I had known Sister Jing, the owner of Artiva Hair Salon, since 2019. I spent a year documenting her lived experience amidst the #NoArenaChinatown movement in Philadelphia, where residents were protesting against an NBA arena project.

However, for someone who survived the Cultural Revolution, her political activism is much more nuanced. On the surface, she seems passive. But she writers her history into the history of Chinatown and Philadelphia through artmaking and caregiving. Her magic fingers, which she proudly refers to as her strengths, materialize the ways in which a sixty-one-year-old unmarried woman fosters her relationality to activism.