Geographies of Kinship is an engrossing film by Berkeley filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem that had me quietly weeping one moment and angrily yelling at the screen the next. The documentary details the complex and often shocking history of how Korea became the largest exporter of babies in the world. As Kinship so effectively explains, though the Korean children arriving in the West were, for decades, presented as orphans, that often was not the case.
But after some high-profile adoptions by Americans returning home, demand for Korean babies shot up. Despite the fact that many of them had living family members.
In Kinship , this is the experience of Jane Jeong Trenka, whose Minnesotan parents were told they were adopting an orphan, only to have her arrive with family photos. Put simply: no father, no future. And the Korean War left behind a lot of fatherless babies. These children were the result of rape, consensual affairs with American servicemen, or sex work. Sex work that was sanctioned by the Korean government to keep the American forces happy. Exacerbating the hojuk problem was the stigma that came with babies who were visibly mixed race.
The automatic assumption was that their mother was a prostitute, impregnated by an American G. And the prevailing attitude in Korea was: if the father was American, then the baby belonged in America. Needless to say, not all of those who were adopted and sent overseas were guaranteed a happy ending. After years spent languishing in an orphanage, she was taken home by an American sergeant to live with him, his wife and his four sons.
On arrival, despite her young age, Cooke-Sampson was treated like a domestic servant. That treatment persisted until she was able to extricate herself in her teens. Watching her struggle to figure out her real birth date is quite stunning. Yet more babies were abandoned after the mass industrialization of Korea began in , and the poverty rates went up.
