Genes in her photos

A Chinese-American artist celebrates her roots in a pop-up photography collection, Kelly Chung Dawson reports in New York.

In transit at a Chengdu train station in 1996, the photographer Colette Fu, then an English teacher traveling around China, spotted a group of Yi people wearing capes that marked their heritage. She approached them with a map, and signaled that one of them should point to their home. Fu's own mother was from the Yi ethnic group, so when the boy pointed to the Daliang Mountains, she decided to travel there. In the region's capital, by chance she met a man who shared her surname. He agreed to take her home to her mother's village, and although they barely shared the same language, she agreed to go. For 10 days they traveled to her ancestral home, where she was welcomed as though she had fallen from the sky. Her relatives sacrificed chickens, goats and finally a cow, thanking the gods that she had returned. A tree was planted in her honor.

And although her camera died shortly before arriving at the village, her memories of that week remain vivid because they changed the course of her life, she recalled recently in an interview with China Daily on We Are Tiger Dragon People, a new project of pop-up photography about Chinese ethnic groups.