For years growing up in Monterey, Gerry Low-Sabado didn’t know her family, as one of several Chinese and Chinese American fishermen dating back to the mid-18th century, would go on to create the area’s world-famous fishing industry.

A fifth-generation Chinese American, she also hadn’t been aware of the racism her family faced, not only through locals' xenophobia, but institutional policies meant to exclude and discriminate against people of Chinese descent.

Following a series of policies limiting their ability to fish, the Chinese fishing village, located near where the Monterey Bay Aquarium now stands, was burned down on May 16, 1906. The grandfather of Low-Sabado was reportedly one of the last to leave after being forced out by the Pacific Improvement Company, which owned the land.

Many of these local experiences were hidden, or worse, obfuscated through simplistic depictions.

Much of this became rediscovered when Low-Sabado, now 69, worked on the 2004 documentary “By Light of Lanterns: An Untold Story of Monterey’s Chinese Fishermen” with California State University, Monterey Bay professors and students.

Since then, she has sought to reclaim her family’s history as part of the American experience.

“By learning about the history and how the Chinese were being treated unfairly, (unjustly), I felt that we have to tell the story of my ancestors because they lived in the village, and how did my generation not even know?” she said. “We lived not far away and we didn’t know that story at all.”

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She is now joining the event “People of Two Worlds: Asian Americans in Monterey County” Friday at the CSUMB Salinas Center for Arts and Culture.

Documentaries "By Light of Lanterns" and “Gambatte Kimashita: Japanese Flower Growers of the Salinas Valley” will be shown as part of the event to facilitate discussion on Asian Americans' pasts, presents and futures in the area.

The event will feature conversations on community memory and activism, as well as research, publication and media.

“By other people in the community ignoring that Chinese history of their own town, it really kind of blocked my generation from knowing anything about it,” she said.

Low-Sabado's parents experienced the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and other racist policies aimed at limiting immigration from China and opportunities people of Chinese descent had in the U.S.

“Because of that, then, our generation just didn’t know,” she said. “and we didn’t even know to ask the question.”

Of contention has been depictions of Chinese people in the century-old “Feast of Lanterns,” a four-day festival each July when Pacific Grove celebrates with paper lanterns, fishing boats and a “Royal Court” pageant where youth wear Chinese-themed garb.

While the festival’s website calls it a “multi-cultural community event filled with entertainment” and efforts have been made to make it more culturally sensitive, Low-Sabado and others have seen it as portraying racist caricatures of Chinese people, in addition to a simplistic viewing of history.

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According to historian Sandy Lydon in his 1985 book “Chinese Gold: The Chinese in the Monterey Bay Region,” the festival started in 1905 after local residents forced Chinese people to stop fishing and drying squid, but Pacific Grove citizens wanted to use lanterns resembling those from Chinese fishing boats.

“Lanterns were also lit in the windows and on the porches of all the Pacific Grove houses facing the ocean so they would ‘resemble a bit our Chinatown by swinging globes and fanciful designs in barbaric colors’,” Lydon wrote. “The Pacific Grove Lantern Festival became an annual affair, and sometime in the early years, a story about a search for a Chinese Empress was attached to the event to give it mythical justification.”

Salinas also has a historic Chinatown, where generations of families settled in the 19th and 20th centuries and founded a tight knit, if segregated, community across the railroad tracks from Oldtown Salinas. While Chinatown is now often associated with homelessness, several cultural institutions and businesses still stand.

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In the documentary “Gambatte Kimashita,” Salinas native and former journalist Lori Eitoku-Wong conducted interviews and narrated the documentary. It covers Japanese families who would go on to create a billion-dollar industry in the postwar era. She herself is the daughter of flower growers – even working in the greenhouses to help sustain the family.

The documentary, which premiered at the CSUMB Salinas Center in September, was made possible with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Salinas Valley Japanese American Citizens League.

“I noticed that they all had in common was their optimism.” Eitoku-Wong had said in September. “Even in their 80s, they had this special spirit about them ... They were just so optimistic they were going to be able to get through whatever they had to.”

Eitoku-Wong worked to tell the story of her parents and other locals who – arriving to the U.S. in the wake of World War II and forced internment of Japanese Americans in Monterey County and other parts of the U.S. – escaped environmental disasters in Kagoshima Prefecture that spawned famines and scarcity of resources.

After a three-year guest worker program requiring them to work farm labor, many of these families founded a prosperous community near Alisal, Encinal and Spence roads just outside Salinas.

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“I don’t think I’m as tough as they are,” she had said. “I don’t know if I would have taken some of the risks that they’ve taken. So I definitely appreciate all they went through.”

Since “By Light of Lanterns,” Low-Sabado has worked to create the annual “Walk of Remembrance” in Pacific Grove honoring and highlighting the Chinese American community that was evicted and whose community razed in 1906.

Low-Sabado has also gone on to give talks at Stanford and Santa Clara universities, among other institutions, and has helped create exhibits at the aquarium and Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History dedicated to the Chinese community. In 2016, she won the Ralph B. Atkinson Award

She said her documentary gives future generations of Chinese Americans a framework to study history. All they have to do is pass it along.

“Those are artifacts that we have that we can share with the other generations and to teach them not to be afraid,” she said, “because it is a scary thing to go out in the community and not know how people will react to you.”

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With both of Friday's showings and discussions, event organizers aim to connect people while furthering possibilities of acting or educating the wider audience about Chinese American and Japanese American history and culture in Monterey County.

For Fred Vermote, assistant professor of global history at CSUMB, history is the study of change over time. "People of Two Worlds" aims to show that, he said, and bring people together to create a better, more just society.

Demographic shifts in the area, whether natural or forced, have created new forms of diversity.

"It constantly changes due to long term variables like economic opportunities or global patterns of migration, but sometimes short-term things like putting up a wall or burning down a village," Vermote said. "The more you know about these processes – the more you recognize challenges and opportunities – the more accurate your understanding will be of the complex reality right now in Monterey and Salinas."

"People of Two Worlds" will take place at 7 p.m. March 8 at the CSUMB Salinas Center for Arts and Culture, which houses the National Steinbeck Center, located at 1 Main St. The event is free and open to the public.

Contact reporter Eduardo Cuevas at ecuevas@thecalifornian.com or 831 269-9363. To support this kind of work subscribe here.