Hui-min Tsen: Rain Follows the Plow
Hui-min Tsen asks us to go west.
Like the young men Horace Greeley implored except by way of heading east.
So cross either ocean in search of gold and encounter the Fords — Henry, John or even Richard but not necessarily in that order, to stretch and elongate the sparse landscape of cowboys and so-called Indians traversing long, empty highways at dusk in a covered Model T schooner.
Settle down where the buffalo roam the vast Plains and take time to ponder its horizon, both flat and jagged so full of myth and ghosts Kathleen Chang glorified as the Iron Moonhunter across the Sierras while Frank Chin rode the Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R. R. Co. toward somewhere near Promontory Point, Utah.
Look through the viewfinder and see Ansel Adams photographing and Chiura Obata painting the mountains or James Wong Howe shooting the lonely ranches and vacant trailer parks in black and white.
It is a place along the Oregon Trail where she and John Wayne wore a yellow ribbon that is also an American Dream, their Manifest Destiny to conquer the open prairie.
Photo credit: Hui-min Tsen