The First Amerasians: Mixed Race Koreans from Camptowns to America

In the years surrounding the Korean War, thousands of mixed race children were born to American military personnel and local women in the camptowns neighboring US bases. The First Amerasians tells the powerful, oftentimes heartbreaking story of how Americans created and used the concept of the Amerasian to remove these children from their mothers to adoptive US homes during the 1950s and 1960s. In recovering this history, Yuri W. Doolan reveals how the Amerasian is not simply a mixed race person fathered and abandoned by a US serviceman in Asia, nor a racial term used to describe individuals with one American and one Asian parent like its popular definition suggests. Rather, the Amerasian is a Cold War construct whose “rescue” has been utilized to repudiate accusations of US imperialism and achieve sentimental victories in the aftermath of wars not quite won by the military. From such constructions, Americans established various refugee, adoption, and immigration laws that would lead to the placement of Korean children in the United States and, later, mixed race Vietnamese and their relatives.

Yuri W. Doolan (PhD, Northwestern University 2019) is Associate Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the inaugural chair of Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies at Brandeis University. He is an award-winning historian whose work explores the anti-Asian racism and structural violence of US militarism and empire. His book The First Amerasians: Mixed Race Koreans from Camptowns to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024) tells the powerful, oftentimes heartbreaking, story of how Americans created and used the concept of the "Amerasian" to remove thousands of mixed race children from their Korean mothers in US-occupied South Korea to adoptive American homes during the 1950s and 1960s. The First Amerasians explores the Cold War ideologies undergirding this so-called rescue and shows how this process of child removal and placement via US refugee, adoption, and immigration laws profoundly shaped the lives of mixed race Koreans and their mothers. Yuri is currently underway on a second major book project that investigates the relationship between US military prostitution in Cold War Asia and the Pacific and anti-Asian racism and violence in US society and culture. 

Yuri is also the author of a number of peer-reviewed essays and public facing works exploring the lasting legacies and human consequences of the Korean War. His research on military brides, transnational and transracial adoption, mixed race Asians, the US camptown military sex industry, and “comfort women” appears in Critical Ethnic Studies, The Journal of Asian American Studies, Diplomatic History, Together at Last: Stories of Adoption and Reunion in the Age of DNA, Mixed Korean: Our Stories (인종주의의덫을 넘어서: 혼혈 한국인, 혼혈 입양인 이야), The Journal of American Ethnic History, Koreatowns: Exploring the Economics, Politics, and Identities of Korean Spatial Formation, 경계를 넘는 한인들: 이주, 젠더, 세대와 귀속의 정치, and a permanent installation in Berlin called Die „Trostfrauen“ und der gemeinsame Kampf gegen sexualisierte Gewalt. Yuri’s research and writing has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Korea Foundation, the Academy of Korean Studies, the Fulbright Program, the Mandel Center for the Humanities, the Northeast Asia Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, as well as internal sources at Northwestern University and Brandeis University.