Pearl Buck, who won both the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes, was one
of the best known and most widely read American novelists of the
twentieth century. She was also an adoptive parent, a prominent
early critic of racial and religious matching,
a thorn in the side of the child welfare establishment, and an advocate
of special needs, transracial,
and international
adoptions.
The child of Protestant missionaries, Buck spent the first half
of her life in China and the second half living in the United States.
Her formative experience abroad led her to write prolifically about
Asia for western audiences and work tirelessly on behalf of international
humanitarianism and intercultural understanding. She was a multiculturalist
who hoped to dignify Chinese history and make cultural difference
understandable for Americans. But she was also an anti-communist
and a champion of civil rights who believed that the human story
was fundamentally universal.
After her first marriage, to John Lossing Buck, Pearl give birth
to a “feeble-minded”
child, Carol, in 1921. Carol was a victim of PKU, an inherited
metabolic disease, and was institutionalized for most of her life.
After her daughter's birth, Buck had a hysterectomy. Although this
wrenching personal experience must have shaped her thinking about
children and families profoundly, Buck kept the fact of Carols
existence and mental retardation secret for a very long time. Buck
and her first husband adopted a baby in 1926. With her second husband,
Richard Walsh, Buck adopted two infant boys from the Cradle (one
of the country's first specialized
adoption agencies) in 1936, followed by four mixed-race children
from Europe, Asia, and the United States. In 1949, she founded an
adoption agency, Welcome House, after being unable to locate an
agency that was willing to place a fifteen-month old of mixed racial
background because of his brown skin. “I was indignant, so
I started my own damned agency!” she explained.
In 1955, Buck publicly criticized social workers and religious
institutions for standing between tens of thousands of homeless
children and willing parents in order to preserve their jobs. She
believed that families formed by love—rather than prejudices
based on race, religion, nation, and blood—were living expressions
of democracy that could counteract communist charges that America’s
global defense of freedom was deeply hypocritical in the era of
Jim Crow.
In 1991, after
forty years, Welcome House merged with the Pearl S. Buck Foundation
to form Pearl S. Buck International, an organization that continues
to carry out Bucks work in the fields of humanitarian aid,
intercultural education, and adoption.
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