Departments
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5 June 1998 |
Vol. I, No. 32 |
Feature Article
When a mile is a milestone
Commencement speaker's address: a remote village in China
by Eric McHenry
Gary Locke has 2020 vision. That's the year he expects his 14-month-old daughter, Emily, to graduate from college, and he looks toward it with hope and determination.
"Emily is my frame of reference for the future," Locke told the audience at BU's 125th Commencement exercises. He wants hers to be a millennium in which justice and open-mindedness obtain. Such a future can only be built, he said, by drawing upon the lessons of the past.
Locke, the son of working-class Chinese immigrants, is the first Asian-American ever to be elected governor in the continental United States. But he told the 5,000-plus degree candidates who filled Nickerson Field on May 17 that they were the American dream personified.
"Our family story is no different from the stories of every family here -- whether you are a first generation immigrant or a sixth," said Locke (LAW'75), the governor of Washington state. "Your stories are made of similar journeys -- journeys fueled by the American dream of freedom, hope, and opportunity. And this Commencement ceremony is what generation after generation of Americans and people all across the globe have dreamed of and sacrificed for."
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Washington Governor Gary
Locke (LAW'75), the first Asian-American to hold
gubernatorial office in the continental United
States, extolled education as a weapon against
prejudice in his speech at the 125th Commencement
exercises. Photo by Fred
Sway
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A cloudburst dampened the event, and Locke admonished participants not to let their diplomas get wet. They signify "the responsibility for human progress" conferred by a first-rate education, which he called the "platform on which we can build out the global village," "a gift," and "the great equalizer."
Locke's address was rich with personal history and anecdote. His grandfather immigrated to Washington state at the end of the 19th century, working as a houseboy just one mile from the governor's mansion where his grandson now resides. A long-standing joke, Locke said, is that it has taken his family 100 years to move one mile.
There's particular irony in that line, of course, because the short geographic distance belies the vast cultural expanses the family has traversed. Locke recalled a recent pilgrimage he and his parents made to their ancestral Chinese village, Jilong. Coming on the heels of his election as governor, the visit illustrated for Locke as nothing else could the magnitude of his forbears' sacrifices for his benefit.
"My mom and dad had not set foot in the village since their wedding day 50 years ago," he said. "In our tiny village of about 150, there is still no running water, just a well in the center of town. There is no indoor plumbing, no toilets. People still use chamber pots and raw sewage runs in open gutters along the walkways that connect the tightly spaced dwellings. . . . Very little has changed for the people of our village since my grandfather left 100 years ago. People still live by the ancient rhythms of planting and harvest and of birth and death. They measure time in generations, not in news cycles.
"To the members of the family village," Locke said, "my return was a vindication of their hard work and sacrifice. My election as a governor in the United States of America represents the success of our entire clan and the