The story began in 2009, when my friend Xing Chen was come to New York and he is 10 years old. In this time he was not start to learn English. He has one small dictionary that his father giving to him and help him a lot because this dictionary has a Chinese phonetic symbols that was helping him to speak. He called that his “hand dictionary”. In one day when he was talking to his friend but his friend laugh him because his sound was not correct. This made him don’t want to use this even though he didn’t know how to say the word and feels this is so awkward when every time speaking to someone need to holding a book to find what he mean. Because that when someone talk to him, he was say on mind first, then if this is clear then he was say that out. If not, he was not able to say that. This is change when his father find him and talk about this. His father comforts him, “There is nothing feeling awkward about that, you don’t know just don’t know. You are learn new things this time. If you do wrong let them correct you so next time you not able to do the same thing. If you don’t correct that, the problem will come to you again.” After that he was striving to learn English. This dictionary was follow him into he was not very need this dictionary. He putting this dictionary in the one side of table in his home and he was feeling more relieved to talking to other people. So this object represent this time he’s lost, shy and scared talking to other people and get courage to move on.

– Huajian Chen

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