An Evening of Tang Poetry: Reflections on Art, Healing, and Community

By Jesse Wang (DAI co-founder)

Reflections on An Evening of Art & Poetry: Yin Mountain 女冠子诗

October 23, 2026 · SIY Gallery, San Bruno

Featuring Rebecca Nie, co-translator of Yin Mountain: The Immortal Poetry of Three Daoist Women

On October 23, the literary-minded DAI community attended a poetry gathering at SIY Gallery, a San Bruno gallery. The evening centered on Yin Mountain: The Immortal Poetry of Three Daoist Women, a collection of English translations of poems by Li Ye, Xue Tao, and Yu Xuanji, three women who lived during China’s Tang dynasty.

Rebecca Nie, one of the book’s translators, was there to share her work. She is also the founder of Dharma Alive Incubator, the community we are building with a group of friends and collaborators.

We often speak about meditation, different wisdom traditions, and the possibility of community. That evening, those conversations opened into Daoist literature, women’s spiritual history, and creativity. What began as a cultural outing left me thinking about how art helps us understand ourselves, and what it takes to build a community that endures.

Hearing familiar culture in another language

During the gathering, Rebecca read a passage from the book in English.

There was something moving about hearing it aloud. For many of us who grew up with Chinese culture, Tang poetry is part of an early education. Names like Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei are familiar. Li Ye, Xue Tao, and Yu Xuanji may be less so. These women lived in a world largely shaped by men, yet left behind writing that held their own intelligence, feeling, and vision.

Now their poems were being read in a California gallery, in another language, more than a thousand years later.

For me, hearing them in English opened a slightly different way into a culture I had already known. I also found myself wondering about the English-speaking listeners in the room. Some may have known little about Tang poetry or the lives of women in that era. Even so, the poems offered a way to encounter real people from a distant time.

The story of how Rebecca came to translate them added another layer to the evening.

A book that accompanied the early years of motherhood

The project began with an invitation to Rebecca Nie from her fellow translator, Peter Levitt. In a reflection she wrote about the book, Rebecca described how that invitation gradually became a deeper and more unexpected emotional connection.

As a woman living in the twenty-first century, Rebecca found herself wanting to know these earlier women better. Their talent moved her, as did the constraints of the lives they lived. At times, their poems and experiences brought her to tears.

The translation also accompanied Rebecca through pregnancy, childbirth, and the early years of motherhood. She kept working while caring for her first child, and the project continued into the years when her family was growing again.

I imagine many working mothers will recognize that kind of life. Responsibilities continue, even as time becomes increasingly fragmented. Work that matters has to find its place among everything else that asks for attention.

Rebecca wrote that the Yin Mountain poets themselves helped her keep going: their resilience and their confidence in the value of their abilities, their work, and their lives. As a contemporary scholar and new mother, she recognized something of her own experience in theirs.

That stayed with me. I usually think of translation as moving between languages. In Rebecca’s experience, it was also a movement across time. As she studied these women’s lives, their words gave her strength for her own.

So much has changed in a thousand years. And yet questions about freedom, identity, and the space women are given to live and create remain familiar.

Whose voices do we get to hear?

Another phrase from Rebecca’s reflection stayed with me: “scholarship as activism.”

She wrote that she had once thought finishing the book might ease her sense of urgency about bringing these women’s voices to more readers. But years later, seeing the circumstances women continue to face in places such as Iran, Mexico, and South Africa, she felt that Yin Mountain has still more work to do.

Rebecca also described finding women in other ancient texts whose contributions had once been acknowledged, then later erased from the histories that survived. Traces of them remained in less familiar sources.

That made me think about how much of what we read depends on someone preserving, organizing, translating, and sharing a work. Other voices disappear entirely. A book like Yin Mountain offers English-language readers beautiful poetry, while also making room for women who are often overlooked in the stories we inherit.

We live in a time when AI can produce a translation in seconds. Searching old texts and reading across languages is easier than it once was. Still, Rebecca’s years of work felt deeply meaningful to me. To understand a poem’s life, culture, and history takes curiosity, patience, and sustained attention.

Readers also bring their own lives to the text. Those poets could hardly have imagined their words being read aloud in English in California. I find that one of the most interesting things about culture is that as different people encounter and reinterpret it, it continues to live in ways its creators could never have anticipated.

Art can be this close to everyday life

I also spent some time talking with Nounie, SIY Gallery’s owner.She has long been interested in the relationship between art and healing.

Nounie told me about a group exhibition she organized in Half Moon Bay in 2018 around the theme of healing through art. Through painting, poetry, and music, she hoped to encourage people to express their experiences and emotions, and to open conversations about mental health. Rebecca, then pregnant with her first child, had also participated in meditation activities within that arts community.

Over the years, Nounie kept organizing. More artists became involved, and the community gradually grew.

I found that encouraging. It is easy to associate art with museums, formal institutions, or with something that requires years of training to appreciate. But in this community gallery, art felt much closer to ordinary life. Writing a poem, making a painting, sharing a piece of work, or simply taking time to listen can all be ways of understanding ourselves and connecting with one another.

We sometimes think of healing in specific terms: counseling, meditation, a particular practice. But people make sense of their feelings in different ways. Writing helps some people. Others find expression through painting, or quiet through music. A poem can offer the recognition that someone in another century has already put words to what we feel.

Art cannot resolve every difficulty, and professional support still matters when we need it. But it does give us many ways to explore and express our experience.

I have always believed that we can learn a great deal from ourselves. Other people can offer knowledge, practices, and support, while our own feelings also deserve careful attention. That evening reminded me of the many ways to begin listening.

Is the Bay Area really a “cultural desert”?

People sometimes joke that the Bay Area is a cultural desert. Conversations about technology, startups, investment, and efficiency are much more visible than those about literature or art.

But as I have participated in and helped organize more community activities, I have met so many interesting people and projects here. They are often simply scattered.

Some people study ancient literature. Others organize exhibitions, lead meditation, publish independently, or invite friends over on a weekend to discuss a book or film.

This gathering was one example. Rebecca and Peter Levitt had devoted years to bringing these poems into English. Nounie had spent years bringing artists and neighbors together. People from different backgrounds met through a shared evening and encountered something familiar, unfamiliar, or both.

These gatherings may be small, and they may not generate much financial return. They still make a city’s cultural life richer.

What I especially appreciated was Nounie’s sustained commitment. A community develops through actual encounters: an exhibition, a conversation, another collaboration, another reason to come back. Seeing what she has continued to build helped me appreciate the work behind those connections.

A place we can keep returning to

The evening also brought me back to what we hope to create through Dharma Alive Incubator.

Rebecca, our collaborators, and I want to build a lasting community space in the South Bay where people from different cultures and traditions can meet through reading, meditation, art, and conversation.

Rebecca’s experience in Zen practice and community service has shaped her commitment to respectful exchange among wisdom traditions. We hope people can share what they know without setting aside their own backgrounds or adopting someone else’s beliefs. Someone might explore mindfulness, another contemplative tradition, a movement practice, or artistic expression without being asked to take on a particular identity.

Over the past year, conversations with friends around the Bay Area have kept bringing me back to a practical question: after attending an event or learning a practice, how do we carry it into everyday life? Where can we return, recognize familiar faces, and keep talking and learning together?

Those conversations have helped shape our plans.

We have already been organizing meditation, reading, yoga, and small-group conversations in Palo Alto. We hope to make room for more literature, art, music, and other cultural activities as the community grows.

One part of this vision feels especially meaningful to me: people can explore their inner lives in their own ways.

Reading, visiting an exhibition, caring for plants, joining a practice, or talking with someone may each offer something different. Our backgrounds, interests, and stages of life vary. What we need from a community will vary too.

I want room for that. Some people may enjoy leading activities or sharing their research and creative work. Others may want friends they can discuss things seriously with. Someone else may simply want to sit with a book for a while.

Nounie’s experience also reminded me of the practical work this requires. Good ideas need people who keep organizing, making introductions, and creating reasons to meet again. Relationships need opportunities to continue.

That Friday evening, I heard ancient Chinese poetry in a Californian gallery, learned about the strength a contemporary woman had found in those poems, and met someone who has spent years nurturing an arts community.

It was a book, a few poems, and a group of people willing to come together. This kind of cultural life is already close to us.

Perhaps, before calling the Bay Area a cultural desert, we could spend a little more time noticing the people who have been building its cultural life all along.