Two-way lens

Two of the 15 people Huie photograhed in Guangzhou, who wrote about their dreams on a small chalkboard.

Through an interpreter, Huie tells Cheng that he sees in the migrant worker his father, who left a small farming village in Guangdong province a century ago for the United States in the hope for a better life.

Huie's father worked really hard to eventually open a Chinese restaurant in Duluth, a predominantly white community in Minnesota, and managed to provide his family with a middle-class life.

"My father must have had an even tougher time than Cheng because he went to a foreign country where he couldn't speak the language there at first," Huie says.

Wearing Cheng's clothes, a dirty shirt and wrinkled trousers pulled out from a plastic bag, Huie posed like Cheng, standing on the stairs thoughtfully and looking into the camera with a shy smile.

"By wearing someone else's clothes, I experience a little bit of the person's life," he says. "Now I have deeper understanding of my father and migration."

Born and raised in the US, the 59-year-old photographer took his first trip back to his home village in Taishan, Guangdong, two months ago before spending six days in Guangzhou, the provincial capital. "I want to know more about my ancestry, Chinese culture and the daily life of people here," Huie says.