Brothers Home and the Production of Vanished Lives

Abstract

This article delves into the history of one of the most infamous internment facilities in Korea’s recent past—Hyungje Bokjiwon (형제복지원), or Brothers Home. The article outlines the history of Brothers Home, its biopolitical production of ‘vanished lives’, and what enabled it to come into existence—arguing that this is an essential context for understanding the history of international adoption from Korea. Located in Busan, South Korea, Brothers Home began as an orphanage in the early 1960s but developed into a ‘social welfare institution’ in the early 1970s. The events that transpired from the early 1970s until the facility shut down in the late 1980s—a period which aligns with the height of international adoption from Korea—have led to some referring to this place as Korea’s ‘concentration camp’. Inmates died in the hundreds, predominantly due to malnutrition and illness, while many suffered brutal deaths through physical abuse and torture. Some of the children from Brothers Home were relocated to Western nations for adoption. The history of Brothers Home embodies the biopolitical process of bodies and lives simultaneously enveloped in and, at the same time, kept outside socio-legal frameworks to invalidate those lives or render them insignificant or invisible; to erase them from any meaningful, socio-legal context and thereby reducing those lives to bare life. The article will focus on three main areas: the history of Brothers Home, the biopolitical production of vanished lives, and how the latter resonates with specific instances depicted in testimonies written by people returning to Korea to uncover details about their adoption circumstances, that is, moments encapsulating this ‘production of vanished lives’. The central concern here is less to draw a direct line between international adoption and the events at Brothers Home, but rather to outline a crucial biopolitical context—epitomized in the history of Brothers Home—that precedes the adoption process and thus constitutes its condition of possibility. By juxtaposing this biopolitical context with autobiographical testimonies of people searching for information about the circumstances of their adoption, the article seeks to understand what it means to bear witness to the existence of a life whose desubjectivization—or disappearance—at the same time constitutes the witnessing subject’s condition of possibility.