‘I Just Feel the Best When I Wear Them’

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.

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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.

At first, Chen didn’t skate with bespoke dresses. When she was about 7 or 8 and needed a costume, her mother just bought one at the rink’s pro shop, albeit balking at the price. Chen ended up complaining about it, saying “Oh my God, this is like too itchy and I don’t want to wear this!”

Her mother offered a familiar parental reply: “I paid money for this. You are going to wear it.”

And Chen did wear it, but only for a while. Her complaints wore her mother down.

“Her body is very sensitive, and so her dresses need to fit in a certain way,” Tseng said. “So I said, ‘I’ll see what I can do’ and solved that issue on my own.”

Tseng’s old Barbie dolls helped. As a girl in Taiwan, Tseng was not satisfied with Mattel’s fashion choices, so she ripped apart her dolls’ clothes to examine the deconstructed fabric, then used them as a template for her own designs and borrowed her mother’s sewing machine to create new, improved clothes.

Years later, she also tore apart her daughter’s first competition dress and put it back together in a way that made Chen feel comfortable — and, maybe more important, confident.

That dressmaking was just the start of Tseng’s devotion to her daughter’s career — and Chen said her mother’s effort and sacrifices have helped her reach the top of her sport.

“I was so young and needed so much help that I couldn’t have done this without her,” Chen said. “When I made the team in 2018, it was a dream come true, and I also knew that my mom was behind it all.”

When Chen was in middle school, her family partly uprooted so she could train with the internationally known coach Tammy Gambill, who was based in Riverside, Calif., 400 miles south of where the Chens lived in Fremont. Chen’s father, Chih-Hsiu Chen, couldn’t move because of his job, but Tseng could work remotely as a database engineer, so she rented an apartment in Riverside, where the family lived during the week.

Eventually, Chen’s younger brother, Jeffrey, also started training in Riverside, as an ice dancer. On weekends, they would drive back to Fremont so the whole family could be together, and Chen remembers her mother being so tired during the six-to-eight hour drive in their Honda minivan that Chinese podcasts or game shows would be blasting in the car to keep her awake.

During the week, Tseng would wake up at 6 a.m. for East Coast business meetings and bring her laptop to the rink, where she would work in the stands.

“My husband and I could never do a sport like figure skating because we didn’t have the resources,” Tseng said. “We will do anything to give our children the opportunity to do what they love.”

Tseng continued to make Chen’s dresses until 2016, when Chen’s first chance at the Olympics drew near, and they turned to a professional instead. Dresses are such an important part of a skater’s presentation that athletes show them to coaches and even judges before competitions to get feedback on how a dress makes their body look as they perform jumps and spins.

“The dress, the hair, the makeup, the music selection and the story behind it, it’s all about the packaging and that’s a big thing, right?” Drew Meekins, Chen’s choreographer, said. “The dress needs to show off the body line in a way that’s most appealing to show things like posture and stretch of the limbs. All those things are evaluated in the program component marks.”

He added, “Karen’s mom is great at highlighting her in just that perfect way.”

But the cost of those professionally made costumes is high, and Tseng said she sometimes paid more than $3,500, and extra for alterations. Sometimes Chen had to buy a whole new dress because the judges didn’t like the one she showed them. In 2018, the cost became unmanageable and Chen went back to her mother for costumes. Tseng also makes costumes for her son, Jeffrey, and his ice dancing partner, Katarina Wolfkostin. They were named as alternates for this Olympics.

“I don’t care what people say because, first, it saves money and second of all, she’s super, super talented,” Chen said. “That’s why my dresses are always drop-dead gorgeous.”

Before turning on her sewing machine, Tseng listens to the music Chen will perform to and then spends hours searching online and flipping through magazines to check out wedding dresses, gymnastics outfits, other skaters’ costumes and fashion, in general, to get ideas for a new creation.

Then she meets with Chen to discuss possibilities and, later, tweaks such as which stone color looks best and which direction the crystal design should go.

Tseng said she spends about $1,000-$1,500 on each dress and creates about 10 of them per year. Chen receives them by FedEx at the United States Olympic training center in Colorado, where she has lived and trained for the past few years — and each time she opens the box, her heart jumps.

Her latest dress arrived the day before she left for Beijing.

For 20 hours a day, four days in a row, Tseng had cut fabric, sewed and glued, and sewed some more for her daughter, who plans to retire soon from international competition and return to her pre-med studies at Cornell University.

“I barely slept at all, but I wanted to make something really special,” Tseng said. “I know in the future I won’t have this chance because she will have a different life, and I will miss this.”

Chen, who was in 13th place in the women’s singles competition after Tuesday’s short program, said she plans to wear the new dress for the free skate on Thursday. She wouldn’t describe it because she wanted it to be a surprise.

“It represents our special bond,” she said.