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Since the Korean War began, Western families have adopted more than 200,000 Korean children. Two-thirds of these adoptees found homes in the United States. The majority joined white families and in the process forged a new kind of transnational and transracial kinship. Kimberly D. McKee examines the growth of the neocolonial, multi-million-dollar global industry that shaped these families - a system she identifies as the transnational adoption industrial complex. As she shows, an alliance of the South Korean welfare state, orphanages, adoption agencies, and American immigration laws powered transnational adoption between the two countries. Adoption became a tool to supplement an inadequate social safety net for South Korea's unwed mothers and low-income families. At the same time, it commodified children, building a market that allowed Americans to create families at the expense of loving, biological ties between Koreans. McKee also looks at how Christian Americanism, South Korean welfare policy, and other facets of adoption interact with and disrupt American perceptions of nation, citizenship, belonging, family, and ethnic identity

Abstract: Ideologies of motherhood reflect the complexities and contradictions of what it means to be seen as a worthy parent—someone who deserves to care for children—in contrast to those deemed unworthy or undesirable. The family is a site of contestation when accounting for the ways maternalism and white supremacy affect racialized family systems in the lives of people of color in white American suburbia. In a critical engagement with the 2017 novel Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng and the 2020 Hulu -released series by the same name, this essay reveals the contours of non-normative kinship formations, including surrogacy and adoption. These kinship ties demonstrate the tensions of motherhood as a gendered, raced, and classed phenomena. A reproductive justice framework reveals the way Little Fires Everywhere —the novel and the series—demonstrate the legibility and legitimacy of some families over others in exploring the contingencies of kinship.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: Our Voices -- Introduction: Our Histories -- Part I: Early Era, Indigenous and Global Roots -- 1. Mālamalama: Reconnecting as Native Hawaiian Women through Cultural History -- 2. Global Roots and Gendered Routes: Early Asian American Women's History -- 3. Two Sisters, Two Stories: Transnational Lives of Ume Tsuda and Yona Abiko -- Part II: New Intersections of Race, Gender, Generation, Communities -- 4. "Up to My Elbows in Rice!": Women Building Communities and Sustaining Families in Pre- 1965 Filipina/o America -- 5. Stretching the Boundaries of Christian Respectability, Race, and Gender during Jim Crow: Chinese American Women and the Southern Baptist Church -- 6. Stepping Onstage and Breaking Ground: Asian American Dancers Complicate Race and Gender Stereotypes, 1930s- 1960s -- Part III: New Cultural Formations, New Selves -- 7. "She Speaks Well": Language as Performance of Japanese American Femininity and Social Mobility in Postwar Hawaiʻi -- 8. History, Identity, and the Life Course: Mixed Race Asian American Women -- 9. Ancestral Ethics and Sāmoanness: Explaining the Contemporary Sāmoan American Women -- Part IV: Wartimes and Aftermath -- 10. Memories of Mass Incarceration: Mobilizing Japanese American Women for Redress and Beyond -- 11. Refugee Lifemaking Practices: Southeast Asian Women -- 12. "Defiant Daughters": The Resilience and Resistance of 1.5- Generation Vietnamese American Women -- Part V: Globalization, Work, Family, Community, Activism -- 13. Precarious Labor: Asian Immigrant Women, 1970s- 2010s -- 14. The Backbone of New York City's Chinatown: Chinese Women and the Garment Industry, 1950- 2009 -- 15. Women's Agency and Cost in Migration: Taiwanese American Transnational Families -- 16. "Revolutionary Care" as Activism: Filipina Nurses and Care Workers in Chicago, 1965- 2016 -- Part VI: Spaces of Political Struggles -- 17. The Mother's Tongue: Language, Women, and the Chamorros of Guam -- 18. Asian American Feminisms and Legislative Activism: Patsy Takemoto Mink in the US Congress -- 19. Opening the Path to Marriage Equality: Asian American Lesbians Reach Out to Their Families and Communities -- 20. Turning Points: South Asian Feminist Responses to Gender- Based Violence and Immigration Enforcement -- Part VII: New Diasporas, Diverse Lives, Evolving Identities -- 21. Locating Adoptees in Asian America: Jane Jeong Trenka and Deann Borshay Liem -- 22. "Let Them Attack Me for Wearing the Hijab": Islam and Identity in the Lives of Bangladeshi American Women -- 23. Navigating the Hyphen: Tongan- American Women in Academia -- Part VIII: Gender, Cultural Change, Intergenerational Dynamics -- 24. Linked Lives: Korean American Daughters and Their Aging Immigrant Parents -- 25. Negotiating Cultural Change: Professional Hmong American Women -- 26. Stories and Visions across Generations: Khmer American Women -- Reflections -- Acknowledgments -- About the Contributors -- Index