Until recently he had been an engineer in China making good money and was now in St. Paul looking for work. Anything, he said, even washing dishes. I met him at the Hubbs Center in St. Paul where he was learning English. I asked if I could photograph him for my University Avenue Project, but it was difficult because my Chinese was worse than his English.
So I called my older brother who speaks Cantonese to translate. Unfortunately the engineer only spoke Mandarin. My brother's wife however knew some Mandarin, but she didn't think it was good enough, so she enlisted her recently arrived daughter-in-law from China, who didn't speak much English.
With all my translators in place, I put my cell on speaker and asked a question in English to my brother, who repeated it to his wife in Cantonese, who repeated it to the daughter-in-law in Mandarin, who finally relayed it to the engineer, After several merry-go-rounds of this I think he finally got the gist of why I wanted to take his picture. His only concern was how the Chinese government would react to having his photograph shown in a public exhibition. My brother, an immigrant himself, laughed and said not to worry, "You're not in a communist country anymore. You're in America."