Dr. Debra Ouyang (Debbie Otto)
1982 – 2026
Doctor, painter, dancer, teacher, and above all, deeply devoted to her family.
She had an imagination that took her on incredible journeys.
Some of them were real — she grew up traveling the world with her family. Others she built herself: a practice of her own, a family she gave it up for, and, in her last two years, a body of paintings that began with a YouTube video in a hospital room.
Her life
Debbie was born in Arcadia, California, and her childhood was full of travel. Donald and Mei Ling took her everywhere — from a fishing trip an hour down the road to countries on the other side of the world — and if the only way to make a trip happen was a night in a hostel, that is how they did it; being somewhere new, together, was always the point. She dreamed of giving Benjamin and Samantha the same, and had only just begun before she got sick, while they were still so small.
Family was the center of everything. She was a devoted daughter, a sister to Sandy, and a beloved aunt to her nieces Alyssa and Kayla and her nephew Alexander. With Ryan she built the family she had always wanted — Benjamin, now eight, and Samantha, now five — two children she fought for harder and longer than most people will ever know. She was a tiger mom and would have said so herself, without a word of apology, because everything she did, she did for them.
She was an endocrinologist and ran her own clinic in California. She gave it up to raise her family, and kept practicing part-time by telemedicine — so there were patients still being cared for by her long after the clinic doors closed.
And there was one thing about her that anyone who spent time with her would recognize. She would take on a project she was certain she could manage, get some way into it, and get thoroughly stuck. Ryan would come and fix it. And she would look up with an expression that was somehow apologetic and entirely unrepentant at the same time, and say, in the sweetest voice she had —
I helped.
In lieu of flowers
The Debra Ouyang Foundation carries her name and her paints: it puts watercolor supplies into the hands of leukemia and transplant patients, on the wards where they are being treated. If you would like to do something in her memory, that is where we would point you.
Leave a memory
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