Pearl Buck & other adoption stories

A hand-edited manuscript of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth has been recovered and feuding heirs have finally reached an agreement that allows the book to be publicly displayed.

Here’s why this matters:

1. PSBI (Pearl S. Buck International) is the organization behind Welcome House, an agency (the first?) specializing in adoption of bi-racial children – kids who, because they’re already crossing racial barriers, might be considered “unadoptable” wherever they happen to be. PSBI is also into “multi-cultural education” which is A-OK in my book.
2. Pearl Buck’s name isn’t as familiar as it once was, so money for the agency has been getting a little tight (or so that Charleston, West Virginia, Gazette article implies).
3. Buck is an author worth remembering. She wrote one of the first personal memoirs of life in China as a Westerner (Marco Polo was a traveler; Pearl Buck grew up there, learning English as a second language), and was also a campaigner back home for the rights of women and against the Chinese Exclusion Act, which I’ve written about previously and about which you really need to know.

So it might be worth a literary trip to West Virginia. Lovely part of the country, too.

I’ve been thinking (suburbanite that I am) about adoption in rural communities. There’ve been a a few stories about that lately.

Nurse Rose Schaumberg lives in a “modern log home” in Streator, Illinois, with her four daughters from China. I wonder what school is like for them.

In Gainesville, Florida, the schools are pretty good because of that one big one with all the orange-and-blue paraphernalia. And for a few months out of the year, there’s a sizable Asian population, too, so less of the nobody-has-a-face-like-mine anxiety. (There’s also a good basic overview of the Chinese adoption process in that article if any faithful readers are interested in entry-level information.) (Or pictures of kids playing in lush, North Florida forests.)

And in Noblesville, Indiana, they’ve just had an international adoption picnic which attracted people from as far away as Texas. It seems to have coincided with the local 4-H fair. My kids love our chickens; I bet they’d get a kick out of that.

I suppose it doesn’t much matter where you wind up, on most levels. And anyway, people everywhere are getting used to the long wait.

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