Above is a photo of Karen Chen, the 2017 U.S. national champion. She won a silver medal in the team event at the 2022 Winter Olympics after skating in the short program and the free skate. The red necklace she’s wearing, which has a rabbit made of jade, is a childhood gift from her mother. Ms. Chen says that she always wears it.
Do you have something like this necklace that comforts you or reminds you of someone special or that you believe brings you luck? If so, what it is? Where did you get it, and why and how does it help you?
In “‘I Just Feel the Best When I Wear Them’,” Juliet Macur writes about Ms. Chen’s jade necklace but also about the costumes she wears to compete, which are made by Hsiu-Hui Tseng, her mother. The article begins:
BEIJING — As soon as Karen Chen skates onto the ice, the dreaded feeling returns.
Her coach could be pounding on the wall of the rink to get her excited. Her family and friends could be screaming encouragement from the stands. The fans could be cheering her name.
Yet in that spotlight, standing there waiting for the music to begin, as she will in Thursday’s free skate of the Beijing Games, she still feels so very vulnerable.
“It’s only me, my body and my mind, and it just hits me that, ugh, I’m doing this by myself,” said Chen, a two-time Olympian and the 2017 U.S. national champion. “That can be so scary.”
She knows the remedy is close, so close that she carries it with her. A quick touch of her jade rabbit necklace and a glance at her costume remind her that it will be OK because her mother is out there with her, too.
Chen’s mother, Hsiu-Hui Tseng, gave her that necklace when Chen was 9 after her first serious injury in the sport, a chipped bone in her foot, and the rabbit is Chen’s Chinese zodiac sign. It’s meant to protect her, and Chen always wears it.
And her costume? That’s a different story, one stitched together over years of a mother’s love and support for a daughter who had an Olympic dream and now has realized it twice.
For most of Chen’s career, her mother has made her sparkling costumes that are carefully designed with Swarovski crystals that are the best for catching the light. There could be thousands of them on each costume, and each is individually glued on. The bigger ones are also sewn on, so they don’t fall off.
At this level of the sport, where dresses can cost several thousand dollars each — or more because, in some cases, Vera Wang has designed them — a homemade dress that can pass muster at the top level of the sport is a rarity.
There’s a lavender one with a deep V lined with shining butterflies and flowers, for a performance to “Butterfly Lovers Concerto.” Another, purple with a splash of white and fuchsia flowers that flows daintily across the bodice. A black one with a moody deep V design of dazzling blues on the front and a matching deep scoop on the back.
And one that’s among Chen’s favorites: a lavender dress with an ombré design that took Tseng multiple tries to perfect because she bought the fabric from a Jo-Ann store and dyed it herself. You can learn anything on YouTube, she said.
Chen, 22, wore meticulously mom-made dresses in both the short program and the free skate of the team event last week, when the United States won the silver medal. She can’t imagine wearing a dress made by anyone else.
“It’s hard to explain, but I just feel the best when I wear them,” Chen said, several days after arriving in Beijing.
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