Being Bayside

Being Bayside is a year-round, three-part series of outdoor storytelling events from November 2023 to May 2024 coinciding with transitioning seasons, Thai-Chinese holidays, and American celebrations.

Each gathering is a convergence of ritual performance, storytelling and readings, and communal eating and tending. The mornings will open with ancestor and land-honoring movement, live music played by Thai musicians highlighting reed and wooden instruments, tending to the area (trash clean up[before and after the event), followed by readings from the collection of vignettes sparked by my year-long Bay Trail exploration and nature-inspired poems from local poets as we enjoy comfort foods (such as tofu pudding and rice porridge) and contextualize our reconnection to land as urbanites. This project engages Bay Area Asian communities and their allies in culturally-relevant, environmental awareness, taking pride in and sharing lessons from our motherland traditions. The audiences will be a cross-section of nature lovers, environmental and arts enthusiasts, and Asian American communities who are based in and around the San Francisco Peninsula.

It provides a down-to-earth, immersive, and accessible performance that takes place in nature, simply loving the land, thanking it, and remembering the human role to tend to and care for it. It’s performance and storytelling are meant to inspire love of land – love of this beautiful blue planet we call home. The project answers the challenges of arts advocacy, climate change, and racial belonging with the same call.

If you are interested in collaborating or learning more about this project, please contact VC Tang directly at vctang@stirfrystories.com and subscribe to receive updates via the form below.