Then I spritz.
It’s jasmine, an intoxicating single-note floral. I wave the blotter and sniff again, the memory coming to me not in bits and pieces but fully formed. When I was sixteen, my mother told me to re-create the jasmine she grew in the small garden behind the house in all its different moods. Jasmine in the rain. In the sun. Playing up the indoles for the pungent smell of mothballs, and then its green notes. I’d done dozens of jasmines, refining and learning each time. The one my mother had chosen for my birthday was a light and sweet interpretation, something suitable for a girl.
Luling22 makes me gasp out loud. It’s a rich, spicy bomb, not typical of my mother, who prefers soft fragrances designed to stay close to the skin and respect the olfactory space of those around the wearer. This is the opposite, an amber overdose with notes of opopanax, civet, and vanilla. It’s said when Giorgio Beverly Hills was released, it was so overpowering restaurants posted signs asking people to tone it down. Luling22 could give that, Angel, and Poison a run for theirmoney. It’s the 1980s in all its lavish excess, and it pulls a surprised laugh out of me. If it were a relationship, it would be the love-bombing of a narcissist.
The more of them I smell, the more I’m convinced my mother is trying to tell me something—but I don’t know what. There’s a tea scent with a breath of buttery pastry that reminds me of Sunday mornings, a leather that smells like a supple old handbag, and a powdery rose I recall from one of Waipo’s old cosmetic compacts.
I sit with Luling28 for a while, as it’s a feat of technical brilliance that brings me an unusual feeling of envy. I knew Mom was good, but this good? She’s combined the ozone of an approaching storm in the top notes with the petrichor of the rain-soaked earth, giving the entire story of a summer shower, with an epilogue of fresh leaves trembling with rain. I don’t know how she made the green linger, when its volatility means it should be one of the first notes to disappear.
Then I open the package that came today. All the accompanying note says isHappy Birthday, Luling, and I put it carefully in the pile of identical notes from years past, tucked under the bottles in the bottom of the tub.
The mist from Luling33 settles on the blotter, turning the white paper translucent. Then I sniff.
There’s nothing.
I try again, but again, nothing.
Bringing my arm up, I bury my face in my sleeve and inhale to reset my nose. Coffee is a myth for fighting olfactory fatigue, since it only replaces one smell with another. I take another breath and turn back to my blotter.
Still nothing.
It’s ridiculous to think she mailed a scentless bottle, and Mom doesn’t make mistakes. I spritz it on my arm in case it’s some novel formulation that has to interact with heat or something.
There’s definitely nothing there.
I put the blotters in the kitchen garbage and the bottles neatly away, all except for Luling33, which I keep on my night table. If I previously suspected the perfumes were a message, now I’m sure. I leave it and head to the shower to clear my nose and my mind, but once I’m back in my room, damp and warm, I pick the bottle up to spray it again.
Nothing.
“Why can’t you just tell me what you want to say instead of playing these games?” I mutter.
Because you never listen,her ghostly voice says.
Wounded by this internal debate that I made up myself, I get into bed, still staring at the bottle. Is she saying I have a blank canvas to play on now? Is she saying my life is empty? I want to ask her, but then I groan, remembering that I already thanked her. I can’t go back and tell her I hadn’t smelled it.
I put the box of perfumes away and take two melatonin gummies. Then I curl around Luling33 like a lover and wait for sleep, hoping to puzzle out the mystery of my mother’s empty perfume in my dreams.
10
Hua Peizhi
Northern Song dynasty. When a plague of locusts destroyed Peizhi’s fields, she was most devastated by the loss of her perfume ingredients.
Heart note //Increase trust
Base note //Spikenard
The morning finds me standing in the dim apartment—gray clouds staining the sky the color of a faded shirt—and staring at my closet.
Smelling my mother’s perfumes last night was like opening the floodgates. I woke craving a connection to what I lost when I left home. Mom is too direct and intimate a link, but those long-dead women from generations past can’t pressure me. I can’t disappoint them the way I have the women in my immediate family.
Yet simply taking out the register and starting to read makes me feel somehow like I’m letting Mom win. I pull the closet door back and forth, the suitcase blinking in and out of sight, until I eventually come to the conclusion that I’m being almost childishly immature. I want to read the register. There are no winners or losers involved. I open the closet fully and grab the suitcase, feeling as though I’ve grown, very slightly, as a person.
The stained ivory pages are almost limp with age and use, and layout my family history starting from the days of Hua Aiai in the Tang dynasty, a distant millennium ago. It runs to the final, empty pages at the back, where my own story should be and isn’t.
Despite Mom’s skepticism, my Chinese is adequate enough to read the orderly columns of characters outlining the lives of fifty generations of Hua women. Other kids had fairy tales as bedtime stories. I had the highlight reel from our family register. Some stories are so familiar I can repeat them by rote, such as my thirteenth great-grandmother watching her brothers being forced to grow queues when the Manchu overthrew the Ming. Others need three or four lines to jog my memory. Many I don’t remember at all.
Literacy was prized among Hua women simply because of this register, as each woman is responsible for writing her own chapter. I pause to read one entry from Liqiu in the Southern Song dynasty, describing the steps taken by her mother to ensure her education, which had to remain secret from a disapproving father. At least Ming-era Dongmei had fewer problems, and her own father, a scholar, had insisted she be educated in order to appreciate the beauty of his poetry.
