Tent Stuck in Lamp in the Yellow Tent

April 6, 2025

I am a facilitator of a tent artmaking workshop with five art teachers in Taiwan, conducted online. I realized it had been a long time since I had spoken in a setting like this, and I felt quite nervous. I was unsure how to discuss my tent idea in Mandarin, especially in a different context. I felt awkward. They are people I am familiar with, but now I feel strange because we have grown into different cultural realizations in these three years since I moved to the States. The people I work with here have migration experiences in the United States, but I was presenting to them without that background. Or should I broaden the term? Migration? I felt tension around how to share my little yellow tent’s racialized encounter in that setting.

The second tension I thought about was the emotional distance from my family. I am far from them and only check LINE once a day since it is on another phone, which is hard to transfer to my new one. Because of the time difference, I have not spoken to them on the phone since January 2025. Every time, often at night, I open the LINE app, I fear receiving news that someone has passed away. If that happened, I truly would not know what to do, because returning to Taiwan would take 48 hours. This fear of being light and unrooted is part of the tension in living a transnational life.

However, I also wrote about my inner energy and folded that writing inside my white tent. I wrote that I recognize I am good at weaving stories, not interrupting them, but noticing the details of daily life and finding connections. Patterns emerge, especially my sensitivity to language. Is that my talent? My language ability is not about memorizing words, but about deeply feeling through languages. For instance, I found the linguistic origin between tent and tension, both from the Latin word meaning to stretch or extend. I would like to extend and connect stories through tent artmaking.

Now, tent artmaking reminds me of tension in the present moment as a workshop facilitator. I placed that energy and the surrounding tension at the edge of the lamp, risk balanced on the lamp’s edge inside the tent. The lamp is the only light source in my tent, and I want my white tent to be filled with light, even when surrounded by darkness. That lamp sits where the white tent is at a threshold between light and darkness in the yellow tent. At the moment, I sit beside the lamp in my yellow tent to facilitate the workshop.

When asked who I would invite into my tent, my first instinct was my mom. After leaving home, I find myself missing my family even more.