Amerasian Children, Hybrid Superiority, and Pearl S. Buck's Transracial and Transnational Adoption Activism

Abstract

In 1949, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Pearl S. Buck established Welcome House to provide long-term foster care for a small number of American-born, mixed-race children of Asian descent whom child welfare officials labeled unadoptable. With the assistance of her neighbors in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Buck transformed Welcome House into an adoption agency that specialized in arranging transracial adoptions for the children she called Amerasians. Within a decade, Welcome House was also arranging transnational adoptions for mixed-race Korean children. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Buck encouraged adoptions of Amerasian children by insisting that they were biologically superior. While Buck's deployment of the concept of hybrid superiority is troubling today, she believed it would counter negative characterizations of Amerasian children that limited adoptions of this population. This article evaluates Buck's rhetoric of hybrid superiority and how it evolved to accommodate her efforts to build child welfare institutions in the United States and Korea.

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