Growing up in a rural town filled with dairy cows and Caucasian farmers, and then in a bedroom community lacking ethnic diversity, I was the sole Asian kid at school until fifth grade. To my classmates, I was a slanty-eyed chink. Like many mixed-race people of my generation, I was Asian to the outside world, but not Korean enough to the Korean side of my family.
This past September in Berkeley, California, I opened the doors to the David Brower Center, slightly nervous and excited, I stepped into a room filled with mixed-race Korean Americans attending the one-day Koreans and Camptowns Conference.
Even though I grew up with my biological parents, I still carry the scarsβphysical and emotionalβfrom being ostracized and bullied for looking different from the other children in my bucolic California communities. Many of the people attending the conference were Korean adoptees KADs who had even more reason to search through crowds to find someone who resembled them.
During and after the Korean War, camptowns were established outside of military installations, offering locals a way to earn a livingβ including entertaining soldiers with nightclubs and prostitution. Their mothers, the camptown women, were marginalized by society because most of them came from poor families and had to work as cooks, maids, sex workers, or other low-paying jobs to support themselves as well as their parents, grandparents and siblings.
These women often waited for fathers of their children to return, hoping for a way out of the grueling camptown life. Once they had a child, these women were faced with trying to keep their children in a land with no support for single momsβa place where their children would be ostracized and seen as a blemish upon society.
