Spotlight: Tiffany Hyeon

This interview took place Friday, March 6, 2020 and was conducted by Samantha Jacobson and Jennifer Reres. Trigger warning: sexual assault, childhood trauma.

Tiffany Hyeon is a writer and consultant whose work traverses the gray areas among international adoption, trauma, and reproductive justice. She grounds her perspective and commitment to this work in her lived experience as an American Korean adoptee and survivor of child sexual abuse at the hands of her adopted father. 

We thank Tiffany for sharing her time with us and opening the discussion of reproductive justice and adoption justice to the Our Repro Rights Community. Additionally, Tiffany will be opening a conference hosted by the NYC Alliance Against Sexual Assault on June 4th! It's free and you can join the waiting list here.

What is a typical morning for you? 

Coffee! (laughs) Mornings are actually my best time of day and I used to be a night owl. Getting up early is my way of managing my endometriosis. I’m able to wake up early without an alarm and ease into the day. I’m gentle with myself and start with some gentle movement, including my pelvic floor physical therapy exercises, which help me unlearn the guarding and tension I have from enduring sexual violence. I take a walk very early in the morning where I live in Chinatown. It’s quiet before anyone wakes up and I take photos, which I send to family and friends who live elsewhere. It makes me very happy and it’s a great way to start the day. 

How do you manage stress? How do you wind down after a heavy day? 

I’ve been working for myself recently, so this is a new area for me and related to living with a chronic illness. As a nonprofit fundraiser, I realized that I was overworking myself, which was a reflection of being a survivor and wanting to prove my self worth with hours worked and money raised. I realized I had to be responsible for my own health. We have this one body and yet capitalism tells us that our productivity comes before anything else in our lives. I came to a point where I wasn’t healthy and physically could not do what I wanted to do. Now, I know I need to make space for my physical and mental health.

To relax and enjoy life I read books (unrelated to my daily work), do crossword puzzles, and connect with my partner and friends -- making sure we’re not only talking about work. I enjoy lighthearted conversation with my partner. At dinner, for example, we’ll ask each other questions that wouldn’t normally come up: if you had a restaurant and five things on the menu, what would you pick? It’s been a wonderful addition to our partnership.

What does feminism mean to you? 

Feminism, to me, is when what is white and masculine no longer defines the normal. We need to change that default. The idea of “racial melancholia” was introduced to me in “Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation”  by David Eng and Shinhee Han. It focuses on the idea the patriarchy and whiteness are upheld as the standard that no one else is able to obtain and this inability to achieve white masculinity causes depression. 

What is missing from the RJ movement? 

I would love the reproductive justice movement to be more inclusive, and adopt adoption as a core issue. Restrictions to abortion have historically resulted in  widespread, coercive adoption practices. This impacts single unwed mothers counseled, really, coerced out of abortion, often using misinformation on the medical and emotional effects of abortion, and shame about what a single, low-income woman could offer a future child over a presumably upper-middle class, white family, and into the relinquishment of their children. 

Adoption automatically gets great PR without being held accountable for its harm. Even the beloved President Barack Obama was quoted at Notre Dame’s commencement speech encouraging adoption as a way to decrease the number of abortions. The point is that adoption is so misunderstood and dominated by the brand narratives created and controlled by the Christian Evangelical right. 

It will surprise a lot of people to know how many crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) are attached to and earn profit from maternity homes and adoption agencies in the U.S. CPCs are even funded by the federal government under the guise of offering whole women’s healthcare, marriage-promotion, and abstinence education to the tune of $60 million. 

I recommend reading Katherine Joyce’s “The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption,” which explores the impact of the evangelical movement on the adoption industry. After Roe v. Wade legalized abortion and single motherhood became more accepted in the U.S., adoption rates for white, unmarried pregnant women fell from 19.2% in 1972 to 1.7% by 1995. Unfortunately, we do not yet have good data on Black women and women of color. This coincided with the decline of supply of children available for adoption and the rise of the religious right and founding of crisis pregnancy centers to create a new supply

Today, in South Korea, most  overseas adoptions actually come from unwed, pregnant mothers in their late-20s to early-30s, which is closer to my age than the narrative of poor, uninformed teenagers. There is a white savior complex with “rescuing” children born into poor, single parent homes. Yet today, overseas adoption exists within the context of a wealthy South Korea. 

One of the least known facts about adoption from South Korea is that it originated out of a desire to re-purify the Korean ethnicity after the Korean War. Of all the overseas adoptions from 1955-56, 87% were of mixed race Korean children. It is from this starting point, not the pure intention to help children, that became the model for what we now know as institutionalized adoption. It’s astoundingly under-reported.

What can we do to create a more inclusive RJ movement? How can we organize?

I am at the beginning of this work with reproductive justice and adoption justice, and currently in the research phase. There are a lot of crossovers and so much missing data. I have connected with NAPAWF (National Asian Pacific American Women’s Form). I attend meetups and community gatherings as much as possible. I would like to organize a coalition of single unwed mothers who have lost their children to adoption.

I also want to try and talk about this in a way that doesn’t increase polarization of the issue. I empathize deeply with the challenges of infertility and the desperation and sadness in not being able to have children, and I do not want to villainize parents who adopt, but rather ensure it can be safe, held accountable for good practices, and the last, remaining option over an independent supply chain. We can make this better together.

My adoptive family was abusive, but I don’t attribute this to the whole adoption system. There are “cracks.” For example, when I was adopted, only two home safety checks were required post-adoption. And identifying domestic violence in a planned setting is just not going to happen. This can be amended by redefining adoption and the process to become an adoptive family. I have friends and family members who are adoptive parents and it’s hard to bring up these negative aspects, but people are surprisingly open to the discussion. This has given me hope that there’s an approach to create dialogue around reproductive justice and adoption.

What are you most proud of? 

Survivors of child sexual abuse experience chronic trauma and in crisis moments, may contemplate or even, attempt suicide. Abusers complicitly teach victims to self-destruct; when they are no longer a part of their life, this suffering continues. Every survivor who can experience love, pleasure, lightheartedness even in small moments, and who is still here, is a success. 

My ability to survive, love, live with my partner, and counter trauma I’ve never asked for, is what I am most proud of. I have a unique position that my abuser, my adoptive father, passed away when I was 14—only 3 years after the abuse stopped. I am 32 now, and of course, I have anger, but the lens I look at this now is not simply that I hate him, but understanding the magnitude of self-hatred and trauma he had to possess to enact that poison onto me, and to abuse me. It’s incredibly hard work, but I don’t believe in carceral systems to punish abusers. They only create more violence. I’m sad that I do not get to reckon with or hold him accountable, but this work is how I heal for us both.