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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.

This chapter begins by reading the controversy of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1974 documentary film, China and Pearl S. Buck's China: Past and Present (1972). Moving from Antonioni's filming of a surgical operation performed under acupuncture anesthesia to Susan Sontag's discussion of just such an operation in On Photography (1977), the chapter argues that part of what was at stake in China's public performance of such operations in the early 1970s was nothing other than the nature of modernity itself. But how, given such a theorization of the photograph, are we to understand the photographs of Chinese torture that circulated in the West in the early twentieth century? Images of Chinese lingchi, the “death of a thousand cuts,” terrified and titillated Western viewers as lingchi became an emblem of the enormous cultural gulf separating the West from China. The chapter closes by reading a photograph famously owned and reproduced by the French philosopher Georges Bataille. Bataille's relation to the photograph, the chapter argues, must be rethought inside the framework of China's relation to modernity, and to the identificatory and sympathetic claims made by the photographic subject's shocking and transformative pain.

This chapter explores the first wave of Vietnamese adoptions against a backdrop of military escalation and growing anti-war sentiment. It examines the language of responsibility, culpability and multiculturalism that came to dominate defences of adoptions in the Vietnam War era as Americans reconsidered the effectiveness and morality of U.S. foreign policy. Integral to such rhetoric was the imagined and real participation of American men and women as soldiers and social workers in Vietnam. The chapter not only elaborates the ways in which Vietnamese adoptions offered Americans an opportunity to engage with gendered notions of citizenship, but also addresses questions about chances for racial equality at home, the extent of the nation’s international obligations, and the power of intimate, familial relations to alter society.

Beginning in the 1840s, Anglo-French gunboat diplomacy and “unequal treaties” forcibly opened China to European economic interests and, in so doing, introduced unprecedented opportunities for Christian expansion. Catholic missionaries and priests returned to nurture “Old Catholics” and plant new missions, and for the first time Protestants appeared on the scene with millennial hopes of reaching “China’s millions.” This chapter begins by giving general attention to reasons for the Chinese to reject or accept the Christian message. It then turns to specific discussions of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the China Inland Mission, “Pastor Xi” (Xi Liaozhi), and first-generation Fuzhou Protestants. It concludes with an examination of the views of American theological liberals who, beginning in the late nineteenth century, rejected the traditional Christian emphasis on the necessity of conversion.