I am the youngest of six and the only child not born in China. For most of my life I've looked at my own Chinese-ness through a white, middle-class prism. Outside of my family, people who looked like me were hard to find in Duluth, Minnesota, or in the popular culture I embraced. My mom made me pray to Buddha every New Year, but it was Jesus Christ Superstar who became my cultural touchstone. At times my own parents seemed exotic and yes, foreign, to me.

They also became my first photographic subjects. Twenty-five years later I embarked on a nine-month, cross-country odyssey, with a distinct awareness of being a hyphenated American. It was refreshing to look at my home country through my particular bi-focal ethnocentric lens and see the exotic as familiar, and vice-versa. What I found was a place that exists mostly under the prevailing cultural radar, but is as American as Buddha bars, Bruce Lee dolls, and chop suey. Wing Young Huie

From the one of the United States' most diverse areas (Hilo, Hawaii) to its least (Slope, North Dakota), Wing and his wife Tara spent nine months traveling through 39 states on an "ethnocentric" tour of their homeland. Some of the sights include: a Vietnamese Elvis, a Hmong street sign in rural North Carolina, a meditating Falun Gong protestor, a bubble tea valley girl, ABCs (American-born Chinese), FOAs (fresh-off-the-airplane), and a self-described ñred-neckî Chinese restaurant owner near the Okefenokee Swamp.

The result is an idiosyncratic collection of 105 color and black and white photographs - and a collaborative video by Wing and Tara - of a post 9/11 America; a place where Asians, particularly Chinese, happen to be in the majority. This vision frames the complexity, nuance, appropriation, humour, contradictions, and surprises of American

9 Months in America: An Ethnocentric Tour was commissioned by the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul, Minnesota. It premiered at their new location in April 2004. The MMAA acquired the entire work for their permanent collection with the intent to travel it widely.