From the Tin Hau Festival in our village on Lamma Island, Hong Kong. It’s held at the beginning of each summer, and celebrates the birthday of the Goddess of the Sea. Pinwheels’ spinning in the wind will bring good luck and smooth sailing for the coming year.

Plaque on the Long Bien bridge, Hanoi Vietnam

We never know how the choices we make will shape the future. I wouldn’t have ever imagined my dislike of French language classes would eventually lead me to work in Morocco, Vietnam and Cambodia with projects that required fluency in the language.

I completed a Fine Arts program within a well-regarded public American university; we were expected to have a thorough education along with our arts focus. This included competency in a foreign language to graduate. Most fellow students complained, or just buckled down and sweated through it – which didn’t appeal to me because I’d barely passed French classes in high school. Wealthy students enrolled in expensive study-abroad programs. This wasn’t an option: I paid for my own schooling and couldn’t afford the expensive tuition. Instead I created my own program [and worked 40-60 hours a week at retail and hotel jobs to build up my savings].

In 1998 I studied the language at a university in France, and sent drawings and paintings home to my painting instructors. This enabled me to complete painting coursework while living there and on the road in Belgium, London, and Eastern Europe during school holidays. I was able to see firsthand many of the artworks by northern European artists that had inspired me in the past. While the language courses were helpful, I really learned French by spending time in clubs and bars and flirting in cafes with friends who were native French speakers.

After graduation I was a full-time artist with both studio and apartment rents to pay: lots of freedom but not a lot of cash staying in my pocket. So when designer friends told me they were looking for a translator for the antique markets at Avignon and Paris, I jumped at the chance. We spent two weeks on trains, in vans and junk shops and collectors’ gardens, rooting out good deals and negotiating terms and prices. Many of the dealers spoke some English, but were much more relaxed dealing with a French-speaking americaine than with deux americains.

Several years later I was offered a trip in Morocco as a translator with the large tour company Grand Circle Travel, and accompanied a local guide from Marrakesh to Fez to the Sahara. The highlight of our trip was a dinner of a dozen elderly americans with a local family in Fez. We ate tagine and flatbread with our right hands. Afterwards we sipped sweet mint tea and I translated both sides of an intensive Q&A about aspects of American/Moroccan culture, from US gangs to majoun, a delectable [so I hear] cannabis nougat.

Eventually, my curiosity about manifestations of French culture – among many other interests – led me to Cambodia, where after starting my own program, I eventually worked with the Angkor Photo Festival, teaching photography to street children. It is a French-run festival, and while my experience with teaching photography was the reason I was approached, my facility in the language helped make everything happen.

Most recently I was drawn to Vietnam and photographed this Frenchman’s folly-turned-success, for another French-run project: the Long Bien bridge festival. One of my prints of the bridge sold this week at auction for US$350, well above my estimate of $200-300 [based on my current print prices].

You never know where this road will take you. But first: you’ve got to get started on it.

Those would by my legs standing on a local Redcoat in west Sydney

Growing up in the States, I slept through my American history classes. American civilization had no patina like European or world history. Teachers eulogized the heroics of double-chinned white guys who once lived somewhere a thousand miles east of our flat midwestern city. Paul Revere’s “The Redcoats are coming!” was the refrain of too many pithy poems mimeographed in smudged purple by teachers’ assistants, then passed around class.

Redcoats were bad, Redcoats were greedy. Redcoats were the British, who wanted to take America away from those to whom it rightfully belonged — the colonists, our forefathers [never mind that the continent didn't really belong to any Europeans at all, or that all my ancestors were still miserable in the old country rather than in the US where they'd flee a century later].

Australia had the Redcoats too, and they had them at the same time that we did. They built buildings here in the same Edwardian/Georgian styles I’ve seen in Boston, in Liverpool, even on Shamian Dao, that strange little European island smack in the middle of Guangzhou.

I step across these Redcoat murals as I walk to the train station, as I walk to buy fresh groceries from this fertile country. It’s an upside down deja-vu every time. Melds childhood stories from the north into history here at the bottom of the world. I get a kick out of walking over the flattened bodies of these British soldiers, brothers of those we kicked out of my country centuries ago.

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