Address Unknown

Postwar South Korea defined itself as one people by blood, and Syngman Rhee's government sent mixed-race children overseas under a policy of one nation, one people. About 40,000 mixed-race Koreans were born between 1955 and 1969, most of them fathered by American soldiers. They were called honhyeol, mixed blood, or the slur twigi, and people assumed their mothers were camptown sex workers. Children with Black fathers had it worst: adults interviewed by the Korea Herald in 2016 remembered being spat on and hit as children.

Until June 1998, Korean nationality passed only through the father. A child born to a Korean mother and an American soldier had no claim to it, and many children of US soldiers were legally stateless. In Address Unknown, Chang-guk's mother writes to his father in America, and every letter comes back stamped with the film's title.

For a Korean man, military service is a rite of passage into full membership of the nation. A 1972 law exempted mixed-race men from compulsory service, with the aim of encouraging them to emigrate. The exemption stood until 2010, when the Military Service Act was revised to cover every Korean national regardless of race or skin colour.

America was the way out the country offered. Holt, the adoption agency founded in 1956, was set up to place mixed-race Korean babies with American families, and in the decade after the Korean War most Korean children adopted abroad were Amerasian. In 1982 the US Amerasian Immigration Act gave priority to the children of American soldiers, and a survey that year found 95 percent of mixed-race Koreans wanted to go. Chang-guk's mother teaches him English for a life in the United States.

Camptowns grew up around American bases and lived off them, through clubs, bars and brothels serving the troops. In 2022 South Korea's Supreme Court ruled that the state had promoted prostitution in the camptowns from 1957 to 2008 to keep American troops in the country and bring in dollars, and it upheld damages for 117 women. Officials had even taught the women English.

The clubs were divided by race, and Korean owners did the dividing. Near Camp Humphreys only one of the four largest clubs served Black soldiers, who were a third of the base. In July 1971 Black soldiers wrecked the clubs at Anjeong-ri, and Korean villagers gathered outside the base carrying banners with messages like "black black black" and "Go back to cotton fields". Chang-guk grows up Black in a camptown built on that same divide.