Search Results

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

Kori A. Graves

in A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War

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 ... More

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.Less

Mixed-Race Children and Their Korean Mothers

Susie Woo

in Framed by War: Korean Children and Women at the Crossroads of US Empire

This chapter looks at what happened to the Korean women and children who remained in South Korea. It sets the stage by describing how President Rhee’s 1953 directive to remove children with American ... More

This chapter looks at what happened to the Korean women and children who remained in South Korea. It sets the stage by describing how President Rhee’s 1953 directive to remove children with American fathers to the United States heightened the vulnerability of those who stayed. The South Korean government worked closely with Harry Holt and in 1954 established Korea’s first welfare agency, Child Placement Service, expressly to remove mixed-race children. The chapter describes how US racial identification practices used to determine which children were “part-black” were introduced to and became institutionalized in South Korea. It also describes how Korean women were erased in this process. They were coerced to give up their mixed-race children and were offered no support from either government. For the children, solutions ranging from segregated schools to welfare reports that pathologized them as “social handicaps” relegated this population to the margins. The chapter ends with a consideration of how mixed-race children and the mothers who fought to raise them navigated the ongoing legacies of US militarization in South Korea.Less

Epilogue: Mixed Races, Mixed Children, Mixed Outcomes

Caroline Rody

in The Interethnic Imaginiation: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction

This epilogue examines the history of mixed‐race characters in Asian American fiction, so as to consider the meaning of the generation of mixed‐race fictional children born to the protagonists of the ... More

This epilogue examines the history of mixed‐race characters in Asian American fiction, so as to consider the meaning of the generation of mixed‐race fictional children born to the protagonists of the novels centrally considered in this study. After a brief discussion of the legacy of “tragic” mulattoes and other mixed‐race characters in U.S. fiction, and then of the increasing public acceptance and even affirmation of mixed‐race identity in popular and literary discourse, it goes on to trace a line of troubled mixed‐race Asian figures, with special attention to the melancholic predicament of visually indeterminate race, in texts by writers including Frank Chin, Jessica Hagedorn, Heinz Insu Fenkl, and Don Lee. Patricia Chao's Mambo Peligroso and Jiro Adachi's Island of Bicycle Dancers present more affirmative if problematic portrayals of mixed characters and societies. But the mixed children in Chang‐rae Lee's Native Speaker, Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land, and Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange should be seen as suggestive projections of an emerging interethnic consciousness.Less

Missionary Rescue and the Transnational Making of Family

Susie Woo

in Framed by War: Korean Children and Women at the Crossroads of US Empire

The war resulted in over three million Korean deaths and an estimated 100,000 children left homeless. The scale of need opened the door wide to nongovernmental US citizens who flooded South Korea to ... More

The war resulted in over three million Korean deaths and an estimated 100,000 children left homeless. The scale of need opened the door wide to nongovernmental US citizens who flooded South Korea to spearhead recovery efforts. American missionaries led the call. They set up over five hundred orphanages by the war’s end and administered care in a country that, unlike the United States, did not have an established national welfare program. The chapter examines how US officials initially welcomed the work of missionaries because they helped to resolve the civilian crisis while promoting Cold War visions of American benevolence, but were soon at odds with missionaries who openly criticized US servicemen for abandoning their mixed-race children in Korea. What began as a humanitarian and proselytizing effort in South Korea turned into an adoption movement that spanned the Pacific. Missionaries like evangelist Harry Holt and internationalist Pearl Buck connected constituencies back home to Korean children, imbuing Americans with a perceived First World responsibility over Third World children. The mobilization of Americans interested in seeing these adoptions through pressured the US and South Korean governments to create permanent adoption laws that set the stage for large-scale transnational adoptions the world over.Less

Race and Rescue in Early Asian International Adoption History

Catherine Ceniza Choy

in Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America

This chapter examines the roles played by race and rescue in the early history of Asian international adoption in America. It begins by discussing how the post–World War II US occupation of Japan ... More

This chapter examines the roles played by race and rescue in the early history of Asian international adoption in America. It begins by discussing how the post–World War II US occupation of Japan (1945–1952) and US Cold War involvement in the Korean War (1950–1953) created a population of mixed-race children fathered by American servicemen with Asian women. It then explains how international adoption and humanitarian rescue became inextricably linked during this period. It also reflects on the work of the ISS-USA (International Social Service-United States of America Branch) in facilitating Asian international adoptions, along with its emphasis on the important role of indigenous social services to alleviate the plight of mixed-race children. Finally, it considers the persistence of the plight of “GI babies” into the 1960s and 1970s in the context of the Vietnam War and the US military involvement in the conflict.Less

The Difference Difference Makes

in Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in the Modern United States

What were the adoption histories of children who faced discrimination and exclusion from placement on the basis of race? When and why did white Americans deliberately begin to violate matching by ... More

What were the adoption histories of children who faced discrimination and exclusion from placement on the basis of race? When and why did white Americans deliberately begin to violate matching by incorporating mixed-race children, minority children, and children born in foreign countries into their families? This chapter begins to answer these questions. It describes efforts to locate adoptive homes for children born into minority communities, continues the story of transracial and transnational adoptions after 1945, and suggests that by the mid-1960s, a new strategy for achieving authenticity had emerged. Denying difference gave way to acknowledging it. This shift was especially controversial in the case of race, where matching continued to seem logical, natural, and absolutely necessary to many parents and professionals. Realness never lost its power as a goal for adoption, but the rules for getting there started to change.Less

Lucía Martínez and the “Putative Father”: Arizona, 1854–1900

Katrina Jagodinsky

in Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women's Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946

This chapter explores how Indigenous women faced the laws that bound them to American masters and made them sexually vulnerable to male citizens' whims by chronicling the experiences of a Yaqui woman ... More

This chapter explores how Indigenous women faced the laws that bound them to American masters and made them sexually vulnerable to male citizens' whims by chronicling the experiences of a Yaqui woman in Arizona, Lucía Martínez, during the period 1854–1900. It narrates how Lucía endured an adolescence of servitude under a territorial Arizona senator, King S. Woolsey, whom she challenged as the putative father of her illegitimate children in civil court. Woolsey fathered three of Lucía's children and indentured two of them. Lucía sued Woolsey in 1871 for custody of her mixed-race children, becoming the first Native woman to use Arizona's legal system. This chapter discusses Lucía's child custody petition in the Arizona civil court as well as the transformation of her children from Martínez to Woolsey within a lifetime, which reflected a shift in Yaqui claims to whiteness and citizenship in Arizona Territory.Less

Growing up on the Middle Ground: Bicultural Creeks on the Early American Frontier

Andrew K. Frank

in Children and Youth in a New Nation

This chapter explores the bicultural upbringing of mixed-race children produced via intermarriages between Creek Indians and southern colonists. On a daily basis, white and Native American parents ... More

This chapter explores the bicultural upbringing of mixed-race children produced via intermarriages between Creek Indians and southern colonists. On a daily basis, white and Native American parents struggled to find compromises and common ground in the socialization of their children, resulting in a bicultural upbringing. This process of middle-ground parenting defied and adhered to many of the norms that structured southeastern Indian society, but it almost always reflected the interests of Native society. Most fathers had the ability to influence the upbringing of their Creek children only when it suited their Indian mothers and families. Creek women and their matrilineal kin maintained the upper hand in this process, carefully regulating the actions of intermarried white men.Less

Sexual Patriotism

Wendy Webster

in Mixing It: Diversity in World War Two Britain

This chapter focuses on what I call ‘sexual patriotism’, to describe what much popular opinion demanded of British women—the avoidance of sexual relationships with all men who were not native-born ... More

This chapter focuses on what I call ‘sexual patriotism’, to describe what much popular opinion demanded of British women—the avoidance of sexual relationships with all men who were not native-born Britons. These rules were generally female-only—British men’s relationships with non-British women attracted little attention. Women’s responses to the demands that they should be sexually patriotic were varied—many flouted the rules that popular opinion laid down for them. Within diverse popular attitudes, interracial mixing—including mixing between white British women and black men—was not only accepted but also championed by a significant strand of popular opinion. British people thought of themselves as tolerant, in contrast to the intolerance of white Americans. But on interracial sex and marriage and the birth of mixed-race children, the views of the American authorities, the British government, and much of British public opinion converged—they were beyond the pale.Less