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

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.

Adopting the Model Minority Myth: Korean Adoption as a Racial Project

Drawing upon racial formation theory, this paper argues that Korean adoption was part of a racial project that advanced the model minority myth, helping shape what it means to be Asian in America. This focus on Korean adoption as part of the foundation of the model minority myth departs from traditional renderings that concentrate exclusively on Japanese and Chinese Americans. It also addresses the exclusion of Korean adoptees from Asian immigration history. In making this argument, I incorporate historical context and draw upon Korean adoptee adults’ online survey responses (N=107) and in-depth interviews (N=37) to examine the multiple domains that enacted this racial project, including policy, family socialization, and interpersonal interactions, and the effect on Korean adoptees. Implications of this racial project are discussed in relation to contemporary adoptee deportations and citizenship rights advocacy.

Mother America

After the Korean War, it became acceptable and expected that American families would adopt Korean children into their homes, symbolizing American prosperity and security. As significant a role as social work played in this process, there currently exists no research that examines the activities of the profession and the origins of Korean adoption. This chapter discusses the maternalist nature of adoption efforts during the 1950s by one international social welfare agency after the Korean War: the American Branch of International Social Service (ISS-USA). Predicated on maternalist ideologies that shaped the social work profession during the Progressive Era, in what the author calls Cold War maternalism, the gendered notions of motherhood were expanded to genderless notions of parenthood. Anticommunist sentiments thrust adoptive parenthood into the political spotlight on an international level, thus serving the best interests of adoptive parents and the nation long before serving those of the children.

Generating a Market in Children

This chapter explores the transnational adoption industrial complex’s origins, paying careful attention to South Korea’s lack of support for unwed mothers and low-income families and the manufacturing of orphans by orphanages and adoption agencies. Korean families’ abilities to parent are curtailed by androcentric legislation concerning Korean citizenship, societal stigma against unwed motherhood, and limitations to women’s labor force participation. Orphanages and adoption agencies facilitate adoptees’ social death in the creation of new birthdates and names, among other natal details. Adoptees are also constructed as interchangeable with documented cases of adoptees being sent in place of another child. The chapter ends with a discussion of contemporary South Korean adoption policy and government overtures to adoptees as they return to the nation that previously cast them out.

Disrupting Kinship

Interacting with Cold War ideology, individuals’ Christian Americanism supported the notion that Korean adoptees would enter “good homes” in a democratic society. Many children felt the brunt of this rhetoric as they were told adoption was in their “best interests” and that if not adoption, they would have fallen through the cracks of economic poverty and degradation in the land of their birth. In doing so, rhetorics of gratitude became cemented in international adoption discourse. This book exposes the growth of the transnational adoption industrial complex (TAIC)—the neo-colonial, multi-million dollar global industry that commodifies children’s bodies—in an examination of South Korean adoptions to the United States. The TAIC accounts for how the South Korean social welfare state, orphanages, adoption agencies, and American immigration legislation facilitated the development of transnational adoption between the two countries. Adoption became a rote process whereby government and non-governmental organizations and actors easily facilitated the exchange of children. Yet, the activism of adoptees and their allies expose the inherent messiness of adoption and reveal that adoption cannot be discussed in black and white terms. Using archival research, media texts, and oral histories, this monograph elucidates greater understanding concerning how the TAIC impacts the lived experiences of adoptees and their families. Notions of adoptees as perpetual children are disabused as I examine adoptees’ efforts to reshape adoption discourse to recognize the inherent rights of birth parents and adoptees. In adulthood, adoptees construct a new type of public personhood, one defined by their autonomy and agency. Cold War, Christian Americanism, Korean adoption, adoption, South Korea, gratitude, industrial complex, orphans, immigration, family, kinship