Rotarians heard fellow members Sharon Park and Dr. Fary Yassamy share aspects of their lives and professions during their craft talks, which were presented at the May 26 meeting of the Rotary Club of San Marino.
Park, a professional concert pianist, has lived in San Marino with her husband, Ken, and daughter Jane – who is a sophomore at San Marino High School – since 2003. She was born in Seoul, Korea.
Park began playing the piano when she was just under three years old. By the time she was four, she was already receiving press coverage for her exceptional musical talents.
“No one had taught me at the time I started to play,” she said. “I just listened to melodies and played them. I was able to express the mood of the music.”
After graduating from Seoul National University, she decided to move to Germany in 1984 to continue her music studies.
“I wanted to go to Germany because my three idols were born there: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms,” she said, garnering laughter from the crowd. Park added, “This was a difficult decision to make because I had never been separated from my family before.”
While in Germany, she earned her bachelors, masters and artistic diploma while also volunteering her musical talents to a church at a United States military base in the southern part of the country and performing in numerous concert. Looking back on her 10-year experience in Germany, she said, “it made me independent and extended my view of the world.”
In 1994, Park returned to Seoul to teach music at her alma mater. While there, she was introduced to her husband by a former instructor. Ken and Sharon married in 1998 and moved to the United States.
Ken Park plays the cello and their daughter plays the violin. Park said they enjoy playing as a trio, especially around Christmastime.
“Music is one of the most important and powerful things in my life,” she said. “God gave me the talent of playing piano so I like to use it to serve church and others,” said Park, who hopes to lend her musical skills to Rotary events.
She made her first musical contributions to the club by playing a five-minute piece on the piano shortly after her talk, a video of which can be found at sanmarinotribune.com.
Dr. Fary Yassamy is a local dentist whose practice is located on Huntington Drive. She took over the practice from Dr. Larry Goodreau, who first introduced her to San Marino Rotary.
“He told Rotarians that I bought his practice and I hadn’t yet,” she said, causing the crowd to roar with laughter.
Before winding down her interview-style craft talk with that San Marino story, she told the audience about how she got here.
Yassamy is ethnically Persian, but she was born in Germany because her father was completing his residency to become an orthopedic surgeon.
When she was two years old, her family moved to Iran. Seven years later, her family moved to Briton, England just before the Iranian Revolution. Soon after, she moved to southern Germany, where she attended a Catholic high school. Her graduating class traveled to the Vatican to meet Pope John Paul II and, after graduation, she began working with her father in a hospital.
Yassamy soon decided to set out on her own. She found a job in an HIV lab at the peak of the HIV scare in the mid-1980s. After a year-and-a-half there, she was offered a job at the University of Munich to do tissue typing for people waiting for kidney and heart transplants.
In 1991 she moved to Los Angeles and married her husband, Rich. Yassamy then began working at UCLA.
After a chance meeting with a childhood friend in San Francisco, she decided to go to dental school. She chose to attend USC Dental School, then moved on to work at the H. Claude Hudson Comprehensive Health Center.
She has since completed two additional post-graduate programs.
After eight years as an associate, she started looking for a place to open her own practice. At first she was looking near her home in West Los Angeles, but when she met Dr. Goodreau, Dr. Yassamy said he was persistent.
Dr. Fary Yassamy and her husband Rich have two children—a son, who is a ninth grader at San Marino High School, and daughter, who is a fourth grader at Carver Elementary School.
In her spare time, she enjoys Zumba, yoga, hiking and skiing.
