Tina Lu: Belonging in the Tension

Creative in Process

Today’s guest is a lovely gatherer of humans, as well as a fellow neighbor and friend: Tina Lu. Tina is a Taiwan native and transplant who has now lived in three out of four U.S. continental time zones (Eastern, Central, Pacific). Tina now finds herself mostly traversing the 4.12 square miles of Somerville on a daily basis -- shuttling kids, groceries, freebies found on sidewalks, and ideas about how to make her local community a more resilient, interconnected place. If you are ever awake at 5:30am on a breezy summer day, you just might find her walking along the bike path, admiring native plant species and making friends with baby bunnies along the way.

Today, Tina and I chat about: how our hunger for belonging, community, and holding spaces for each other is birthed from our own experiences, the messiness of immigrant identity and inhabiting awkward decimals (like 1.25 or 1.5) as immigrants or children of immigrants, why belonging in tension also means doing conflict well, the search for a meaningful model for how to do conflict in community and listening and storytelling as meaningful antidotes, the relationship between agency and belonging, and many other things…including how chill spouses and pokemon-loving children are necessary (albeit challenging) counterbalances to those of us who struggle to embrace the process.