UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation offers a comparative literary and cultural studies account of how the United States constructed and leveraged concepts of disease and disability in its military operations in Asia and at home to further its Cold War agenda. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of post-1945 transpacific cultural works and state-affiliated and community archives in South Korea and the United States, my project retrieves and critiques a distinctively Cold War disability narrative that postulated Asians and Asian Americans as at once ideologically contaminated, highly contagious, and selectively recuperable. I explore the racializing conflation of contagious ideology and infectious disease by asking how this conflation was deployed across Cold War Asia and Asian America. By delving into community archives, I examine how impacted Asians and Asian Americans reinflected concepts of disease and disability to resist this pathologization. Chapter One studies how and why Hansen’s disease (leprosy) patients in South Korea emerged as a Cold War ideological battleground. By investigating U.S. military and medical documents, Korean patients’ anthologies and oral testimonies, and the U.S. propaganda film Litany of Hope (1962), I argue that Cold War narratives of contagion used medical terms to conflate “infectious” ideologies with Hansen’s disease, which facilitated the characterization of Hansen’s disease patients as a race apart in Korea. Chapter Two investigates how the United States policed communism through its immigration policies, focusing on Chinatown as a site of ideological pollution during the McCarthy era. Through an analysis of Fae Myenne Ng’s novel Steer Toward Rock (2008), I demonstrate how the Chinese Confession Program (1956-1965) served to cast ethnic Chinese as dangerous carriers of communist ideology and how they navigated and resisted this racialized medical discourse. The final chapter examines how the U.S. and South Korean governments collaborated to normalize mixed-race children as multicultural Americans through transnational adoption. Analyzing Deann Borshay Liem’s documentary, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (2010), I probe how the South Korean government and adoption agencies conflated the mixed-race orphan and the disabled Korean as abnormal, and how the desire to rescue children from the dangers of communism impelled transnational adoption from South Korea.