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"I had an acupuncture face lift"
When I got this assignment I was skeptical. How could 5 weekly sessions with needles remove a lifetime of wrinkles?
By Carol Parikh

Week One
I admire the smooth quiet planes of Dr. Tsay's face as he stares down at my rumpled one. I want to tell him that I've never had acupuncture and am afraid of needles, but before I can speak he dabs camphor under my nose and sinks a needle in my cheek. I feel the prick of it, open my mouth to comment, and feel another sink into my forehead. He pauses, his head cocked as if he's waiting for inspiration, and then he darts forward with another needle. Prick, prick, prick. They seem to appear over his handiwork, which happens to be my face, and turns to leave. "Have a pleasant sleep," he says softly, stepping back from the doorway to poke a few last needles into one leg near my ankle.
Knee-knee on small stools before we began today, Dr. Tsay told me that five or six 45-minute weekly treatments (for a total of about $350) would reduce my wrinkles, or at least keep them from worsening. "Your face will look more energetic and charming," he assured me, ticking off these last two benefits on his slender fingers. When I interrupted him to object to the whole idea ("What could be more natural than wrinkles?"), he reached forward and smoothed my cheek. "Wrinkles can also be the result of an imbalance of your internal organs," he said "or your emotions." He explained that the needles would unblock the paths through which me qi, or vital energy, flows, and that this would tone the muscles beneath my face and nourish my skin. When I asked him how best to preserve these benefits (thinking he might know of special herbal masks and moisturizers), he recommended drinking more water and learning tai chi.
Basically low-maintenance - I've never had a nail wrap or a bikini wax, although I floss my teeth and get expensive haircuts - I briefly consider sliding of the table and grabbing my coat. I volunteered for this assignment because I was the oldest person at the editorial meeting that day and not because I thought that acupuncture could erase my wrinkles. But the warmth and silence of the narrow room make my limbs heavy and I lie back down. My mind becomes interested in the tingling of one needle and then another. I imagine that the ache in my left temple is the result of a battle between my qi and a particularly difficult blockage. I grow aware of the tight set of my mouth as it begins to melt. I feel my forehead loosen. Neither awake nor asleep, I imagine the voices of my friends, who would never consider a surgical face lift but like the idea of freeing their qi, urging me on ("Let me know if it work").
On the way home I study my garbled reflection in the darkened train window, but it's only when I lean back against the seat that I know that something has changed. I feel a new ease in my face, as if it had been balled up like a fist and is opening.

Week Two
Two terra-cotta rabbits perch alertly on either side of Dr. Tsay's front door. You step between them onto a porch where a pair of life-size glass deer pause in their musings. Over the doorway into the waiting room, what seems to be a samurai with a drooping moustache and thick robes looks down from a small red photograph. From inside you see a red dragon writhing over the same doorway. Last week I wondered anxiously what each object meant, but today as I slip off my coat and settle down to wait for Dr. Tsay, I feel at ease. I feel like one more creature in this gathering.
I leaf through an old People magazine, thinking of all the toothpaste behind those celebrity smiles, the good food that supports clear skin, all the trips to the gym that go into flat stomachs and slender things, the pricey herbal shampoos that make hair shine. I tell myself that in a culture as committed to appearance as tours, trying to look younger isn't really any different from trying to look younger isn't really any different from trying to look thinner or richer - or healthier. But I don't quite believe it. I imagine the horrified gasps of my children. Who are in their 20s, at the sigh of my face as unmarked by time as theirs, all my hard-lived years gone like chalk lines from a wall.
But once I'm lying on the table beneath the infrared lamp and feeling that pleasant melting along the edges of my eyes, it occurs to me that what is disappearing from my face is not the exhilaration of experience, but the fear of it. I feel as if my face has been holding is breath until now.

Week Three
Beneath four large faded photos of his grandparents, Dr. Tsay makes me a present of a heavy black volume called Acupuncturist's Handbook - A Practical Encyclopedia, explaining that he wrote it for acupuncturists and acupuncture students. He also gives me two disposable acupuncture needles to examine; they're about two inches long, with a hilt in the middle like a dagger, metal now, although originally they were made of stone or bone. Waiting for a room to come free, I wonder who first imagined that a needle in a foot might relieve a headache. Or smooth away the tension in a face.
I look from the handbook to a nearly life-size plastic man near the receptionist's desk A red sash has been tired around his waits, the bow artfully arranged over this genitals. Elaborate lines zigzag over his face and body and perfectly shaped limbs, from the top of his head to the tips of his toes, forming 14 long pathways, called meridians, broken only by clusters of tiny holes that indicate acupuncture points where qi could be blocked. Studying that plastic man, I think how strange it is that even people like me who don't believe that happiness depends on the flow of qi or on the balancing of yin and yang can be helped by acupuncture and other Chinese healing arts, like qi gong and herbal medicine.
That night I meet an old friend for dinner, who whoops when she sees me. "I can't believe it, it's amazing," she says as she circles me, checking out my face from different angles. I don't quite trust her because she's a very good friend and knows I'm having the acupuncture, but they way she keeps coming back to my new face makes me feel that something has really happened.

Week Four
Even though I hadn't believed Dr. Tsay's promises that first meeting, climbing on the table today, I realize that I don't totally disbelieve them anymore. He asks me to sit up straight before he begins, and after a few painful massages of my shoulder I feel the sudden prick of one needle and then another at the base of my scalp. I lay my head back gingerly. This time I close my eyes right away, and after he sinks a few needles into my knees and wishes my a good nap from the doorway, I fall asleep immediately. I sleep for over an hour and wake up refreshed.
That night, brushing my teeth, I notice the shape of my face as if I've never seen it before. The smooth rounding of my cheeks below my eyes looks unfamiliar, too. It's not the face I had when I was 35 or 50. It's not a face I've ever seen before.
I lean over the sink to take a closer look. My face does seem less lined and more "energetic," as Dr. Tsay had promised that first day, but more than my face has changed. The way I look at it is different, too. The acupuncture and the weeks of close examination by my friends and colleagues have freed me from it. I could be looking at a stranger's face.

Week Five
Today is my last treatment. After Dr. Tsay leaves, I lie awake thinking of the 83-year-old woman he just told me about who won $500 at bingo and used it to pay him for a face-lift. Foolish, I think. Ridiculous. Immoral. If she didn't need the money, she could have given it to a shelter for the homeless or changed it into dollar bills and tossed it from a helicopter. But as I drift toward sleep, lulled by the familiar dab of camphor, my body feels so light and I could be 83 myself. Or 17. I see the round pale faces of the concubines for whom these face lifts were created almost a thousand years ago (at the time that foot-binding came into fashion). Twelve to 16 needles, the same for concubine or octogenarian or me. I wonder vaguely if they, too, came looking for a new way of being seen and found instead a new way of seeing.
Just before I fall asleep, I catch a glimpse of the 83-year-old woman's surprise when she finishes her treatment and, still looking from the inside out, steps into the bathroom to brush her hair. I see her, her timeless self, peering in wonder at that old lady in the mirror.