About a month ago, I was invited by the Oracle Women Leadership Council to deliver a speech for their UN Day of the Girl ceremony because of my heavy involvement with the Silicon Valley UNA and UN International Youth Council. Although Day of the Girl is officially on 10/11, Oracle moved their ceremony up to 10/9, on a weekday.
This Thursday (10/9), my father picked me up from school at around 11 AM, and we drove to the Oracle headquarters in Santa Clara. After dropping me off at a building, I was escorted to a huge conference room where the event was to take place. For their catered lunch, I ate a beef and swiss cheese sandwich and started rehearsing the speech again in my head. The ceremony started off with an excerpt from the movie "Girl Rising"- which gave me chills. The first scene showcased a Thai woman, dressed in ethnic clothing, performing an ancient Thai dance, with a melodious Thai song resonating in the background. With elegance and grace, she executed a series of very sophisticated movements, her glittering clothing moving along with her. Suddenly, the scene cut to a little girl, digging through the wastelands and dumps of Thailand, sifting through the unwanted belongings of others, searching for anything salvageable. It was revealed that the young girl was the current girl, performing on the stage, except 20 years younger.Through education, an orphaned child in Thailand who used to spend her days digging through landfills transformed into an intelligent and beautiful woman, which attested to the power of knowledge and learning. My speech was on empowering women in Ningxia, China through my financial literacy initiative that I started with my friend Valene.
This Saturday, I delivered another speech to the Chinese American Semiconductor Professionals Association. Hosted at the Santa Clara Convention Center, there were SO MANY people in attendance- no less than 500. There were also a lot of important people who arrived at this event (which I did not anticipate), including the mayors of Milpitas and Sunnyvale, several state senators and congressmen, and the CEO of ARM, one of Britain's most prominent technology companies. I was proud of my speech- according to my mother, when the CEO was delivering his keynote address, no one was listening and everyone was one their phone, but everyone fixated their attention on me when I began to speak. It's strange and also humbling to think that I commanded more attention than the CEO of a multibillion international corporation...
I spoke about my speech impediment as a young girl and how my fear of speaking as transformed into wanting to use my voice to give a voice to the marginalized and unnoticed.
Although the days leading up to a huge speech are stressful and nervewracking, it's all worth it when you know that you've moved people with your words.
