펄 벅과 혼종 우월성

Pearl Buck and Hybrid Superiority: ‘Amerasians’ in The Hidden Flower and The New Year

Pearl S. Buck, born in America but who spent most of her life in China, is considered a spiritual hybrid with an ‘in-between’ identity. Most of her works are included in the category of interracial literature because they deal with the issues of interracial marriage and hybrids. She has a special concern for ‘Amerasians,’ the mixed-race children born between American men and Asian women during the Cold War period. In The Hidden Flower(1952) and The New Year(1968), Buck not only reveals her sympathy towards the plights of ‘Amerasians,’ but also subverts the 19th-century discourses of racial hybridity that claim the superiority of pure blood over mixed-race. Lennie, the mixed-race child of an American man and a Japanese woman in The Hidden Flower and Christopher, a child of an American man and a Korean woman in The New Year are portrayed as genetically superior hybrids in whom the mental and physical strengths of East and West are united. Through these novels, she also criticizes the myth of ‘racial purity’ rampant at that time in the American South with the assertion that “all cultures are hybrids and amalgams because miscegenation is going on constantly between all peoples.”