With a digicam, a tape recorder and a suitcase full of garments in tow, 20-year-old Marguerite Gong is able to assist fulfill a promise her grandfather made to her a few years in the past .
It’s 1981 and she or he travels to a small household village in southern China the place her 30th nice grandfather, the First Dragon Gong, got here to stay in 837 AD. She is mendacity on a hardwood mattress with a skinny straw mattress, as second cousins require. about her life.
He peppered her with questions on what it was wish to have lecturers, books and libraries. By no means greater than an hour’s bike journey previous their village, they eagerly pay attention as Marguerite tries in damaged Mandarin to explain the mountains, the oceans, the elephants, the Parthenon and the Louvre Museum in Paris.
As a substitute, her kin collect sticks for gas, personal solely two outfits, and haven’t any working water. However the younger Californian can see that their lives are nonetheless considerable as a result of they’ve a way of identification from belonging to a household spanning generations.
“That modified my life—it nonetheless provides me a thrill,” Marguerite Gong Hancock recollects of the go to. “Because the little one of a trainer and a trainer in Palo Alto, my life was extra considerable than I may have realized.”
Marguerite Gong, aged 20, exhibits a digicam to youngsters in her ancestral village in China. It was the primary time the youngsters noticed a digicam.
Marguerite Gong Hancock by way of LDS Dwelling
That household village is now a thriving, fashionable place that Marguerite has visited along with her household ever since. The teachings she discovered on that first journey to China helped set the stage for different essential experiences in her life, together with her research at Brigham Younger College, Harvard, the Fletcher College of Regulation and Diplomacy, and a 20-year profession at Stanford .
Now vp of innovation and programming on the Silicon Valley Pc Historical past Museum, Marguerite focuses her work on museum innovation, together with occasions, training, range and inclusion. She can be the director of the museum’s Exponential Heart, which captures the previous and considers the way forward for innovation and entrepreneurship. And but, amongst these many accomplishments, Marguerite had her personal private challenges to face as she battled breast most cancers and endured the various chemotherapy and radiation therapies that got here with it.
As a lady who believes nothing is extra essential than her religion and her household, Marguerite lives with a mindset she noticed exemplified in that Gong household home with its filth ground and single mild bulb: abundance. Irrespective of how troublesome the impediment or how nice the chance, she then resolved to stay her life with the conviction that the blessings she had been given had been immeasurable – and she or he would at all times attempt to stay them and share them with others .
Learn the total story at LDSLiving.com.
