ABSTRACT
When Welcome House expanded from a permanent foster home to a full-fledged adoption agency, Buck crafted an adoption narrative for the media that highlighted the successes she observed in the residential home. Whether speaking to small crowds, writing to women’s organizations or for women’s magazines, or soliciting money to support the Welcome House, Buck’s goal was to change the opinions of people in areas where families were likely to adopt a Welcome House child. She always described the children as beautiful and intelligent, and this tendency rubbed off on some of the families who adopted from the agency. Buck’s narrative of hybrid superiority contained elements of the model minority stereotype that emerged in the 1960s, in part, because of Chinese and Japanese activists’ decades-long efforts to counter negative characterizations of their communities. The American eugenics movement of the early twentieth century encouraged the belief that genetically inferior people threatened society.
