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20-year-old Marguerite Gong, with a camera, tape recorder and a suitcase full of clothes in tow, is ready to help her grandfather fulfill a promise he made so many years ago.
In the year In 1981, she traveled to a small family village in southern China where her 30th ancestor First Dragon Gong came from in 837 AD. As second cousins request, she sleeps on a thin mattress made of straw on a hardwood floor. About her life.
He asked her what it was like to have teachers, books and a library. Less than an hour’s bike ride past their village, they listen with rapt attention as Marguerite tries to describe the mountains, oceans, elephants, the Parthenon and the Louvre Museum in Paris in broken Mandarin.
In contrast, her relatives collect firewood, have only two sets of clothes and no running water. But the young Californian can see that their lives are abundant, because they have a sense of belonging to the same family that spans generations.
Marguerite Gong Hancock recalls the visit: “It was just life-changing – it still makes me emotional.” “As a school teacher’s son and a professor in Palo Alto, my life was more abundant than I could have imagined.
At the age of 20, Marguerite Gong demonstrated a camera to children in her ancestral village in China. It was the first time the children had seen a camera.
Marguerite Gong Hancock via LDS Living
That family village is now a prosperous modern place where Marguerite visited with her family. The lessons she learned on her first trip to China helped lay the foundation for valuable experiences throughout her life, including a 20-year career at Brigham Young University, Harvard, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and Stanford.
Now the Vice President of Innovation and Programming at the Silicon Valley Museum of Computer History, Marguerite focuses her work on events, education, diversity and inclusion at the museum. She is also the director of the museum’s Exponential Center, which captures the past and envisions the future of innovation and entrepreneurship. And among these many accomplishments, Marguerite had her own personal challenges as she battled breast cancer and endured the many chemotherapy and radiation treatments that came with it.
As a woman who believes nothing is more important than her faith and her family, Marguerite lives with the mindset she exemplifies in that Gong family home with its dirty floor and single light bulb: abundance. No matter how difficult the obstacle, or how great the opportunity, she decided to live her life believing that the blessings she was given were immeasurable – and she always strived to fulfill them and share them with others.
Read the full story at LDSLiving.com.
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