Phoebe Yang

They wanted Alice Walker from The Color Purple.

And but she it was an 11 minute speech.

You can still hear it.

And I sometimes go back and listen to it.

It was just brilliant.

And one of the things she said in that speech was, you know, at the end of your life, you are not going to care about whether you, you know, pass that test or not.

or closed that deal or won that case, what you're going to care about is did you spend time with the important people in your life and how did you invest your life in that way?

And so I try each day to make sure that, you know, even if I'm on the road a lot that I have

made a point to make sure that the people in my life and those in my life most important to me know that they are most important to me.

Because sometimes what's on our calendar doesn't really reflect the priorities of our hearts.

Yeah, so my origin story is I'm the daughter of a single-parent immigrant who was a father, not a mother.

A lot of times it's a single mother, but it was a single father who had three daughters, and I'm the oldest of the three daughters.

He came to the United States in the 60s to get his master's.

The first place he stopped was in Harlem and then ended up at Atlanta University, which is at HBCU, now called Clark University.

met my mother and ended up staying in the United States after his father, who had been a single parent also, who fled communism in China and went to Taiwan.

Why am I

Father was a teenager.

He ended up being my mother.

And so when his father passed away, he decided to stay.

And he got a job in Arkansas teaching at another HBCU.