With a digicam, tape recorder and a suitcase stuffed with garments in tow, 20-year-old Marguerite Gong is able to assist satisfy a promise her grandfather had made a few years prior to.
It’s 1981 and she or he travels to a small circle of relatives village in southern China the place her thirtieth great-grandfather, First Dragon Gong, had come to reside in AD 837. She lies on a hardwood mattress with a skinny bed product of straw as 2d cousins ask about her existence.
They pepper her with questions of what it used to be love to have lecturers, books and libraries. Having by no means been past an hour’s bicycle experience previous their village, they concentrate eagerly as Marguerite tries in damaged Mandarin to explain mountains, oceans, elephants, the Parthenon, and the Louvre Museum in Paris.
By contrast, her family members collect sticks for gasoline, personal handiest two outfits and don’t have any operating water. However the younger girl from California can see that their existence is nonetheless ample, as they have got a way of identification from belonging to a circle of relatives via generations of time.
“That used to be simply life-changing — it nonetheless brings emotion to me,” Marguerite Gong Hancock remembers of the consult with. “As a kid of a schoolteacher and a professor in Palo Alto, my existence used to be extra ample than I may just understand.”
Marguerite Gong at age 20 displays a digicam to kids in her ancestral village in China. It used to be the kids’s first time ever seeing a digicam.
Marguerite Gong Hancock by the use of LDS Dwelling
That circle of relatives village is now a thriving, trendy position that Marguerite has since visited together with her circle of relatives. The teachings she realized on that first shuttle to China helped lay a basis for different necessary studies in her existence, together with her research at Brigham Younger College, Harvard, the Fletcher College of Regulation and International relations and a 20-year occupation at Stanford.
Now the vice chairman of innovation and programming at Silicon Valley’s Pc Historical past Museum, Marguerite focuses her paintings on innovation around the museum, together with occasions, training, variety and inclusion. She may 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 those many accomplishments, Marguerite had her personal non-public demanding situations to stand as she fought breast most cancers and continued the various chemotherapy and radiation therapies that got here with it.
As a lady who believes that not anything is extra necessary than her religion and circle of relatives, Marguerite lives with a mindset she noticed exemplified in that Gong circle of relatives house with a mud flooring and a unmarried gentle bulb: abundance. Regardless of how tricky the impediment, or how tremendous the chance, she decided then to reside her existence with the conviction that the blessings she have been given had been immeasurable — and she or he would at all times try to reside as much as them and percentage them with others.
Learn the whole tale at LDSLiving.com.
