At Mount Hope Cemetery in Boston, grave stones dating back to the 1800's cover hill after rolling hill. The cemetery is so large that most people drive through the cemetery to find their loved ones.
At a back corner, next to the maintenance shed, are three small plots of small headstones. The gravestones belong to Chinese immigrants, from the 1920's to the 1960's, when burial plots were segregated. Most of the headstones belong to men who immigrated from Toisan in a time when laws shut them out of many jobs, and refused women the right to immigrate. And so, these early settlers of Chinatown died and were buried under small headstones with no family to tend their graves.
The graves crumbled and fell, forgotten even by cemetery care takers for years, until a group of Asian Americans from Chinatown took notice. They raised money to resurrect the headstones over their proper plots and organized volunteers to clean up the site. Today, a new memorial marks the site with space for people to come and pay their respects to many of the founders of Boston's Chinese American community.
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