Hua Yanlin
Yuan dynasty. Witness to the end of the Song dynasty and the Mongol conquest under the Khans.
Heart note //Intensify gratitude
Base note //Lavender
I return to the house in time to share a strained dinner with Mom and Dad. She’s made stir-fry, and I’m reminded again how time-intensive cooking is when you have to cook for others, since there’s no way I’d bother cutting all those vegetables just for me. The second the meal is over, I plead more packing and escape to my room. Dad comes to say goodbye while Mom does the dishes.
“It was good having you home,” he says. “Your mother wishes it would be more often.”
“Dad, about last night.”
He holds up his hand. “All in the past, Lucy. You know I’m not the kind of man to hold grudges.”
That’s a lie. “Which means that there’s something worth holding a grudge about?”
“We can all agree it wasn’t an ideal situation, but as I said, it’s in the past.”
“Dad, did you mean what you said about our moli?” I ask, almost desperately. I don’t know why I can’t let this go, even when I know the answer will hurt.
“Have a good flight. Call your mother when you arrive so she doesn’t worry.”
A few seconds later I hear the door to his office close. I suppose that’s answer enough.
Since I don’t actually have packing to do, I sit on my bed and check my phone. There’s a message from Ana with a photo of one of the designs she’s working on, a pair of earrings with little cherries dropping from silver threads. It would be cool if they smelled like cherries as well.
“Are you busy?” Mom stands at my door.
I want to say yes to avoid whatever conversation she wants to have, but it’s obvious I am not busy at all. “What’s up?”
“I thought you could go through the boxes from Waipo’s room.”
Mom’s tired expression drains my initial unwillingness. She did all the heavy lifting: the removal of the intimate leavings such as used toothpaste tubes and wrinkled bedsheets that retain the imprint, if not the heat, of the body. I should have been there to help or at least offer support, but I wasn’t. I can look at a few boxes.
“Sure,” I say, standing up. We go out the back of the house to the little annex where Waipo lived. It’s about the size of a reasonable one-bedroom apartment, and when Mom turns on the lights, I stand in the door for a moment, the same way I did at the Yixiang shop. In front of me is an empty space, apart from appliances and a pile of boxes in the corner. It smells of nothing except bleach.
“I sold off the furniture,” says Mom. “Luckily, we’d done a big purge before she left the old house to move here, so there wasn’t much.”
She points to two boxes that have been set apart from the rest. “Those are yours.”
“What’s in this one?” I tap an unlabeled box sitting slightly to the left. The others have Mom’s tidy writing listing what’s inside. Clothing for donation. Dishes. Books. I never saw Waipo reading. She was always busy. Busy cooking, and creating, and running Yixiang, and then, as she got older, playing games on her tablet.
Mom glances over from the kitchen, where she’s unplugging the refrigerator. “Nothing.”
I’ve always been able to read Mom well, no doubt because humans are evolutionarily wired to pay attention to threats, and I know she’s hiding something. “Really?”
“It’s late, Luling. You should go through your boxes. You can do what you wish with them.”
There’s no point in putting it off, so I turn away from the box of books and open up the ones meant for me. The first is accessories—lovely silk scarves and supple leather gloves that still have the tags on them, which makes me ache almost as much as seeing the ones that have been well used. The best method is to do this as dispassionately as possible, like Ana sorting through a bin at the thrift store, so I get to work. Three scarves and all the gloves are instant keepers, and I put aside a few to give to Ana, or that she might like for the store. The last scarf I pick up is printed with peonies in various shades of pink and has the faint smell of lemon. I keep that one as well, folding it as small as I can to try to preserve the scent forever.
Mom watches me. “Did she tell you why she loved the smell of lemon so much?” she asks.
I shake my head and pack away my treasures. “I assumed she liked how refreshing it was.”
“The old family compound outside Nanjing had a lemon tree that had been gifted to them by a prince,” Mom says. “The tree had been tended religiously through the generations but had to be left in China when the family came here. Her mother harvested the last lemons for the oil.”
“She liked it for the memory of home?” Waipo never talked about leaving China.
