Phoebe Yang

And so I was born in a small town called Pine Bluff in Arkansas, which is in the Mississippi Delta.

Grew up there with the exception of three very influential years when I lived in Nebraska, where my dad did his Ph.D.,

And then during that time, my parents split up and my father ended up becoming a single parent.

We moved back to Arkansas and people, you know, my hometown, the same year that it was ranked by Rand McNally as the worst city to live in the United States, it was also ranked the top volunteer community in America.

And it was a wonderful place to grow up.

The whole town becomes your family.

But needless to say, in a predominantly African-American community, I looked I looked a little different.

And then I looked even more different because I had a single parent father and then he was an immigrant.

And so, you know, it was an interesting upbringing, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Yeah.

Defined who I was.

Yes.

There was one probably most pivotal moment.

So I went to law school thinking that I was going to do a traditional career of being a law professor and maybe a judge or something like that, because I had a long history, ancestral history of Supreme Court justices and attorney generals and

And diplomats and judges in my family, my father, who was the only son and the oldest, decided to veer from that and became a professor.

And I wanted to be a professor, but he really wanted me to be a lawyer.

And so we kind of compromised and I said, okay, I'll be a law professor.

And

And so I went through law school and did my summer work, et cetera, with the assumption that I might do something in that realm.

And then the year after he graduated, I was clerking for a judge, which a lot of law students do after they graduate from law school.