Life
Born in Canton, China, to a family of farmers, Lue Gim Gong, was interested in America and the opportunities that lay across the Pacific Ocean. After his uncle returned from America when Lue was 12, the boy pleaded with his parents to let him return with his uncle to America. His parents agreed, giving him a bolt of silk to sell when he arrived. He lived in a heavily Chinese-populated area in San Francisco until the age 16 when he moved to North Adams, Massachusetts, to work at a shoe factory.
At the factory, Lue met Fannie Burlingame, who taught his Sunday School class. When she learned of his skill with plants, she asked him to live with the Burlingames to tend their garden. She converted him to Christianity, and helped him become a United States citizen in 1877.
Lue had been advised to move to a warmer climate due to his recent contraction of tuberculosis. Due to his conversion, he was unable to return to China. Fannie recommended a relocation to DeLand, Florida, where she and her sister owned land. Lue agreed, and in 1885, he was working once again, this time in orange groves.
Read more about this topic: Lue Gim Gong
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“... life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a man’s difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits as a whole ...”
—Jane Addams (1860–1935)
“A woman’s whole life is a history of the affections. The heart is her world: it is there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her whole soul on the traffic of affection; and if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless—for it is a bankruptcy of the heart.”
—Washington Irving (1783–1859)