Paperslip Referenced In “Sight Unseen: Proxy War, Proxy Adoption” By Kelly M. Rich.

Posted to Paperslip on February 3rd, 2026.

We want to belatedly publicly thank former Harvard professor turned Wellesley professor Ms. Kelly M. Rich for citing Paperslip in her excellent article, titled “Sight Unseen: Proxy War, Proxy Adoption”. Upon her request, we provided her with a copy of an Orphan Hojuk (Hojukdungbon) — a document which is a prime example and site of Orphanization — not only for KSS Adoptees, but for Korean Adoptees in general. *(Please note that not ALL Korean Adoptees were orphanized for the process of adoption to the West. However, a great deal of us were).

You can learn more about Kelly M. Rich on her website here.

Below: Screenshot of the page where the Orphan Hojuk (Hojukdungbon) provided by Paperslip appears in Kelly M. Rich’s article. She writes beneath the image (bolds ours):

”The orphan hojuk is an exceptional document, one that exists only inside Korea’s adoption system. Unlike patriarchal family registries, these papers were issued to male and female alike, in a singular recognition and erasure of girl children. What’s more, this one-page document not only orphans a child but strips them of their citizenship, family, sociality, and history even as it makes them into new legal subjects.26 If, as Heonik Kwon puts it, “the milieu of human intimacy became the primary target of the politics of the Korean War,” these kinship wounds continued to be felt long after the armistice was signed precisely through the continuation of transnational adoption.27 Understanding the Korean War as mere proxy war occludes this fundamental dimension: that waging a war by proxy affects not only the proxies themselves but also the inheritors of the war, who have no option but to keep playing out its violent means.”