"Smiley" - the man residing on Smith Street - Chinatown, Honolulu

June 05, 2014  •  Leave a Comment

In my first blog post in April,  some of my photography workshop classmates and I went to Chinatown to practice what we learned on our first day.  One of my subjects was this man we passed as the class made its way to Mauna Kea Marketplace.  I fell back, offered him a breakfast muffin, and then asked if I could take his photograph.  He wasn't very long on words and even though I asked for his name, I was unable to decipher the response.  

 

Ever since then, I've been wanting to go back to Chinatown.  I promised them I'd come back to give them a copy of their photo.  So this past Saturday, I made it back!  We (and my workshop classmate, John) found all but one of them (the one we didn't find wasn't in the same location)

 

Here is another photo of this man who sits on the ground near his wheelchair.  Since it was early in the afternoon, I brought a spam musubi with me which he gladly accepted.  I think he said, "thanks" in his own way...and then I began to think that maybe, like the others who are pros at striking poses for the photographer passerby's like me, that he was a pro at playing the stereotypical role of what society thinks a person who lives on the street should sound like.  I was certain that he was responding to my comments which, in hindsight, were not very worthy of an audible response anyway but when I asked him if he liked his photo, he stunned me when he said:  "Yeah, I love it." 


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