Are You My Kimchi Mother? Asian Officers, American Women, and Cold War Military Training

Abstract From 1950 to 1963, over 200,000 international military officers trained in the continental United States through the Military Assistance Program (MAP). This article examines how military “study abroad” was pivotal to Cold War cultural diplomacy and empire building. Beyond transferring military skills, military study abroad sought to transform the worldviews of officers from South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and other Asian nations through immersion in American life. U.S. programs relied on the gendered labor of American women to curate an idealized vision of suburban domesticity and liberal democracy, while attempting to insulate officers from the ills of 1950s American society. Asian officers also navigated and bucked official expectations, reacting to the quality of their training, race relations, and cultural friction. Military study abroad thus illuminates the complexities of U.S. global power: ambitious in scope and far reaching, yet vulnerable to the dynamics of unpredictable everyday encounters between the foreign and the domestic.