Acceptance Problem Everywhere

Dynamic preservationist Gerry Low-Sabado, who lives in Fremont, travelled 90 miles to Monterey to show me her ancestors' village. (Post one.) She first led us to Point Lobos, a point not only of nature but history, she said. Her great grandmother's photo is in the Whaler's Village. (Post two.) Her great-great grandfather floated over from Canton, escaping the chaos and poverty that accompanied war. (Post three.) Gerry researched her ancestors, and so had lots of information to share when CSU-Monterey Bay expressed interest. A documentary came from that research, and bolstered Gerry to spread the word.(Post four.) People didn't always want to hear her words. (Post five.) Still, making history correct became Gerry's mission. (Post six.)

Gerry asked the docent if she could in a lion head for a picture. The docent said, “Sure.”  So we went to retrieve it from the car. “All my life, growing up on the Monterey Peninsula, I never saw a Chinese lion. My generation didn’t experience that. “

We took a picture, and were putting the colorful ornament back when a man approached Gerry, asking what she was doing. She explained the history of the village and the cabin, and that she was here to honor her ancestors. 
“When you go in the back you’ll see my great grandmother. Where her son was born—that village was burned down because the people didn’t like the Chinese, they didn’t like the smell of the fish, they thought the Chinese were taking their jobs. Sort of like what’s happening now.”

“It’s all the same everywhere,” the man said. He explained that his mother moved to a region near Venice after WWII, because her house had been burned and destroyed. She moved only 300km away, “the same distance perhaps between Los Angeles and San Francisco. And she experienced the same that you are telling, ok?  For the same reason--because she came from another region, because she was poor, because they are taking our jobs, something like this, no?”

He said he admired what Gerry was doing. His mother, he said, did not learn from the lesson. “Now there are other people coming to us from other countries. In Europe we have a big—let’s say problem—because there are many people coming from Africa, from Afghanistan, from Iraq. There are masses of people, millions of people. These people are in the same situation she was sixty years ago.  But she behaves no differently to these people than those people behaved to her.”

(To be continued. Next: Happy Doing Right Thing.)