Exploring Korean identity formation from the perspective of mixed race underlines the centrality of racial hybridity to the construction of racial purity, on the one hand, while also highlighting the persistence of eugenics in national sciences despite increased globalization in the latter half of the twentieth century, on the other. Korean studies literature has traced the origins of Korean claims to ethnic homogeneity to the colonial period, demonstrating how an anticolonial nationalist discourse of shared bloodline that arose in response to foreign incursion led directly to postcolonial political doctrines that grounded each Korean state's claim to be the rightful unifier of the peninsula (Schmid 2002; Shin 2006). In linking the anti-Japanese context of pre-1945 anticolonial nationalism to the pro-Unification spirit of post-1945 ethnic nationalism, such studies underscore the significance of the unambiguously “them” and despite-division-still “us” to modern Korean identity.

In the decades after liberation, however, the main focus of Korean racial anxiety and the subject of South Korean identity consolidation efforts were not absolute racial others but, rather, racial proximates—that is, those whose inheritance of the “one bloodline” (hanp'itchul) was mixed with outside racial stock.⁴ In this racial schema, which expanded on the legacy of colonial racial constructions outlined in the editors’ introduction to this forum, Korean national identity was articulated as a distinct racial type that cohered across the political division of the peninsula and diaspora beyond the peninsula, on the one hand, while also distinguishing and defending the putative Korean race from external bloodlines (Black, white, or non-Korean Asian) identified as outside races, on the other. So-called mixed bloods (honhyǒl) therefore threatened to undermine the premise of the “one people” (ilmin) propounded by nation builders like president Syngman Rhee, who asserted a form of Korean identity bound by an unbroken five-thousand-year bloodline dating back to Tan'gun, the mythical progenitor (Oh 2015: 54). Whereas identifying and excluding non-Koreans was relatively simple, dealing with near-Koreans proved a thornier issue. The Korean parentage of “mixed bloods” was undeniable, but acknowledging them threatened to concede the integrity of a core pillar of the Korean nation to the compromises of racial hybridity. Ultimately, the near-but-not nature of mixed race compelled a coalition of politicians, scientists, and educators aligned around a shared nation-building project to create a new category of racial alterity, “mixed blood,” thereby catalyzing a new conception of Koreans as “pure bloods” (sunhyǒl) in modern, medicoscientific terms.

Meanwhile, attending to the role of scientists in pathologizing mixed-race Koreans foregrounds the persistence of eugenic epistemes in ethnicity-based national identities well into the late twentieth century. The current worldwide wave of reactionary ethnic nationalisms has been viewed with alarm by celebrants of economic globalization who previously assumed that the expansion of multinational corporations, internationalization of supply, production, and distribution chains, and proliferation of cross-border movement and transnational identities would inevitably undercut nationalist focus on local differences, particularly those putatively expressed in physical markers like race (Rose 2001; Stern 2015). But the trajectory of ethnic nationalism in Korea, where scientific development did not undercut but, rather, marshaled ethnocentrism to evolve into “bionationalism,” can be read as a demonstrative example of an underappreciated global trend (Gottweis and Kim 2009). That is, the very interconnectivities that enabled the transfer of scientific research and technologies also facilitated the purposing of these methods toward reinforcing national identities set by colonial conditions. The “resurgence” of eugenic epistemologies and ethnic nationalisms, seen from the postcolonial periphery, emerges less as a regression than as the natural progression of the meeting of imperialism, scientism, and technologism in the modern era (DiMoia 2013; Hyun 2015; C. Kim 2017).

Finally, demonstrating that the process of making an exceptionalized other was central to constructing an ideal national self pushes back against the marginalization of mixed-raceness in historiographies of racialization and nation building in favor of accounts that enunciate the constructedness of majority or minority identities within and beyond Korea. To be mixed race is to be always in the minority but never of the minority. It is that very existential condition of perpetual residence at the edges of socially constructed categories that makes mixed-race persons a threat to social order. Race as a governing hegemony, as noted by this forum's editors, relies on the fiction of biological essentialism—a fiction reproduced and made socially real through reading racial identities onto bodies based on their presentation and performance. As Sandra Mayzaw Lwin explains with regard to intertwined Black-Asian racialization in the United States, social hierarchies built on this “system of racial meaning” (Omi and Winant 1986: 63) hinge on “learning how to read or decode bodies, how to translate a certain shade of skin, shape of lip, or eye or nose. . . . It means knowing how to ‘race’ a person” (Lwin 2006: 24) and, in so doing, accrete to the racially corporealized subject what Frantz Fanon (1967: 111) describes as “a historico-racial schema . . . woven . . . out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories.” But what happens when bodies do not conform to expected racial categories or do not demonstrate clear racial markers? What happens when what is seen on the outside does not make transparent the putative biological essence contained within? How can a society built on the presumption of timeless racial homogeneity read and respond to bodies without reliable visual referents or the historical meanings that go with them?

Phenotype may be the primary external indicator of race, but racial ideologies are built on assertions of biological essence that lie hidden below the surface. As noted by the editors in the forum introduction, the study of race in Asia contends with the paradoxical possibility that bodies may be phenotypically indistinguishable but racially distinct. Likewise, Lwin (2006: 24) reminds us that mixed race challenges optical racial regimes because “bodily markers are unreliable. The exterior is not always a guarantee of the interior; what we see may not always be what we get.” In the South Korean response to such unreliable bodies in the postwar decades, we see the scaffolding of a racial order in a putatively monoracial state that set the template for immigration, citizenship, and Korean identity (Ahn 2018; Choo 2016; J. Lee 2010). Through the case of the postwar generation of mixed-race Koreans, this study therefore broadly asserts that mixed-raceness should be the central heuristic, rather than a tangential curiosity, in mainstream scholarly discussions on modern racial orders because it uniquely undercuts the concept of biological race while also highlighting the inescapability of racial constructs in the lived experiences of those whose very existence exposes the falsity of the modern concept of race (Anzaldúa 1987; Joseph-Salisbury 2018; Tate 2019).

The Problem of “Mixed Blood”

The first generation of so-called Amerasian mixed bloods was seen by South Koreans as a “new” population produced by the post-Liberation development of an unofficial system of regulated prostitution for American military servicemen stationed in Korean camptowns. The perception of Amerasians as a new and anomalous race must be understood in the context of rapid political and social changes on the peninsula in the wake of its liberation from Japanese colonization, division into northern and southern spheres of foreign occupation, and the Korean War. Against the backdrop of mass displacements of the Korean population and the movement of foreign forces into the peninsula, the camptown institutionalization of intimate contacts between Koreans and foreigners, predicated on an unequal balance of power, provoked anxieties about Korean sovereignty that were grafted onto the bodies of camptown women and Amerasian children (K. Moon 1997; S. Moon and Höhn 2010).

The first generation of Amerasian mixed bloods was consequently seen by South Koreans as a “new” population produced by the postwar development of an unofficial system of regulated prostitution for American military servicemen stationed in Korean camp towns. The sex-work sector catering to foreign soldiers was both politically expedient and economically profitable, but Korean camp-town women were denigrated as a “national shame” (I. Lee 2004; K. Moon 1997). The mixed-race children born to camptown couples were therefore doubly unacceptable—as the children of foreign fathers in a paternalist society, on the one hand, and Korean women considered unfit reproductive subjects, on the other. As a 1969 editorial in the daily newspaper Maeil kyǒngje described them, camptown progeny were “fatherless waifs no different than the second-hand GI rags that they are raised in. They have no paternity, no lineage, and as the root of their mothers’ misfortune they have no future to look forward to.” Together, the sins of the mother and the foreignness of the father undercut the moral and physical potential of the children and marked them as the historically anomalous product of “monstrous intimacies” (Sharpe 2010).

Social approbation, however, bowed to defense imperatives, and as US troops in Korea swelled during the Korean War, so too did the number of mixed-race births, along with frequent instances of abandonment, infanticide, and so-called blonde-baby lynchings in the ever-expanding camp-town environs (A. Kim 2009; Oh 2015). In the decades after the war, interracial unions and their mixed-race by-products became prominent subjects of national concern as policy makers and public intellectuals alike sought to identify the roots of and propose solutions to the “mixed-blood” problem. Such pundits traced the “historical” advent of a mixed-race population in Korea to the moral degradations of the post-Korean War climate, characterizing mixed-race children as regrettable result of “female immorality,” “social disorder and gender equality,” and “the sinful indulgence of vanity and vice” (Tonga ilbo1947; Chosǒn ilbo1946). Social disapprobation of camp-town sex workers notwithstanding, the perceived political and economic imperatives of the military sex industry guaranteed its survival and the continued growth of a “mixed-blood” population. Consequently, serious efforts to solve the “mixed-blood problem” concentrated not on reforming the system that produced them but, rather, on scientifically defining, quantifying, and regulating mixed Koreans in relation to “true” Koreans.

Defining Mixed Blood

Cold War scientific studies of mixed blood were collaborations between the state and government-funded academic research institutes, with the ultimate goal of producing knowledge in order to enact policy. Beginning in the mid-1950s after the Korean War and continuing in force through the late 1970s with the end of Park Chung Hee's regime, sociological and biological surveys registered biometric data on “mixed-blood” lineages, physiognomy, development, and environments.⁵ Such studies were supported indirectly by government funding via state-sponsored research institutes, and their results informed policy making, particularly around the recognition of personhood in medical contexts and defining the legislative terms of national inclusion (Kukka in'gwǒn wiwǒnhoe2003; Chaewoe tongp'o chaedan2007). The absence of a clear and legible precedent for identifying the social position of mixed-race persons and the “vacillation” of mixed-Korean bodies between racial categories generated institutional unease because state agents, as Judith Butler has said of bodies that trouble binary gender categories, “[could not] with surety read the body that [they saw].” This failure of “staid and usual cultural perceptions” compelled the state to collaborate with scientific researchers to create a new racial category particular to the Korean context (Butler 1999: xxii–xxiii).

Invariably, studies of “mixed bloods” presented their subjects as both novel and dangerous—a statistically significant divergence from the five-thousand-year unbroken Korean bloodline (Chang 1962). “The rising number of these historical anomalies,” cautioned Seoul National University pathologist Yu Yangsǒk (1966) in a typical introduction, “is cause for alarm.” This claim was, of course, patently untrue. Amerasians were neither the first mixed-race Koreans in the peninsula's history nor even the first Korean-American mixed-race persons, with marriages between Korean men and missionary women dating back to the early twentieth century (Fujitani 2011; Teng 2013).⁶ But in the context of postcolonial racial anxieties and persistent eugenic influences, it became imperative to catalog exactly how these Korean-adjacent bodies could influence the national community as a whole, giving rise to a scientific field of “mixed-blood” study dedicated to observing and defining this new population in relation to a normative Korean racial identity. State-sponsored scientists therefore conducted behavioral, biological, and physiognomic surveys on mixed-race children, registering their lineages, anatomy, development, and environments. Referring to blood as the origin of racial identity and determinant of racial fate, Korean scientists reproduced a eugenic system of blood quantification and colonial order of racial hypodescent. In this way, the threat mixed race existentially posed to reproductive and racial timelines was made manageable by categorizing “mixed blood” as the root of biological difference and pathologizing it as a category of disability.

To this end, researchers developed a methodological formula to seal mixed blood within legible parameters within which they could catalog and identify generalizable characteristics. In this, they reproduced a scientific “fiction of miscegenation” that “posited a finite number of ‘pure’ races” and “held that racial purity could and should be protected” (Pascoe 2009: 7). Paired with the principle of calculable blood quantum, the principle of racial purity suggested the possibility of a system for classifying amalgamated blood according to contributing types in varying proportions. At Seoul National University and Yonsei University, professors and graduate students in the fields of pathology, physical anthropology, and dermatology created three main categories: “White-Korean,” “Black-Korean,” and “Yellow-Korean” mixed blood, concentrating particularly on the first two groups (Chang 1961, 1962; Yi 1975; Yu 1966). Reproducing the fiction of finite racial purity, the non-Korean halves of these combinations were presented as homogeneous racial entities. Taken at face value, the facticity of whiteness and Blackness remained uninterrogated. Meanwhile, the Korean half of the formula was subject to intense scrutiny, as researchers asked how a mixed version of Koreanness altered its purer form. “Korean” consistently occupied the control group position, but baseline averages for this group differed from study to study, demonstrating the danger that the normative and putatively constant category of “Korean” was prone to vacillation, vulnerable to change, and ultimately in danger of erosion.⁷ To researchers, the Korean constitution was like a pool of water, into which paints of various colors were being poured. As an outside agent, the paint without was left unchanged, but the pool was dyed forever. That is, while whiteness and Blackness were seen as unaffected external additives, Koreanness as a static constant was inherently vulnerable to alteration.

As researchers developed a vocabulary of distinct racial bloods, they confronted the challenge of articulating the effect that the fractionalization of blood had on racial constitutions. Biological and physiognomic studies followed the standard eugenic formula for evaluating mixed-raceness as evolutionary movement up or down the ladder of racial hierarchy, as either hybrid vigor or, more commonly, hybrid degeneration. In the first camp, Yonsei University serologist Yi Samyǒl stood alone in advocating limited forms of racial hybridization to improve the Korean race. Based on his blood-type surveys of blood he drew from white-Korean children and Korean women pregnant by white men, Yi argued that white-Korean reproduction offered a path to racial improvement by moving the nation closer to the racial pinnacle of whiteness (Hyun 2018; Yi 1975). Yi's commitment to a specific form of hybrid vigor, however, was married to his belief that all nonwhite blood mixing resulted in hybrid degeneration—a conviction rooted in a eugenicist approach to racial miscegenation shared by others (Pascoe 2009).

The belief that race mixing was degenerative was bolstered by surveys quantifying blood type, skin pigmentation, anatomy and physiognomy, growth and maturation rate, and such race markers as Mongolian spots and epicanthic eyelid folds. Figure 1 reproduces one example of the detailed measurements of the mixed-blood body that contributed to such studies. There seemed to be no limit to physical characteristics that could be quantified to ascertain the degree of difference between racial populations.

A partial list of the physical features that researchers measured, cataloged, and compared across survey populations of mixed-blood subjects is detailed in table 1. The prolific collection of data by mixed-blood researchers down to the most minute details fell into four primary categories: racial identifiers, color scales, skeletal structures and body measurements, and cranial structures and facial features. In the first category, surveys interrogated the relative durability of racial identity by checking for features associated with Asian racialization, such as the incidence of mono or double eyelids. Ironically, many of the markers examined in this vein, such as the Mongolian spot and Mongolian fold,⁸ drew on colonial epistemes deployed to demonstrate the racial atavism of a homogenized “Mongol” Asian racial family (Keevak 2011). Alongside features thought to explicitly identify race, relative degrees of coloring, stature, and facial physiognomy were averaged to determine population-wide characteristics in opposition to a normative Korean racial constitution.⁹ Drawing on the notoriously inexact science of measuring skin color, researchers used color slides to determine the skin color spectrum of mixed-blood subjects, focusing on areas with less exposure to direct sunlight, such as the medial upper arm, to ascertain “true” base colors (Keevak 2011; C. Pak 2012). Meanwhile, measurements of skeletal and cranial structures fetishized proportion by comparing the degree of torso length to total height or bizygomatic (the measure of facial width between the most lateral points of the zygomatic cheekbone arches) to bigonial (the measure of the diameter between the most lateral points of the gonia, or jawbone) between mixed-blood and pure-blood Koreans to argue that the former exhibited a deterioration from the ideal physical proportions of the latter (Chang 1962; Chǒnghwan Lee 1963; Nam 1966; N. Pak 1969; Yi 1975). The fractionalization of mixed-blood bodies into measurable parts derived from and mirrored the process of naming mixed race on the basis of separable and quantifiable bloodlines, and the conclusions drawn from these data, in turn, facilitated the translation of these surveys from biological research into the establishment of a medical category of disability.

Named mixed blood, categorized as a disabled race, and defined as a pressing threat to “pure” Korean racial integrity, mixed-blood Koreans were made subject to processes of political determination. This determination was enacted through a state drive to address the threat of mixed blood in Amerasians through a comprehensive and ongoing project to identify, remove, and erase the threat of this new racial type in a potent program of targeted ethnic cleansing.

Policing “Mixed Bloods”

Eugenic studies of mixed blood critically informed a policy agenda towards mixed blood that extended not only throughout the Korean Peninsula but also across the Pacific. The tables of statistical data, physical measurements, and diagnoses of disability authored by researchers of mixed blood were reproduced in South Korean professional journals and popular periodicals but also reappeared in publications aimed at Americans invested in the “mixed-blood problem” (Moen 1974). If we draw back the curtain of scientific objectivity that obscured human networks and connections from eugenic Korean research on mixed blood, it is not surprising that these studies were reproduced and shared outside South Korea. The mixed-blood Koreans surveyed for these studies—reduced to “materials” identified by age, sex, and racial type (most commonly “White-Korean” and “Negro-Korean”)—were drawn by researchers from institutions designed to provide medical support and attend to the social well-being of mixed-race children. Far from insulating mixed-blood Koreans from social scrutiny, these social-welfare centers functioned as concentrated sites of disciplinary governance and political oversight and served as the foremost furnishers of bodies for testing and sampling by researchers. Welfare providers, such as hospitals, orphanages and adoption agencies, mixed-blood schools and charities, and juvenile detention centers, granted access to their charges—called “materials” in scientific surveys—with the expectation that the research results would validate and promote their existence.¹⁰ The practices engaged in by researchers to acquire “sample materials” through these mixed-blood concentration centers, the social agendas set forth based on models of racialized pathology, and the investment in these agendas by the South Korean government and American adoption agencies orchestrated a program of disenfranchisement and expulsion from the peninsula.

On the peninsular side, social scientists took up the pathologies propounded by biological researchers to expound policy recommendations aimed at segregating mixed-blood Koreans from the ethnic nation and disenfranchising them from the entitlements of state citizenship. To make broad claims, sociological and psychological studies surveyed broad populations. The reliance of physical surveys on data averaging had already assembled a relatively large pool for social scientists to return to. One study comparing the interdental palette tone of “White-Koreans” and “Black-Koreans” drew its data from “844 Koreans (425 boys, 419 girls), 186 Korean-white mixed-bloods (96 boys, 90 girls) and 119 Korean-black mixed-bloods (60 boys, 59 girls)” between the ages of 7 and 12 who were “registered at Ch'unghyǒn Orphanage, Holt Adoption Agency, Yǒnghwa Elementary School, and It'aewǒn Elementary School.” Likewise, a biometric study surveyed “197 Korean-white mixed-bloods (110 boys, 87 girls)” from “Ch'unghyǒn Orphanage, Sǒngyuk Orphanage, Holt Adoption Agency, mixed-bloods enrolled at Yǒnhapsǒngja Academy, and mixed-bloods who visited the dermatology department and Catholic University Hospital” in order to properly map the “mixed-bloods scattered around Seoul” (Chang 1962; Nam 1966). As outlined in the methodology reports of such studies, institutional complicity was crucial to collecting data in such significant numbers. Whether housed in orphanages or adoption agencies, attending school, or seeking medical care, mixed-blood Korean children were constantly subjected to medical and social surveillance.

While biologists and physiognomists examined the degenerative dangers hidden within mixed-race bodies, social scientists considered the threat that degraded mixed-race psychology posed to the Korean nation. Such studies drew a direct line between social conditions and developmental patterns, particularly with regard to psychological stability and sexual deviance. Sociomedical surveys of mixed-race Koreans took the overdetermined association between mixed blood and camptown sex work as their starting point, tracing a causal connection between what one public health adviser declared to be “the relationship between the two problems . . . of pervasive female prostitution and mixed bloods” (Chǒnghwan Lee 1963). Based on this starting assumption, “social medical” surveys set about constructing subject profiles of pathological hypersexuality and juvenile delinquency rooted in genetic predisposition compounded by the neurological effects of poverty, transitory habitation, and low education.

The presumed relationship between sex work and mixed race deeply impacted the methodology, execution, and conclusions reached by sociomedical studies. Researchers assumed a standard pattern of parentage—foreign father and Korean sex-worker mother—and accordingly recorded the father's nationality, education level, and occupation but only noted the mother's level of education in surveys into “typical mixed-blood” living conditions. The emphasis on racial and moral deviance in social science surveys expressed the imbrication of private and public spaces under postwar South Korean recovery and development regimes. Liminal mixed-race Korean children and the transgressive cross-race relations that conceived them upset the ideal order of private domiciles, the public sphere, and a symbiotic relationship cultivated between them under the auspices of what Charles Kim (2017) has conceptualized as a prevailing concern with “wholesome modernization” in Cold War South Korea, with one representative study describing transitory patterns of family cohabitation (23.6 percent of respondents reported that parents cohabitated for 3–6 months, while only 3 percent reported cohabitation lasting over one year) negatively compared to “normal” long-term family living arrangements (Chǒnghwan Lee 1963).

Social psychologists rounded out the “mixed-blood” research program, which began at the anatomical level and extended to the social environment, by returning to the interior realm of the psyche. Neuropsychiatrists like Pak No-t'aek assessed the impact of genetic inheritance and camptown living conditions on “mixed-blood” socialization, arguing that nature and nurture manifested as deviant psychoses. Based on sketches of human bodies that he asked mixed-race children to draw in order to assess physical ideations, Pak (1969) concluded that their “abnormal” environments had induced “premature sexualization and an excessive interest in sexual matters,” advising that “measures be taken to account for and curb this truly overwhelming sexual proclivity in a minority population.” Such policy recommendations were the norm, rather than the exception, in the concluding remarks of mixed-blood studies regardless of research field.

What measures were taken to limit the threat of blood mixing to the biological integrity and social safety of the nation? It was at this level of policy making that race studies crossed the threshold from research framework to state practice. The first priority of scientists and their state sponsors was to guard against mixed bloods passing as “pure” Koreans. Millions of families had been displaced and separated during decolonization and the Korean War, and the peninsula was consequently awash with children and teenagers unidentifiable by the usual family networks (DiMoia 2013; Oh 2015). The Nationality Law established in tandem with South Korean state formation in 1948 had codified the principle of patrilineal descent by limiting South Korean citizenship to individuals born to Korean men. The dislocations, family separations, and abundance of orphans left in the wake of the Korean War, however, highlighted a loophole in the Nationality Law that entitled children of unknown parentage born on Korean soil to Korean citizenship by law of the land (jus soli) rather than the law of blood (jus sanguinus).¹¹ Fearing that abandoned mixed-race Koreans denied citizenship by reason of paternity might take advantage of this loophole to pass themselves off as “normal” Koreans and lay claim to a franchise reserved for “pure” Koreans, researchers repurposed the averages of their data toward identification purposes in defense of ethnic homogeneity. Abandoned and unregistered children of uncertain parentage and ambiguous race were to be identified as Korean or mixed based on such registers as Mongolian spots for infants, measuring racialized hair types according to the “pencil test” for hair curl then employed in apartheid South Africa, and skin tone indexes for older children, teens, and adults (Chang 1962; Ch'oe 1967).

Efforts to guard against the threat of racial passing and citizenship were subsequently expanded into laws to identify, monitor, and expel mixed-blood Koreans from the country altogether. The Ministry of Health practice of labeling mixed-blood orphans slated for adoption as disabled was extended into hospitals and census offices, where mixed-race newborns were documented on medical intake forms and birth certificates as “disabled.” Meanwhile, a proposed 1972 law would have required mixed-blood Amerasians to submit to a state identification examination for a racial identification card noting their racial appearance (what the subject in question looked like, or “passed for”) and bloodline ancestry (what the subject “actually” was, according to racial blood quantum), which they would be required to carry at all times and submit upon request for verification. This initiative, however, was ironically abandoned because the disenfranchisement of Amerasians by reason of paternity effected by the Nationality Law rendered the population so thoroughly marginal and confined to limited and lawless borderland areas like camptowns that it was nearly impossible to guarantee full identification and compliance with the requirement (H. Kim 2006; Ch’ǒl-u Lee 2003; Sǒk 1997).

The result of peninsular disenfranchisement policies was the near-complete exclusion of mixed-blood Koreans from the privilege of citizenship and such welfare channels as education and medical care reserved for citizens. Already by 1959, based on a survey of mixed bloods in police custody, an estimated 67.6 percent of mixed-race Koreans born and raised in South Korea were stateless persons without citizenship of any kind (Chosǒn ilbo1959). Built on a scientific regime of pathology, state disenfranchisement and its partner program of transnational adoption effectively separated mixed-race Koreans from the social, political, and physical property of the Korean state and ethnic nation.¹² South Korean state policies toward interracial relationships and mixed-race children hinged on the ability to capitalize on and control the transfer of property. On the one hand, as Seungsook Moon (2010) has shown, the state promoted the development of entertainment sectors that furnished sexual services as a means of funneling GI dollars into the struggling South Korean economy in the eras of postwar recovery and rapid development. On the other hand, it also took steps to remove mixed-blood Koreans’ competing claims on state properties such as land (through family inheritance) and welfare (through citizenship prerogatives), as well as more abstract national properties, such as Koreanness itself, as a political, cultural, and racial identity/form of communal capital.

Legacies and Possibilities

South Korean nation builders working at the crossroads of a political mandate for reunification, an educational imperative to define and disseminate a clear sense of South Korean national identity, and a social injunction to maintain sexual purity and middle-class propriety pinpointed “mixed-blood” Koreans in their identity-making project. In seeking to identify, other, and expel “mixed blood” from the Korean national body, this coalition created a new ethnic category while also biologizing all iterations of Korean identity, whether hybrid or whole. This Cold War race-making project has thus had enduring effects on the identities of mixed and “pure” Koreans today.

Mixed-race Koreans far from this “first” generation of Amerasians still know that no degree of cultural competence will ever make up enough for compromised biology to gain entry into the hallowed halls of uri minjok (our nation). Neither language fluency nor educational achievements, not even a life spent in Korea is sufficient to overcome the difference marked in the body, as demonstrated in the media othering of model Han Hyun-Min, born and raised in Korea of Nigerian and Korean parentage.¹³ A form of Koreanness couched not in citizenship but in the body, which works to cohere a global Korean diaspora and police the dispersed Korean ethnos through racial purity, is the direct legacy of South Korean nation-builders’ campaigns to socially engineer a new identity through the bodies of “mixed bloods.”

On the other hand, the homogenization of authentic Koreanness into a fragile biological essence that is all too susceptible to dilution has created a form of Korean identity plagued by anxiety about the dangers posed by diaspora, in-migration, and a dropping domestic birthrate. In stark contrast to the concerted state efforts to expel “Amerasians” born in the wake of the Korean War, in the twenty-first century the state pivoted to a conditional embrace of so-called Kosians—mixed-Koreans born to Korean men and South Asian women migrants to South Korean rural provinces. Whereas Amerasians were seen as superfluous and subversive to mainstream Korean identity decades earlier, Kosians have been treated as a necessary corrective to South Korea's precipitously declining birthrate, graying population, and emptied rural labor sector. The multicultural (tamunhwa) campaigns of the early 2000s are emblematic of administrative recognition at a local and national level that racial discrimination based on the state-propagated principle of ethnic homogeneity had begun undercutting national goals, and that a multiracial population is increasingly probable and productive in coming decades. The “multicultural movement” notwithstanding, it remains notable that South Korea remains committed to recruiting new bodies to replace its declining population based on ethnic proximity, prioritizing “ethnic compatriots abroad” (chaeoe tongp'o) and, in so doing, feeding into hierarchies of biological authenticity that structure Korean diasporas and global identities.

Today, Korea's demographic challenges are forcing reconsiderations of the terms of citizenship and national inclusion, but the biological concept of Koreanness consolidated through the exclusion of mixed bloods endures. Who “counts” as Korean, what constitutes “true” Korean identity, and how mutable authentic “Koreanness” remain cogent terms for a debate derived from terms set by the South Korean scientists discussed in this study. The forms of authentic and adjacent Korean identities established in the medicoscientific surveys of “mixed-blood” Koreans indelibly framed the way Koreans relate to one another, the diaspora, and the world.

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