Steve Yang

Dentist, Yang Family Dentistry

Native of Seoul, South Korea

Industry: Medical

Dr. Steve Yang has lived in Salisbury for more than 40 years, coming here as an eight-year-old, after his dad decided that Los Angeles was not the right place to raise his family. 

The family story is that his dad started driving east, looking for the right place for his family, and stopped when he arrived in Salisbury, all the way across the country. Since his parents died when he was 13, Steve has unanswered questions about that cross-country trek; however, he doesn’t think the story is all that unusual. Years ago, a former church friend originally lived in Pennsylvania, stopped in Salisbury to visit relatives on a trip to Florida, and realized that it was a neat place to live. That family stayed, too. 

Steve just knows that Salisbury is home. He knew it, after dental school, when he came back home to open his dental practice. 

“My wife, Lori, and I were raised here, and we felt it was a good area to raise our family,” he says. “I couldn’t see myself any place else. I love the small-town feel, the close relationships that are developed, and the connections that are made. I love the community-type businesses and getting to know business owners on a personal level.” 

Contributions that Left an Original Mark

The Yangs’ contributions to the community are enormous. With a dental practice celebrating its 25^th year and four biological children and two adopted sons, with the six ranging in age from 23 to 13, Steve has always found time to coach youth sports — basketball, softball, baseball, volleyball, soccer. He’s the coach whose girls’ teams brought home two Little League World Series championships in 2015 and 2019.

“This area is very strong in youth sports,” he says — another good reason that Salisbury-Rowan is a good place for families. He loves it when the kids that he has coached over the years reach out to him. “Hopefully, I am a positive role model,” he says. “I tell kids in sports that the most important thing is to make memories, that to always remember the good but it’s OK to remember the bad. We learn from our losses.”

He sees youth as a big part of a community’s success. “Our youth are our future. We need to keep them strong and healthy and faced in the right direction.”

Rowan County’s Be an original™ slogan means that people should be themselves “and not try to follow in anyone’s footsteps,” Steve says. “Everyone is ‘an original,’ so being who you are is who you should be … challenge oneself to think in ways that will likely build upon the ideas of others, but not copy them. We might argue that originality always is a built-upon, tagged-upon, improved-upon process. After all, everything that exists today has been built upon something that has existed in one way or another before.”

Connecting to the Community 

The Yangs are active in church life, the Rowan County United Way, the J.F. Hurley Family YMCA, Rowan Little League, Rowan County Young Life, the Community Care Clinic of Rowan County, Inc., Meals on Wheels Rowan, and Rowan Helping Ministries, to name a few. A favorite restaurant is East Coast Wings “for its personal atmosphere that you don’t get in a larger city,” he says. Steve likes knowing the owners and staff.

The new Bell Tower Green Park is a favorite outdoor space for its beauty, the 

camaraderie that it has produced in Rowan County, and all the people who allowed this to happen from personal contributions. “Residents invested to make this work,” he says.

His family’s Voices of Hope Outdoor Concert is his favorite event. The concert, held annually on the first Sunday in November at Bell Tower Green Park, is a fund-raiser for the Michael Yang Foundation, in memory of the Yangs’ son, Michael, who died in 2001. The Foundation funds the bereavement group, Circle of Hope, and also private bereavement meetings, as needed. Lori Yang is the director.

Steve says there are so many good places in Salisbury-Rowan that it is hard to narrow the list of places that he would recommend newcomers visit — from the downtown beautiful shops and homes in the Historic District to family adventures at Lazy 5 Ranch and Dan Nicholas Park to the multiple great theaters — Lee Street Theatre, The Meroney Theater, and The Novell Theater. 

He sums up Rowan County as a diverse, growing community with “families raised here throughout multiple generations because they care about the community.”