If I thought it was awkward and nerve-destroying when I did this the first time, doing it with my mother there to critique my every move is eons worse. She doesn’t comment on my shaky strokes when I trace my huo or the crooked way I place the tag.
Mom looks at the bottle. “Now, Luling,” she says in a hard voice. “Do it now.”
I think through what I did last time—the sensation of the water, theconnection as I drew energy from the world around me, the feeling of loss as I let it go—and dip my head forward.
Mom is there with a cup of cold rejuvenating tea she must have made this morning when I wasn’t looking, and I remember the medicinal taste. It’s the same as what she gave me after my first attempt.
I drink it and we stare at the bottle. Mom takes it from me and holds it to the light. “Can you see something?” I ask, wondering if I’ve missed a vital testing step.
“No.” She puts it down. I take the bottle back and, like Mom, hold it up to the light. I made it in clear glass, but all I see is the pale hay of the juice. I give it a shake.
“Do you feel it?” she asks. “That tug?”
I close my eyes and let myself be filled with the power from the perfume, the bottle pulling at me. “I do.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” I try to keep my hand from shaking.
“You’re sure? Absolutely you can feel it? You aren’t imagining it?”
I keep focusing, but now I don’t know if it’s a tug or simply gravity pulling down my hand. I’d been sure before and it didn’t work. I rub my birthmark. “Maybe?”
“You need to be sure,” Mom says intently. “Are you? A lot depends on this, Luling. You must be absolutely and one hundred percent certain.”
I begin to doubt myself. “I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?” She sounds more disappointed than angry, which is of course so much worse.
“I thought I did, but then you came in asking if I was sure!”
“Because you need to know.”
I put the bottle down carefully, because what I really want is to slam it through the window.
She doesn’t say anything for a moment, but then pushes my bottle aside with a decisive gesture.
“Watch,” she says firmly.
The first thing she does is riffle through my vials with blue-gloved fingers, nodding and pursing her lips. In a moment, she has five lined up in front of her in a wavering line, along with a beaker and pipettes. “I was thinking about this today,” she says in a soft voice, as if speaking to herself. “By the water. The difference in the smell between a lake and an ocean when the sun hits it.”
I nod, but I’m not sure what she means.
“It reminded me of Xiaoting and what she wrote in the register,” Mom says. “Our moli is like a sea in our souls. You need to dip into that sea with your hands and pour a little of that energy into the perfume. You will channel the current as it moves through and around you.”
I brush off my renewed frustration because I thought I had done that. I need a GPS map, and all I’m getting is a pastel sketch.
She adds galbanum and petitgrain with other ingredients and automatically notes her measurements on one of the paper formula sheets I keep in a small wheeled cabinet that fits under the desk. It has rows for the materials and columns for the amount that goes in each modification. I simply sit and wait. In any other situation, I’d be looking for my phone or anything else to distract myself, but there’s a deep pleasure that comes from watching my mother at work. This is her as a professional, and I have the strange dissonance that comes from understanding our own parents are deeper and more complex than we give them credit for in our minds—almost as complex as we are ourselves.
Mom’s hair is tucked behind her ears, as it always is. Although we look alike, I inherited Dad’s more jug-like ears. When I was younger, Waipo used to laugh and call us to join her in front of the mirror so she could see the three generations together. Our similarities were exaggerated whenever she did, and I could see the connections between us through our hands or our noses. It was easier to mark those physicaltraits than it was to see how my mother and grandmother shared other characteristics, like high-handed stubbornness, and wondering if that was passed to me along with our eye shape.
Mom sits back with the blotter in her hand, eyes distant as she smells it before handing it over. I sniff and, much like smelling the Luling scents, awareness of Mom’s ability crashes over me. She’s not only my mother but also an artist and a craftsperson, with an expertise that extends far past my own. I would feel envious if this were anyone else, but instead I’m in awe.
“We’re doing an experiment,” she says. “I want you to watch. Give me your huo stickers.”
She’s going to transform it right in front of me? She frowns when I don’t move. “We don’t have all night.”
I still don’t budge. “What are you doing, exactly?”
