Interview and photography by Skip Rowland

JG:  My name is Miao Yan Guo, but everybody calls me Jenny.  I [came] from mainland China [from] a little city call Fuzhou.  It’s in southern China.  It’s not like a Powhatan [where] we have like acres around and between the houses.  My daddy has restaurants all over the place.  He owns restaurants in Jersey City and in the capital of Michigan, in Lansing; it’s all big-city so Powhatan is the first place I’m going [that] is country.

At first I don’t have many friends here [but] we have of lots of good customers and they say ‘You can come to our house for a picnic’ or have fun, you know, on the weekends.  Mr. Goodwyns, he is one of our customers, he always like tell us, go to his house and have some fun, BBQ, or came over if I am going to be here working seven days a week.”

[The business] is going pretty good, still, it’s hard for sushi…it’s hard to start with. We have lots of customers come in here really often, like once a week, twice a week.

What’s special about Powhatan County?  The fresh air! It’s just like standing in the front door—you can feel it like fresh; it’s not like the city, you know, you smell it or like gas around or the steams.  It’s fresh! I like it a lot!

I go back to New York very often because New York has lots of things to buy.  Always going there, visiting families and getting our “real” Chinese food. I guess we will always be going to New York [but] it’s just not as comfortable as here; you always have traffic no matter what—daytime, nighttime—there always traffic.

Here, we hear some bird sounds and then we have some in the night time; we hear some froggies and doggies; New York they have ambulance around, police around, and lots of other people playing music in the streets.

We have the families and they come here to visit us. [My brother] like it here a lot so he is gonna stay here, he not gonna be anwhere else.  He don’t like [to go] back to Michigan.  It’s cold, really cold. In the winter time they have the snow all day long, you know, never stops.  So he likes it here a lot, too. So we try to help him and we are getting another restaurant going [on] the Hull Street where people can take Thai food, Japanese food, and Chinese food at the same time. It’s gonna be hard, I think, to start with, but I’m gonna be really excited, too!

I am somewhere between business and family woman because I care about my business, at the same time I care about my family, and I hope that everybody have a happy smile on their face.