FARGO (Far-to-go) Fargo (Far-to-go) has been specifically created for UNCOMMON TRAITS: RE/LOCATING ASIA to reconstruct the story of my father's transition from his native rural China to a small town American community. It also serves to reflect my own autobiographic involvement in this history and positions me within a predominantly Nordic/Germanic American perspective. As if objectively investigating someone else's past, I have reexamined family snapshots to recall psychological adaptations I had to form because of the color of my skin. My challenge while growing up was not one of assimilation but one of being accepted by my peers. In retrospect, I compare my own childhood to my father's experiences as an alien. With this installation, I have created a "displaced restaurant scenario" which involves text, photographic images, and variously found and altered objects. My parents' immigration to Fargo, North Dakota from their rural villages near Guangchou, China during the years between 1929 to 1947 provide a narrative, representing their personal chapter in the migration of Chinese people during the 40's and 50's. The history of restaurants my father opened during his career in Fargo work as a visual timeframe upon which these artifacts function. In 1929, my father, Philip Wong, entered America at the age of eight as a "paper relative" to a shirttail uncle of his neighbor friend, Vernon Wong who grew up with him in the village. "Uncle Git Moon" was part owner of the Fargo Cafè, where my father learned to cook and eventually attended Fargo Central High School. After graduation, he travelled and worked in New Mexico and Texas. When America entered the Second World War, he enlisted in the Army in 1942 and eventually became a technical ("mess") sergeant where General George Patton commended him for his fine culinary service while plowing through Europe on his way to Berlin. After the war, my dad returned to China to arrange his own marriage by meeting my mother through Vernon's younger brother who had incidentally married my mother's aunt. My father brought my mother back to Fargo as a GI bride. Returning to the Fargo Cafè in 1947, now as a partner in the business, he eventually sold his share and successfully opened three of his own Chinese restaurants before retiring in 1975. I have reconstructed this sense of genealogy with images appropriated from family albums, printed media, and my own photographs taken on a recent trip to Fargo, returning there after 22 years. These images are transferred by hand from electrostatic copies onto paper I have made for this project. The transfer process leaves less or little information left of the image on the surface of the paper, determined by the paper's varied absorbency. This "visual residue" remains as a kind of conceptualized loss of memory; how photographs retain a frozen visual documentation of the past; how a photographic image can fade with the life span of the photo process. A table and chairs set for a meal, stuffed pheasant, photos on the wall, Chinese lantern and screen also represent links to my analogy and recreation. This process of recounting family history only intimates the complexities of sorting out facts, fiction, and visual documentation. I have recently interviewed my mother and only older brother to compare their accounts to mine since my father's death in 1991 and have found three conflicting impressions of accuracy. These images and objects provide my own dramatization to this reconstructed journal of my father's struggle to escape poverty and how both my parents' made a major leap in their lives to confront a New World.   -Paul Wong   Note: Paul Wong's work is also featured at CEPA Gallery,