Few photographers have captured a neighborhood as well or as thoroughly as Wing Young Huie did with his massive Lake Street USA series of a few years back. For his latest project, he and his wife and collaborator Tara hit the open road to visit thirty-eight states, Canada, and Mexico in search of the Asian experience in North America. 9 Months in America: An Ethnocentric Tour combines about a hundred of Huie’s photos with video installations and nine short stories, creating both a personal exploration of Huie’s heritage and a look at what it means to be American at the beginning of the millennium.
THE RAKE: Your previous Frogtown and Lake Street series centered on specific Twin Cities urban areas, but 9 Months has a much broader geographic scope. Were you shooting for something more ambitious?
HUIE: Lake Street was pretty ambitious. I don’t know if I’ll ever do anything like that again. Coming off the heels of Lake Street, I really wanted to get away. And I also wanted to expand and try different stuff. Lake Street and Frogtown, none of it really focused on my own background. I’m the youngest of six; I’m the only non-immigrant in my family. Everyone was born in China. I grew up in Duluth. I’d always wondered what it would be like if I’d grown up in other parts of the country, in, say, Chinatown. Or in the Deep South. So basically, “ethnocentric” describes a viewpoint rather than a subject. The subject is really America, and our trip. But in this America, the Asians are the majority.
How did you meet the president of the Asian Worldwide Elvis Fan Club?
We were in Houston, and read an article about a guy who’d seen the image of Elvis on his tree, in his yard. All it said was that he was the president of this club. So we looked it up in the yellow pages and the next day, we were at his house, which he had turned into a shrine to Elvis. He sang for us. He’s not an Elvis impersonator, though his son is. But he sang for us a variety of songs—in Moroccan, in French, in Spanish; he did country western, blues, and of course Elvis. He’s a Vietnamese immigrant, and the only thing he didn’t sing was a song in Vietnamese. He was inspired by Elvis and how this poor backwoods person overcame his circumstances. He related to that, as a poor Vietnamese immigrant. Elvis was a role model for him.
Did you have a very specific itinerary?
We didn’t know going into a city what we would do. It was serendipitous. We had a rough plan, but for the most part, we’d drive to a city and go, “OK, what are we gonna do now?”
It must be second nature to you to look at something and say, “Oh, that would make a good photo.”
You know, when you see Miss Congeniality talking on a cell phone while walking down a street in Chinatown, you’ve got to take a picture of that… When I was working on Lake Street, I lived in the neighborhood. Because the project was so big, I felt like I was seeing photographs everywhere, and it got to the point where I would have to drive outside of the area to feel less anxious. With this project, at first I thought it was going to be mostly about Chinese restaurants, but the further we got into the trip, everything became photographable. And so you can’t shut it off. There were times when I’m thinking, “Am I going to go talk to this person, or am I just going to sit here and enjoy my coffee?” Because that’s how we’d meet people. You go to a Chinese restaurant and start a conversation.
9 Months opens April 17 at the Minnesota Museum of American Art’s new space on Kellogg Boulevard and Market Street in St. Paul. (651) 292-4355; www.mmaa.org.
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