Pumping Tent:

“It’s time to pump.”
The phone chime rang like a refrain in Nora’s life, structuring her days as a new mother to a three-month-old infant. She checked the crib, then moved quickly through the kitchen, bedroom, and living room, tending to her child’s needs. Seated on the sofa, she cradled her baby and began to sing. Her lullaby was resonant, precise, emotionally rich—a reminder that twelve years earlier she had trained as an opera singer, performing internationally. Now, her living room had become a hybrid stage where professional artistry converged with maternal care, infant cries, and the layered traces of a transnational journey.

Nora’s story spans continents, professions, and profound transformations. Originally from Taiwan, she arrived in the United States to pursue graduate studies in opera performance. After completing her degree, she worked as a professional singer, traveling between venues and rehearsals. Yet she soon encountered the precarity of the performing arts: low wages, unstable gigs, long hours, and visa restrictions that kept permanent residence out of reach. “I couldn’t even afford rent,” she recalled. The dream of sustaining an artistic career clashed with financial insecurity and structural constraints that marked her as an expendable immigrant worker.

Determined to build stability, she shifted course. She purchased textbooks, enrolled in online courses, and eventually entered an engineering program. After two years of relentless effort, she became a data scientist. Today, she holds a senior position at a chemistry company. Yet her sense of belonging in this new career is tenuous. “Even now, as a senior data scientist, I often feel like I’m not good enough,” she admitted. The feeling was not only personal but shaped by racialized and gendered hierarchies. As an Asian immigrant woman with non-native English, she was often treated as linguistically deficient and culturally peripheral. Within a male-dominated STEM environment, her expertise was dismissed, her presence overlooked, and her pregnant body rendered inappropriate in professional discourse.

She recounted moments when colleagues silenced her contributions or trivialized her reality. During a casual conversation, she mentioned a hospital visit related to pregnancy complications. A White male colleague interrupted: “Oh, too much information portion.” His remark reframed her embodied experience as unprofessional excess, exposing the ways patriarchal norms dismiss maternal presence as irrelevant or improper. Later, after giving birth, she told colleagues directly, “I need to pump.” The room grew uncomfortably quiet. “I’m not saying anything dirty,” she reflected, “but apparently, that might make some people feel a certain way.” What was essential to her child’s survival was cast as indecorous, marking her maternal body as out of place in the professional sphere.

Against these silences, Nora turned to the yellow tent art project as a space of re-signification.

For her tent-artmaking, she chose a baby’s tent-like toy composed of two intersecting soft poles with dangling objects. She placed it atop the yellow tent, transforming the domestic artifact into a metaphor. The two poles crossed like the dual tensions she lived: immigrant mother and professional scientist, marginalized by race, gender, and language yet continually forging resilience.

During the session, Nora laid her infant beneath the toy-tent. The baby immediately burst into tears, the sound piercing the room. Instinctively, Nora leaned forward, arms reaching to comfort. The baby’s cry fractured the rhythm of research, revealing the unpredictable intensity of caregiving. Yet rather than disruption, the cry articulated the embodied truth of her transnational life: fragmented, uncertain, and profoundly human.

In this moment, artmaking and maternal labor merged. The toy-tent became a site where the public-private divide collapsed, where professional struggles and intimate care were entwined. Its crossing poles mirrored the intersectional pressures of gendered exclusion, racial stereotyping, and linguistic marginalization. But instead of immobilizing her, Nora transformed these pressures into expression. Through tent-artmaking, she carved a temporary, porous space where immigrant women’s stories, often erased from professional discourse, could become visible.

Her narrative underscores how immigrant mothers navigate worlds where their bodies and voices are deemed excessive, yet they persist in creating meaning. The act of pumping, the sound of a lullaby, the baby’s cry—each re-situated within the tent as feminist gestures of resilience and worldmaking. Nora’s story reminds us that immigrant women’s lives cannot be reduced to either domesticity or professional achievement. They inhabit hybrid stages, improvising spaces of belonging at the intersections of care, art, and labor.

For Nora, the tent was not only an artistic practice but also a declaration: her voice, her body, and her maternal presence belong.