The Oceanographer and the Acupuncturist
Sophia Peng
Sophia Peng shared her story, “The Oceanographer and the Acupuncturist,” at an Off Script performance in October 2022 at the Blaffer Art Museum on the University of Houston campus.
When George wrenched his back pulling the dredge net last winter, he’d gone to the acupuncturist. Cleared the aching in six months, and set the rest of me straight too. So Lina swallowed her apprehension and drove to the dusty strip mall on her day off.
Lina had always been wound tight. Think too deep, her mother would chastise on the phone, after Lina had invariably laid one on her about the harms of beach tourism, or the invisibility of Asian minorities in biology. So when first her shoulders, then her upper back, started tingling every time she removed her wetsuit, followed by a radiating ache that persisted for several days, she ironically dubbed it a physical manifestation of what her head had been suffering since undergrad a decade ago: a relentless inability to relax, to let go of anxieties until she derived from them a logical, straightforward conclusion.
The office was nondescript, camped in the shadow of a dilapidated Sears. Stepping inside, Lina noted the heavy-handed Chinese symbolism: Mohua, ink paintings, lined the walls. Verdant monsteras overflowed jade-and-white porcelain pots by the window. As the receptionist checked her in, Lina’s eye caught on the row of accolades above the entryway. Three diplomas—a long journey in the pursuit of knowledge—and a mirror of her own mantelpiece. There was one striking difference, though. Whereas her name, “Lina Ma,” could be read in a blink, “Matis Yvonne Saint-Fleur” demanded a full swoop of the eyes.
Lina frowned. It added to her anxiety, that this stranger should hold so much weight on paper. And that soon, she would be half-naked on an examination table before him, the “less” of her exposed to the “more” of him, like a plankton haul bleaching on the deck of a boat. Her back twitched. The receptionist clicked one last key and then they were walking, down the hall to the last room on the left, and she was alone.
Lina’s aversion to acupuncture began in her teens. She’d been visiting relatives in San Francisco, and on a trip to Chinatown she’d stumbled into a community acupuncture clinic. At seeing all the men and women with needles protruding from their faces and ears, sitting upright in metal folding chairs like statuesque pincushions, she’d freaked. The whole scene had felt postapocalyptic—the dimness, the stench of mugwort, the whiskered practitioners shuffling back and forth between puffy lounge chairs. Like the underbelly of Chinese America, something left behind closed doors in favor of firecrackers and red envelopes.
And though George, with his big brown eyes and Americana smile, had reassured her that Dr. Saint-Fleur’s practice was like any other doctor’s office, really, she couldn’t help but envision herself with head bowed, pierced through and through like a fish, something ancient and intangible being swirled and manipulated inside her like a serpent waiting to strike.
A knock on the door. Dr. Saint-Fleur, a short, bald man dressed in a crisp white coat, tan khakis, and beaten blue New Balances. Lina jumped to her feet.
“Oh, n-no worries. S-s-sit, sit, please.”
He had a slight stutter. She hadn’t considered that.
“Ms. Ma, yes? Wh-wh-what can I do for you today?”
Lina’s mind leaped back to the first time she saw the ocean. As if only then, with the horizon laid out in a line before her, she could understand how much the world was. Years later, she framed it in job interviews as a sense of peace she got brushing the limit to limitlessness.
Dr. Saint-Fleur’s soft, halting speech felt like another limited limitlessness. How long Lina sat there answering his questions—mapping her career, her medical history, and finally her current condition—she could not tell. But she found she was not uneasy talking to this doctor, who appeared genuinely awed when she spoke of her deep-sea dives and recommended her his favorite Indian restaurant.
When the time came to put in the needles, Dr. Saint-Fleur asked her to undress and stepped out of the room. Lina blinked. She was still nervous, but there was something meditative about this space, the gentleness of the man in charge lending an atmosphere not unlike waves against a hull. A steady rhythm to ease her heart into.
Another knock. Dr. Saint-Fleur’s voice through the door. “All good?”
At Lina’s confirmation, the doctor re-entered. He had Lina lay on her stomach. Here goes.
It wasn’t painful, just…a little warm. Her mind wandered, from Dr. Saint-Fleur’s unassuming demeanor…to the assays she needed to run in lab…to her mother last weekend, watching Disney’s live-action Mulan, scowling at the film’s coquettish portrayal of feudal China. She’d gotten her cultural righteousness from her mother. It was why she’d chosen to study the ocean rather than pursue an interface job—the chess game of curating her identity and reckoning with bigots would have set off her temper constantly, and probably brought her to this clinic far sooner.
After twenty minutes, Dr. Saint-Fleur re-entered the room. His voice cut through Lina’s thoughts:
“C-come back next week. Okay? We will want to do eight consecutive treatments, to f-fully strengthen circulation, and maybe some Tui Na massage also.”
Lina rolled her shoulders. The ache was still there, but the stiffness was gone. The pressure at the base of her skull felt lighter too. She squinted at this small-statured African man who had built his life around a practice that, in name, was tethered to her heritage. A spiritual and historical legacy that, unlike the food and festivals, she had never truly contended with.
“What made you want to become an acupuncturist?” she asked softly.
Dr. Saint-Fleur smiled. “My mother in Haiti, she u-used to do cupping on me. W-we took herbs, a-all the time. This sort of holistic healing, it’s m-my calling. It brings me closer to home.”
Once, on a particularly deep dive, Lina thought she’d encountered a new species. But by the time she’d flicked on her headlight, the creature had zipped away. Lying in the sand where it had been, however, was a gray-green globular body. In lab, the blob revealed itself to be an exquisitely rare sea plant. Lina was riveted—by the plant itself, but more so by the unexpectedness of its existence. How she had thought she’d known one thing, then in a cloud of bubbles she’d made an entirely different discovery.
