ABSTRACT

Born in South Korea and adopted by American families, Thomas Park Clement and Mark Hagland were part of a modest but significant revival of Asian immigration during the early Cold War years, which differed markedly from the immigration of previous eras. Far removed from the young, working-class, adult men of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Korean adoptees came as children and generally lived away from the traditional centers of the Asian American population. Clement, who knows little about his early years, believes he was born around the start of the Korean War (1950–53). Abandoned by his parents when he was four or five, he was eventually found by a missionary who took him to an orphanage. He stayed there until 1959, when the Clement family of North Carolina adopted him and brought him to the United States. Hagland was adopted as an infant along with his twin by a German–Norwegian family in Wisconsin. Standing out because of his adoptee status and Korean ancestry, he said of his early years in America, “Growing up in Milwaukee [it felt like] I was a Martian who landed in a spaceship.”1