A Gold Medal Portfolio Award is the highest honor students can receive in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Jurors choose portfolios by high school seniors whose works best represent the Scholastic Awards’ judging criteria: originality, skill, and the emergence of a personal vision or voice. These remarkable artists and writers will each receive a $12,500 scholarship.
For the next few weeks, we’ll be profiling the 2023 Gold Medal Portfolio recipients. Next up are Nora Sun and Cherish Williams.
Nora Sun
A woman wearing a straw hat brimmed with a long, translucent black veil strides across time and continents, walking through joy and strife. The purpose of my portfolio is to examine the Chinese woman beneath this weimao and how she is transformed in the modern age as a Chinese-American. My portfolio portrays six female immigrants and first-generation Americans with a focus on how their lives have been impacted by relationships with other women.
The Needle Mistress
Short Story
Nora Sun, Grade 12, Walter Payton College Prep High School, Chicago, IL. Jason Chau, Educator. Belin-Blank Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development, University of Iowa, Affiliate. Gold Medal Portfolio Award, The Harry and Betty Quadracci Writing Portfolio Award
She bore the journey alone. The jade waters which sloshed on a wooden deck beneath the swollen moon cast a lasting grayness on her skin. The torrential rain that tossed the ship’s ragged carcass about opened sores in her body that never truly closed. The briny scent of sea clung to her long after she set foot on land, and the white men regarded it like an exotic perfume, like she was one of their Western fish-tailed women. Day by day, she inched forward towards the other coast, a fragile singular star traversing the velvety sea in a wind-blown arc.
After twenty days hidden in the storage ship, a pale figure clutching a shimmering brocade emerged in the harbor. In the Lunar calendar, it was an inauspicious date for big changes. In the American calendar, it was a Tuesday in 1988. She stood on that shore, her clothes dirty and hair ragged, regarding the American world around her. No gold bubbled from the ground. No fish fell from the sky. The sun was neither brighter nor warmer than it was in Hong Kong. But it did not matter. Her little island had long been swallowed by the sunset. This was her homeland now.
—
Sima Buming was the name she had been given, but the Needle Mistress was the name she earned. Her practice sat in a strip mall at the center of Chinatown, the vermillion heart of a sprawling city that wore a skirt of gray skyscrapers. The entrance was marked by a plain plastic sign in the window that read “Pain Relief Acupuncture PLLC 针灸止痛” and printed a few prices for different services in Chinese and English. She was neighbors with a hair salon and a Chinese grocery.
The interior was as humble as the exterior. The 120 square-foot room contained a soft-bellied black-leather treatment table for the patient, a rattling metal table to hold supplies, and a faded second-hand couch where two waiting customers could sit. Most conspicuously, at the back of the office behind the medical table, there hung a beautiful golden brocade with a delicately embroidered Qilin leaping across its surface. Each scale of the Qilin was woven with glistening silver and blue thread, and its claws were dyed a shade of black that swallowed all light.
During the first few months when she hardly had any customers, she considered selling this priceless brocade many times. In the end, she could not bring herself to. The Qilin brocade was passed down from generation to generation, a gift at sixteen for mastering the Sima family art of acupuncture. It hung like a haunting from her past, reminding her of her duty to carry on and pass down her legacy. No matter how hungry she was, she would not sell her family.
Fortunately, her prices were cheap, and her skill was good. Eventually, a few customers trickled in, speaking only Chinese and complaining of back pain. One by one, they lay down on the treatment table, faces marked by skepticism.
She knew the flow of qi through the human body better than any other living soul. The jīngmài (經脈) and luòmài (絡脈) were stationed like gates to a body’s vital force, which overflowed along the twenty major pathways within the body. She had memorized the standard and extraordinary meridians when she was a child of seven years, running barefoot in her mother’s clinic.
One by one, she diagnosed the source of their pain. She selected a configuration of the 950 acupuncture points passed down in the tablets of the Sima family and inserted the delicate needles into them, relieving tension and blockages of qi flow. Delighted by the miraculous effects of what they had believed to be a pseudoscience, her customers went to tell their friends, and soon, stories of the Needle Mistress working miracles ran like wild geese among the hottest gossip tables in Chinatown.
—
It was the Needle Mistress’ gentleness that forged her into a heroine. She was new to Chinatown with a mysterious background. She was eighteen but with no signs of youth on her face, and her strangely ageless appearance had its charm. Her skin had cooked into a leathery brown in the California sun. She was fluent in pǔtōnghuà (普通话) and guǎngdōnghuà (广东话). Soft wrinkles piled up on her forehead when she concentrated. She played music of the patient’s choice from the record player that an especially wealthy customer gifted her after she relieved her of her joint pain. She was well-read and told fascinating stories to customers afraid of needles. For those with chronic pain, her soapy touch became a second home.
The Mistress saved most of her earnings and used them to slowly upgrade her clinic over the next decade. When the hair salon next door went bankrupt, she bought it, adding another 2000 square feet to her office. She purchased handsome wood and leather furniture and magazines for waiting clients to enjoy. She hired a college student to work at the front desk keeping track of patients and payments. Besides the brocade, American paintings whose style she had grown to appreciate hung on the wall in the treatment room.
On a good day, which came more and more often, she worked twelve hours and saw half a dozen customers an hour. The thin needles danced as though possessed by witchcraft at her fingertips. She began to cure cases that professional physicians and expensive medications could not. She even began to experience a slight gratification at her job, watching a decade-long ache diminish and flicker out between her fingers, accepting the repeated thanks of the client. There was meaning and pride to be found in her work. She had finally become someone in this foreign land that was no longer foreign to her.
—
Soon, the Needle Mistress’ reputation spread beyond the borders of Chinatown. Westerners from across the city also wanted to see her. She was proud—the West had traditionally upturned its nose towards the art of acupuncture if they knew what it was, but now they needed it to resolve their pain.
It was because of this that she decided to cut her hair short.
In her mother’s culture, the body was a gift from the parents—those who hurt the skin, bones, nails, and hair cooked in their mothers’ wombs were sinful and unfilial. In her family, hair was always well-maintained at the same waist length with regular small trims. But there was no such idea in this country. Altering the body was fashion. Even women from the most traditional Chinese families in Chinatown sometimes wore short hairstyles. Hair was merely a symbol of filial piety; cutting it in a trendy style would increase her appeal to Western customers, she reasoned with herself, thus growing the acupuncture business, and fulfilling her true duty to her parents.
With her hair swishing by her ears, her shoulders felt much lighter.
—
She made her first true friend in this country: a white woman from uptown named Megan. Megan was a slight, flaxen-headed housewife with a smattering of orange freckles about her nose.
In the harsh world of business, this friendship kept her warm through early winter mornings and cold meals. When summer storms loomed, Megan helped her board up windows. If there were business forms she did not know how to fill, Megan used her accounting background to explain them. They spoke of travel and escape, books they enjoyed, and the meals they cooked. Megan introduced to her what it was like to start a family. Megan’s husband and children sat in the lobby as she saw to Megan’s back pain.
She began to consider it because of Megan—starting a family. Her business was big enough. It was time to pass it down.
She heard the rumors half a year too late, the distaste that the Needle Mistress had turned her back on Chinatown and was kowtowing at the feet of the wealthy Americans. The ladies from the teahouse glared at her as she passed their window. Her favorite noodle stall spilled the soup, scalding her hands and pretending it was an accident, leaving her unable to work for a week. A traitor received no sympathy. Loyal Chinese customers who had visited her for years stopped showing, so she peddled some of the furniture and decor. Without the comfortable American couches, her uptown customers quickly left too. Megan moved away a few months later. Decades of the Mistress’s kingdom evaporated with her.
—
Perhaps the date she cut her hair was inauspicious. Perhaps the heavens were punishing her for defying her parents’ will. Perhaps the red line of interest which ticked lower and lower collapsed the mortgage market and caused banks to tighten their nooses around lending.
Everything slid apart in the bitter winter of 2008. The victories she had sown and harvested fell away. Days passed without a single ring of the doorbell, and dust fell over the treatment table. She sold everything she could, all except that Qilin brocade, and what she did not spend on rent she spent on beer. Days passed in a colorless haze as the cheap alcohol created warmth inside her. She had risen so high and fallen so quickly; she could not bear it. Her drunkenness chased away her last faithful customers.
In the final week, they stopped providing electricity. It was January, six days away from Lunar New Year. Through the fogged glass, she saw mirages of Hong Kong’s festivities. She watched dragons and night parades and tasted lotus roots and prawns in the cracks of her teeth. Empty bottles glittered between the beige tiles like fireworks growing from the earth. Meanwhile, the needles rusted away, tips bitten by ginger rust.
On the first day of the Year of the Ox, a curious neighbor drunkenly wandered into the clinic to check on the disgraced Mistress. He found her sitting at her table, a frozen half-bottle of beer beside her. Her last breaths lingered above her cracked lips in shallow wisps long after she was gone, her hair turned the color of ice. Broken needles were scattered around her like decapitated thorns.
The brocade had been taken down, leaving the yellowish wall barren. All that remained of it was the scrap of gold fabric clutched in her fist, edges singed black.
—
A few years later, a twenty-three-year-old girl with tanned skin from the mainland arrived alone on the plane. She bought an office in a strip mall at the center of Chinatown. With it came an old treatment table that she modified into her first pedicure chair. Business might be difficult at first, but her unique designs were sure to attract Chinese and American clientele alike. Carrying many fears and hopes, she opened her nail salon.
针灸止痛: pain relief acupuncture
Qilin: a mythical horned, four-legged Chinese creature that symbolizes luck and prosperity
qi: vitality, life force
jīngmài (經脈): meridian channels
luòmài (絡脈): associated vessels
pǔtōnghuà (普通话): Mandarin
guǎngdōnghuà (广东话): Cantonese
Cherish Williams
I always grew up thinking that everyone’s art style had to be a certain way. At the start of my junior year, I wanted my art to be smooth and realistic. However, it became apparent that art comes in many different forms. I began to experiment with my art to discover what I wanted viewers to understand about me and also understand how certain things shape who they are.
My investigation depicts my identity through portraits and still-lifes using old and recent photographs. Some paintings have tear-like features, indicating the time passed or the feeling one gets when inflicted with certain emotions. I want viewers to understand how negatively or positively moments of my life impacted me.
Featured image: Cherish Williams, Family Outings, Painting. Grade 12, High School of Art & Design, New York, NY. James Harrington, Educator; NYC Scholastic Art Awards, Affiliate. Gold Medal Portfolio, The Dav Pilkey Art Portfolio
To see more Gold Medal Portfolio recipients, past and present, visit our Eyes on the Prize series.