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Today’s guest is Candy Yiu who lives in Portland and Astoria.  She owns a Boutique Hotel called Near the Pier on Franklin St. and also began, along with her husband, Slurpalicious, a local food delivery service.

If you’re a local, you might have noticed the cool white building with the robots mural on Duane Street with the food carts. Gary Hirsch, the artist has an interesting story. To encourage a kid with cancer, he painted a little brave robot on the back of a domino and gifted it to him. It worked. So, hospitals all over the world asked him for a few thousand robots. Then he realized he couldn’t paint so many, he had the idea to have other kids paint the robots to gift to kids in the hospital. 

It ended up helping two kids at once- both how to give and how to care.  So far, he’s painted more than 60,000 dominos. Candy asked him to come to bring Astoria joy in the form of the botjoy mural.

Candy tells her inspiring story of growing up in Hong Kong, a city of 3 million, where education for girls was not important and where the value of women was nearly nonexistent.  

Let’s lean in to her journey of grit to go to college and obtain her PhD.

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