Established in 1853, the Presbyterian Church in Chinatown (PCC) in San Francisco, CA is the oldest Asian church of any Christian denomination in North America and the first Chinese Protestant church outside China. Its history in the United States reaches back to the earliest days of Chinese migration to this country, giving the church a rootedness in Asian America that few other institutions can match. This dissertation examines how the contemporary community at PCC negotiates its institutional memory in creating a sense of place and a sense of collective self that is simultaneously both Protestant Christian and distinctively Chinese American.

Employing the use of archival materials and oral histories conducted specifically for this project, the study explores how the three language ministries which currently comprise the church--English, Mandarin, and Cantonese--navigate historical resources and contemporary memories in different ways to support varying ideological positions in the present. The project focuses specifically on place-making and the process of investing the physical space of the church and its location in a historically evolving Chinatown with meanings that distinguish the community from the white American Protestant establishment on the one hand and from non-Christian Chinese society on the other.

This process of place-making is mapped over three defining moments in the life of PCC: the church's founding, its institutionalization, and its struggle to redefine itself in the wake of trauma from clergy sexual abuse. The study argues that these three chapters, reaching from 1853 to the recent past, are especially formative for PCC's identity, because they span the period of white missionary leadership at the church from beginning to end and, as a result, become the terrain over which the racial/ethnic meanings of being Chinese American Christian are negotiated, contested, and defined. In its founding moment, the intersection of racialized thought and theological justification for the establishment of a physical home for anticipated Chinese Christians resulted in the first enduring expression of religion that was conceptually Asian American, rather than simply Asian religion transplanted to the United States or Western religion imposed upon Asian immigrants. The institutionalization of the church was the enfleshment of this concept with Chinese believers, whose practices of place subverted missionary understandings of Christianity and church by reinterpreting the Gospel message within the social, economic, and political contexts of being a racial/ethnic minority in the oftentimes hostile environment of the United States. Even as this hostility eventually seemed to give way before new visions of plurality in the 1960s, it lingered at PCC in the form of clergy sexual abuse, which came to define the final chapter of missionary leadership at the Chinatown church. Inscribing its insistence on truth and healing into the physical space of the church, PCC has embraced its response to the trauma as a defining element of its identity as a Chinese American congregation at the beginning of a new era beyond missionary control.

The transnational adoption industrial complex established between South Korea and the United States following the Korean War initiated what is sometimes called the “Quiet Migration.” Since then, over 200,000 Korean children have been sent abroad, and the transnational, transracial adoption industry has operations set up in dozens of developing countries worldwide which takes thousands of children annually from their natal homes and places them in adoptive families in Western countries. For the past seventy years, the figures of the Korean orphan and adoptee have held significant meaning in the imaginations of by South Korean and American citizens. The sentimental figure of the Korean orphan became the conduit through which both South Koreans and Americans defined their experiences in the Korean War. The transnational Korean adoptee has become an icon of the United States’ commitment to humanitarianism and diversity and South Korea’s modern branding as a sophisticated and internationally-networked nation.

This dissertation explores how United States and South Korean culture and society have used the figures of the Korean orphan and Korean adoptee to construct national identities that reflect its citizens as virtuous, cosmopolitan, and unified. I am interested in the ways in which U.S. and Korean media have appropriated the figure of the orphan to construct narratives of collective national pride. Through the analysis of popular film and media, I trace the evolving portrayals of Korean orphans in U.S. and South Korean culture and society to demonstrate how these two nations have appropriated the figure of the Korean orphan to engender feelings of patriotism and belonging in its citizens, and what such narratives consequently obscure.

This research is comparative, in that I explore representations of orphans and adoptees from number of different perspectives. First, I am looking at portrayals of orphans and adoptees in both American and South Korean cultural productions. I am interested in examining how each culture co-opts these figures, and for what use. Additionally, I am interested in looking at these representations over the longue durée in order to understand how these narratives have changed over time. I question what different uses the orphan or adoptee have served in these various narratives at various points in history, and how and why these representations have transformed over time. I also make inquiries into how representations of orphans differ from representations of adoptees. I examine how these identities differ in their portrayals in American and Korean film and television and discuss how and why the transformation from portraying Korean children as orphans to adoptees transpires.

I begin by exploring representations of Korean orphans in Hollywood during the Cold War era. I argue that the presence of Korean orphans in film and television programs about the Korean War works to justify the United States’ military involvement in the conflict. From there, I trace the transformation of the Korean orphan into the transnational Korean adoptee in American film and television. In analyzing these representations of transnational Korean adoptees, I explore how adoptees have continued to be used construct an exceptional and progressive U.S. national identity. In examining Korean War films from South Korea’s Golden Age, I find that representations of Korean orphan reflect a postwar South Korean national identity informed by the conflation of nation and family and gendered subjecthood. In turn, I argue that representations of transnational Korean adoptees in the contemporary era of the Korean Wave are used to showcase South Korea as sophisticated and cosmopolitan while overlooking the complicity of the South Korean government in transnational Korean adoption’s painful and traumatic history. Finally, I explore the ways in adult transnational Korean adoptees have used their cultural productions and creative expressions to challenge master narratives of Korean orphanhood and transnational adoption. I read these productions as statements of self-determination and a move toward adoptee decolonization.

In today’s world where migrant children in the United States are separated from their families and detained and rural Korean bachelors import wives from Southeast Asia to create multicultural families, I argue that understanding the ways in which representations of Korean orphans and adoptees inform and are informed by U.S. and South Korean national identity help deepen and redefine our notions of community, citizenship, and national belonging.

The Korean War, as a “hot war” within the Cold War period with participation by 21 member nations of the UN and the People’s Republic of China, and also an unresolved civil war between South Korea and North Korea, is characterized by still-present animosities, which play out in contemporary politics in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as for the U.S. Furthermore, memoryscapes of the Korean War continue to be shaped and reshaped in the present. My dissertation examines built spaces and cultural texts of Korean War memorialization, focusing specifically on films, museums, and memorials in South Korea and the U.S. in the “post-Cold War” conjuncture. It focuses specifically on the theme of reconciliation to ask, how do Korean War memorial texts and spaces attempt to reconcile an unfinished Cold War conflict in a post-Cold War world?

I trace the theme of reconciliation in multiple ways – first, I utilize the common definition of reconciliation as an act of bringing issues to an agreement. For example, how do memorial texts and built spaces suture histories and memories into coherent or cohering narratives? Furthermore, I examine reconciliation as a specific affective theme in South Korean popular and national cultures, particularly through the imagined reunification between South Korea and North Korea, and/or separated family members stuck on opposite sides of the DMZ border as well as divided ideologically. Lastly, I examine reconciliation as a conceptual theme underlying memorialization of the Korean War in relation to Cold War memory and history – what is the relationship between memorialization and history, particularly as memorial and national texts attempt to make sense of Korean War history (as a technically unfinished war) with Cold War history (as a “finished” event)?

Memorials and national/popular memory of the Korean War are thus necessarily changing or constantly being amended in flux with changing presidential administrations as well as in response to veterans or civic groups in both the U.S. and South Korea. In studying the memory of war, it is impossible to ignore the ways in which memory and memorial discourses travel across geographic space in reference to each other, whether intentional or not. Drawing from the rich genealogy of Asian American cultural critique, this dissertation argues that critical Asian American memorial studies as methodology to study memorialization can bring out transnational narratives and allows for the multiple subjectivities of museum/memorial visitors and film viewers to enable readings beyond existing Cold War frameworks and narratives in both South Korea and the U.S. Through conducing a transnational study of Korean War memory, this dissertation rethinks the Korean War as “forgotten war” or as the benchmark for showcasing South Korean developmentalism (“forgotten victory” discourse), but rather the nuances in differential layers of forgettings and rememberings that constitute Korean War memoryscapes in the “post-Cold War” period.

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