I didn't want to go to Chinatown. I'd drive around and not find parking and give up the precious parking spot I found just five blocks from the office on Market Street. I spend a couple of dollars in gas just starting the truck's engine. Besides, there is so much to do. My Macintosh is beeping.

But the Wing Luke Museum has an exhibit that includes some of Dean Wong's photography. The Ballard News-Tribune's staff photographer for years, Wong delivers a steady stream of content for the paper and I've seen plenty of his photos but exhibition photography is something else. A lot of what's done for the newspaper is "drive by" material, snapped off at the last moment in the name of quantity. Gallery photography is more vital and more inspiring. And since I'll follow inspiration just about anywhere, (as long as it's not followed by execution, which isn't really my bag) I dragged myself out of the cluttered little shoebox in the Ballard Building and drove to the International District.

I haven't been to a gallery opening in a long time and spent a while in the Wing Luke gift shop looking for the exhibition until a staffer led me to the sushi, soda and proper entrance.

The exhibition concerns three buildings central to the history of the International District. Wong's photos complement the display of architecture, objects and anecdotes, by providing the faces that are the product of that history; contemporary images of children and adults, framed with shadows and geometry. A man plays guitar in a windowsill; a young girl with an eye patch peeks from behind a window curtain; children of the neighborhood at play.

The photos provided an on-ramp to twentieth century's Asian Seattle and I was totally unaware of it. There were stories about Filipino Manongs, seasonal workers in the Alaskan fishing trade, giving cans of Icy Point brand salmon as gifts, or being run out of Cashmere by a town-sponsored lynch mob.

Or the Murikami family, owners of the Higo Variety Store, one of the touchstone buildings in the exhibit, with Higo products on display and pictures of boarded up windows during the internment when the family was shipped to a camp in Idaho.

Or an enigmatic Chinese man, looking proud and formal in a sepia-toned photo with Chinese characters, running like vertical bars beside him.

I stayed on beyond the time needed to take in the modest exhibit, enjoying the unfamiliar in the gallery and the neighborhood. Seeing ducks hanging in a butcher's window and Chinese characters in all the shop fronts was relief from the greedy, blank pages waiting back at the office.

Exhibits like this are in invitation to travel, and by extension, hold onto some of the fire - a can of Icy Point Salmon maybe - in someone else's life. The images fade, of course. The sepia tones just get darker like they've had too many coats of varnish, so I can make room in my skull for the glossy images and self-important signage that scream my day away. I don't know if it was the exhibit, or just the International District that felt like coming up for air but next time it won't take so long to give up my parking spot.

These Walls Can Speak exhibit runs through November at the Wing Luke Asian Museum, 407 7th Avenue South. 206-623-5124 or www.wingluke.org.