My writing classes with the Oakland Word series have just finished up. Yesterday I read my piece in front of a mini audience, including three of my friends. Ah, I was a bit nervous that they were going to cut me off at three minutes, the prescribed time limit, but a few people didn't show up and it wasn't a big deal for me to read my whole piece. I was pleasantly surprised to hear some laughs at funny parts and a compliment from an audience member who suggested I try writing for feature articles like in a newspaper. I can see now how much practice and work it is to write, and write well. I look forward to my next class on short fiction writing, and hopefully producing another little piece.
----------------------------------
Acupuncture Clinic, May I Help You?
My sisters and I spent Saturdays at our parents’ acupuncture clinic. My parents enlisted us to do minor tasks like refilling dispensers for the cotton balls, which they used with a dab of rubbing alcohol to disinfect patients’ skin before the needles were inserted and after they were removed. We often rearranged the glass moxibustion cups on the bedside tables after playing with them by stamping each other’s arms with big red circles. My mother and father never seemed to mind that we were all inveterate snoopers who also peeked in every drawer and into every cabinet at home. We liked to look under the patient beds that my parents had made themselves with two-by-fours, plywood, foam pads, and yards of synthetic leather. Under the beds they stored old Chinese acupuncture journals and empty cookie tins, but we always checked to see if my parents had hidden any new or interesting things there.
The clinic was always an exciting place to visit – it was nothing like home or school. It was a completely adult world, which made it precisely the most excellent place to play. When the clinic was not too busy, we had a whole small patient room to ourselves. We liked the room with the two beds because it gave us more space to spread out our toys and papers. Each of the beds was a continent for our troll dolls and the space between was an enormous canyon. The Chinese watercolor paintings and woodcut panels on the walls were backdrops for our plastic bear family saga. We looked out the window of the office building at the freeway below and stuck our bare feet on the glass, daring drivers to look at our toes.
But when we had exhausted all play in the little room, or our parents needed the room for patients, we all piled into the small reception area and sat behind the big desk. We three sisters tried our best to avoid talking to patients. We politely answered questions about how old we were and where we went to school, but mostly we played under the desk and on the floor in hopes that they did not notice us. Unfortunately, staying in the front meant that we had to answer the phones. Callers were greeted with a little girls’ voice saying, “Acupuncture clinic, may I help you?” When the caller needed more than to make an appointment, we placed the telephone receiver facedown on the desk and ran to find one of our parents. We peeked into the rooms and saw patients in various degrees of undress with needles prickling from their waists, knees, or eyebrows. No one ever appeared too surprised to see us stealing glances at their peachy bellies and waxy legs.
My father loved to tell stories and we always found him deep in conversation with patients. There was one room in the clinic that was lined with chairs and devoted to people trying to quit smoking. My father liked to brag about the very particular technique of ear acupuncture he had discovered to take away patients’ tolerance for nicotine. He told one story about demonstrating the technique in China to a group of acupunturists. None could find the right spot in one Communist official’s ear, but when my father tapped it, the man had to throw up immediately because his body could not tolerate the cigarettes he had just smoked. My father said that the room was designed to encourage patients to share their experiences kicking their addictions, but in effect he created a captive audience for his talks on how his patients needed to make changes for healthier living. He had placed a poster in the room that charted different foods as positive or negative. Sweet potatoes had huge positive points and my father liked to recount how he had survived as child on sweet potatoes grown by my grandmother during the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, when all food was scarce. Much to my mother’s chagrin, he thought the few positive points for pizza also justified his love of barbeque pizza.
When we were tired or hungry we sought out our mother. She still had her mother smell even in her white doctor’s coat. She maintained order where my father left chaos. He never kept track of when patients were ready to have their needles removed or who needed to pay for their treatments. My mother took care of her own patients in addition to his and I don’t know how he managed on the Saturdays he went to the clinic alone. My mother found us paper to draw on and snacks to eat. She showed us the little balls and pins that they taped to the earlobes of their quit smoking patients. Patients were to rub the taped spots on their ears over the course of the following week to reinforce the effectiveness of their treatments. She taped the little balls into our ears to treat our sinus problems and headaches. I used to get stomach aches, for which my mother gave me heat treatments with burning moxa sticks that she waved over the skin of my stomach. The sticks looked like smoldering cigars and had a sweet incense smell. My mother’s heat treatments were some of the few regular times that I had her all to myself; I recall constantly having stomach aches.
When we needed to go to the bathroom, the three of us went together. We hoped to avoid running across other adults. Most of the time we never saw the attorneys, dentists, and insurance agents that occupied the neighboring suites to the acupuncture clinic. We saw them as strangers, who were unknowingly dangerous. We made our rounds together from the bathroom, to the water fountain, and to the vending machine where we picked out what chips we would buy if we had money. The building was six-stories high, with the suites arranged around the periphery of open space on every floor, thus allowing a clear view of every door from the floor to the ceiling. After the security guard called our parents, we couldn’t ride the glass elevators from floor to floor anymore, but we still trampled the cold metal stairs with the dim fire escape lighting. We found the hallways not visible from the bottom floor and used our hidden passage ways to make our way back the clinic.
At closing time, my mother tried to drop my father subtle hints to wrap up his conversations so we could go to lunch, but he never seemed to notice. Usually my sisters and I became so squirmy that the patients themselves knew it was time to say their final words and leave. At last, my father held up the day’s stack of checks and twenty-dollar bills, boasted about how much he’d made, and took us out for dim sum.
