Pearl S. Buck and the Institutional and Rhetorical Reframing of US and Korean Adoption

Abstract

In 1949, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize–winning author Pearl S. Buck established Welcome House, the first permanent foster home and adoption agency for mixed-race children of Asian descent born in the United States. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Buck innovated an institutional model and rhetorical strategy to increase adoptions of US-born and foreign-born mixed-race children of Asian descent. Buck’s strategies were controversial because they represented a break from adoption standards that child welfare professionals devised to promote the best interest of adoptees. Professionals associated with the US Children’s Bureau, the Child Welfare League of America, and International Social Service were critical of Buck’s adoption work and her support of proxy adoptions. But white adoptive families responded to her reframing of mixed-race children as beautiful and intellectually superior hybrids that were model adoptees. Yet, Buck’s efforts to increase African Americans’ adoptions of Korean black children were less effective. Her awareness that transnational adoption would not be a solution for many mixed-race Korean children, and especially Korean black children, led Buck to establish the Pearl S. Buck Foundation and an opportunity center in South Korea to assist mixed-race children and their mothers.