On a sunny Thursday at Hopkins Marine Research Station, Stanford sophomore Claire Menke digs carefully in a four-foot hole. Within minutes her arm pops up, victoriously clutching a ceramic shard painted with a floral pattern. She adds it to a collection of artifacts reclaimed from the Chinese fishing village that occupied the Hopkins property more than a century ago: an American coin, a toothbrush handle, rice bowls, bullets and animal bones.

Geraldine Low-Sabado snaps a photo of the shard, and her cousin, Rod Jone, scribbles in a notebook. Both are the great-grandchildren of Chinese fishermen who lived near the excavation site in the mid-1800s. Stanford doctoral student Bryn Williams, who is writing his dissertation on 19th-century Chinese-American communities, has invited the two descendants to participate in his five-week archaeological dig.

“It’s very special for me to come here and sit on the rocks and imagine what life was like for my ancestors,” Low-Sabado says with a tepid smile. My eyes are drawn first to an American flag pin stuck in her red collared shirt, and then to a gold-and-opal peacock ring that she inherited from her great-grandmother, Quock Mui.

Just a few blocks away, Pacific Grove residents are decking the streets in Chinese bling of another sort. They’re preparing for the Feast of Lanterns, a century-old celebration that paints the town in distinctly Oriental hues. The festival’s organizers view the theme as innocent fun, as much an annual tradition as the salad chow-down and fireworks.

But Williams and other scholars see the festival playing to stereotypes of the Orient that more closely resemble Disney cartoons than the recorded history of the Chinese in Pacific Grove. The kindest phrase for it is ignorant romanticism.