ABSTRACT
I was not an active student. I did not consider myself American – I am not Black or White. Then, the summer before tenth grade, I joined the Coalition for Asian Pacific American Youth (CAPAY) at UMass Boston. The first field trip I went on with CAPAY was to Mount Hope Cemetery. There was a stark difference between a majority of the cemetery and the back section, where we were going. In the back, there was trash everywhere. Headstones were broken, crooked, and covered by unmowed grass. It looked like an abandoned field. We gathered around a man in shorts and a t-shirt, who I later discovered was the Director of the Asian American Studies Program at UMass Boston. He told us the story of Mount Hope cemetery. The back section was the Chinese burial ground, dating back to the 1930s. Those buried there were the first Chinese to settle in Boston. Now they lay forgotten and neglected.
