Heon YOOK

*** My Parents: The Foundation Beneath Everything *** Before there was a career, before there was a marriage, before there was a daughter or a son-in-law, there were my parents. Everything I have built in America rests on a foundation they laid in Korea — through sacrifice, through service, and through a quiet, steady belief that their son’s education was worth more than their own comfort. I am grateful, beyond what words can carry, that my parents made the decision to send me to America to study. Our family was not wealthy. My parents were not rich enough to easily support the cost of an American graduate school education — the tuition, the living expenses, the distance, the years away from home. And yet, they made it possible. They found a way. They saw to it that I completed my schooling, even when supporting that path required real sacrifice on their part. That choice — to invest everything in their son’s future across the ocean — is the gift on which the rest of my life was built....