Scent of a Country

What scents might I consider noxious or attractive when I return to the States? Might I choke at the perfume counters of a department store or find the odorific fumes emitted form fast food restaurants more nauseating than I already do? Having not smelled my own country for months or years, I anticipate I’ll become aware or at least cognizant of some inherently American scents I never recognized or detected. Changes in olfactory sense are common among women, especially during menstruation and pregnancy, as I’ve witnessed with the former. No one should have a sense of smell so highly tned! There are certain things that just shouldn’t be smelled, but I care not to go into detail as the mere scanning of these olfactory iamges across yoru eyes may cause damage to your nose.
Westerners, especially Americans, have this preconceived notion that everything smells bad in other countries. Before I departed for India I was often asked, “Doesn’t it stink there?” How am I supposed to respond to ignorance without calling a spade a spade? I chose to respond as such: “The way I look at it, you either love or hate the smell of India. If you like the smell of Indian food, you’ll like the smell of India.” I happen to love the innumerable spices used by Indians so the smell of that country was more than delightful to me. It’s like being wrapped with sun-warmed bamboo leaves and decorated with a palette of fragrant colors.
People even warned me about Italians before my first trip there. “They don’t bathe,” people said. “They don’t wear deodorant,” others said. Where do people get such images? Espresso’s scent, for instance, is jsut as deep, rich and ripe as the beverage itself, and it puts the scent of American coffees to shame. Italian perfumes are some of hte best in the world and the italians love to use them, only not to the extreme (suffocation) that Americans do. Does that mean that only those you douse themselves in perfume or cologne are said to smell pleasantly? That may be symbolic of America: that its citizens would rather smell somethign artificial than soemthing real. If that’s the case, I want to ask: would you rather smell your lover’s shirt after a long run or smell your lover himself? OK, if you’re not into sweat, let’s consider something else. Would you rather smell the pillow your lover has slept on or your lover herself?
We’d take the real thing in most cases. But with traveling abroad, scents are a part of hte journey. They are instant memory makers. You can be 5,000 miles from your grandmother’s house, and she could have passed 20 years ago, but a scent floats by in the breeze and suddenly your grandmother is standing beside you as a child and youre’ reliving a beloved memory. All because of a scent. Somthing intangible, incaable of beign bottled (no matter how hard scientists try), but able to transport us in our minds to another time and palce. Notice there aren’t many negative associations formed around scents? The only ones I can conjure are artificial ones. For instance, every time I think of a particular cologne it brings to mind a past boyfriend. But first I have to cut through the positive assocaitions before recalling that that boyfriend is an ex for a reason. Anyway, back to traveling. I’m not so sure that scents and odors should be judged so harshley as many Westerners tend to do when traveling abroad. Countries possess their own scents. I cherish the lemony and perfumy fragrances of Italy, and I cherish the earthy, enveloping scents of India. I don’t recall the bad odors.
it’s almost as if we’ve been programmed to believe that if it doesnt come out of a can, shaker, bottle or other container then it cannot possible smell good; that it must be covered up. I disagree. Sure, I like perfumes. I used Coco Chanel for years, but now that I’m in a developing nation where the price of a bottle of Coco culd feed a Chinese family, I find smelling like the contents of a perfume bottle to be rather...well...superfluous. it suprised me how quickly i started to smell China on myself. Thre days, I think it took, and the first scent I caught was of graham crackers. Granted, I had been munching on a lot of Chinese crackers that taste similar to graham crackers. But the more I thought out it the more I realized that no morsel of American food was in mybody anymore. Memories flooded back of the time a former boyfriend returned to the States from six months in Italy. I’d been subtly appreciative of the slight lemony, musky scent he effected since I picked him up at the airport and hugged him. His sister, however, didnt’ react as affectinately. He removed his winter coat upon entering his family’s house, whereupon she immediately exclaimed “You smell weird!”
Over the next few weeks I rveled in the lemony clean, sweet yet musky scent of his body, and I thoroughly enjoyed it whenever in Italy. I still feel kissed with memories of that country whenever teh refreshing scent of lemon permeates the air. That boyfriend never mentioned anyone discussing his scent, but years later and after several weeks of living in China I wished he had.

Scent is a weird thing, indeed. It often conjures colors for me. For instance, I can tell what my lovers have eaten, espeically if they’ve consumed meat. They come bearing a scent that’s sickly brown, about the color of turkey meat that’s not quite the dark nor wuite the light meat. This highly tuned olfanctory skill has been culminated over 15 years of my being a vegetarian, but lovers come to know each other’s scent naturally. After all, an individual’s scent is a bio-mechanical instrument to guide humans to each other for mating. One reason perfumes never smell natural is because, being manufactured itms, that is made by humans and laboratory science, we will never be quite able to tap into the essence of a scent that makes it work on a base level. We can never recreate what works for us subconsciusly.
Yu’ve likely heard it said in movies, “She just smells like home.” Well, take that sentiment as a direct translation of our human motives: we are guided to one another through a sort of homing mechanism.
“Finally, I just stopped dating black men,” a gay friend once told me. he was recalling a bad story about a breakup he’d had with his last in a string of black boyfriends, when I asked him to expound. IN my mind I see the color blue.
“So it was a race thing?” I don’t know. I’ve never dated someone from another country or been intimate enough with someone from another race to become familiar with their scent. All I know is that there’s someting in Italian DNA that I cannot refuse; it’s something like a cautious red clashing with a generous green.
“Sort of. I never got used to the way they smelled,” my friend says, edifying me in detail of how and where African Americans smell differnt from what we’re used to as white people. Like smelling different after living in another contry for some time, I had never known this. People talk abotu sights, sounds, tastes, and to a lesser degree our tactile expereinces. We take for granted, however, the power of scent. Perhaps that explains the popularity of WHO Suskind’s relatively poignant effort to encapsulate its power in his novel (and the subsequent film) The Perfume.
The scent of ourselves is not something we can ever experience though. We can never be that objective. The closest example I can envisage is one of our own homes. Frequently we become so accustomed to our domestic surroundings that it’s only when we return from a few days away and open the door that we get a sense of what we might smell like. For instance, you may no longer notice the odor of dogs and cigarette smoke or dust and old books. The heavy odors of ethnic food you’ve cooked or perfume that’s hit the bathroom wall after 14 years of spraying it from the same angle have blended into the fabric, teh architecture. Spring cleaning or even weekly cleaning may do some justice to help prevent or reduce your individual residential smells, but life creates more, and they’re permanent.
Now, living in another country, eating the food of another culture day in and day out, using this culture’s hygienic products like olive shampoo, sandalwood soap and lemon chewing gum, the home that is my body has infused and diffused new scents. What colors they are, I know not. In my mind I see yellow like my hair, green like my eyes, and coppery reds like my skin’s autumnal hues. I have discovered, though, whatever Chinese scents that cause me to diffuse the smell of tofu, green tea and graham crackers, I still smell like home– just not a Chinese home.

One roomate tells me about an experience today of switching from one cab to another. Each driver, it seems, reeks of cheap booze and the lack of a shower.
“They just smell so bad. Why do Chinese people smell so bad?” are common questions among the group of Westerners with whom I associate. I know it’s not just the people they refer to. I know that in the back of their mind they are thinking of the time they walk down the corridor of large public buildings to be olfactorily punched by the odor of stale urine and wastebacskets unwashed after years of collecting menstrual materials. I know they’re thinking of the time they sat in a cab whose driver (inadvertinently?) left bags of wht’s appropriately called stinky tofu in the hot back seat.
The smell of Chinese people doesn’t overwhelm me genreally. (But perhaps that’s because I’m of the persuasion that anything Indian smells good.) Maybe I just expect it more because I’ve been to a small handful of countries other than America. I am well aware of the fact that the often rotten teeth and the repeated use of clothign I see on my students indicates there is a smell not American. They do not bathe themselves in products to mask their natural scent, nor are they obsessed with prcenting scents that naturally occur in a well lived day. They do bathe; I see them carrying their shower caddies from their dorm rooms to places unknown off the university campus. I see them return with wet hair and seemingly glowing faces and skin not covered by their thick winter clthing.
What can be offsetting is their breath. Americans are taught by dentists to brush our teeth three times daily. Gum is sold in stores and newspaper kiosks. Toothbrushes are available at gas stations. Mouthwash is given freely at hotels. But then again the American culture is so obsessed with the image of a perfect outh that teeth whitening has become de facto and availabel in countless methods. Maybe it’s becuse I’m so aware of my homeland’s culture of the cover up that I’m not as easily disgusted by their bad breath. However, i cannot claim to be unaffected.
There is indeed a certain ripple of nausea that runs through me when enclosed with a cab driver who breathes out of his mouth. There is a wave of dizziness that invisbly encircles me when surrounded by a handful of students who want to see their grade at my desk. There is a natural culture-induced tendancy to thrust my head back when a 20-something cashier smiles to reveal a mouthful of half brown teeth.
If I were to allow myself to remain so sensitive about these smells my world travels would be far less enjoyable. I choose to remain ambiguous about them...until one of my students writes in a class assignment that one memorable thing about her teacher (yours truly) is “her American smell.”
Now my suppressed thoughts about the odors of China hit the air, so to speak. What does that mean? What does that mean to a Chinese person?
“She probably meant you smell clean,” says the roommate who is viscerally affected by Chiense olfacfory experiences.
I take stock of what external scents might have preempted this literary statement. I wear scented deoderant, whcih was manufactured in America. I wash and condition my hair with Chinese products. I cleanse my clothing in Chinese laundry detergent and fabric softener. I adorn my face with French and American cosmetics. I chew Chiense mint gum afer smoking the same cigarettes smoked by virtually every man (and few women) in this country.
I smoke. Perhaps that’s it.
I ask students in another class. “What did that student mean when she wrote that I smell like an American?” I’m hoping to glean some cultural insight I’d not bothted to seek from my experience with my ex.
The answer still evades me. The students seemed to think the question was so obvius that it didnt’ require an answer. It was as if I’d asked them if the sky were blue.
I will admit to being taken aback by the student’s literary characterization of me. I am human. If Americans think people from other cultures smell bad, do Chinese people think Americans smell bad?
With their limited English my students inform me that my smell is simply not theirs. Then it dawns on me: If I’m an African American I’m going to possess that scent that my gay friend no longer found desirable. If I’m Italian I’m going to smell lemony and musky. If I’m Indian I’m going to smell like curry and tamarind.
No matter how often I clean my house, no matter how frequently I bathe, no matter if I use scented products, no matter if I eat meat or not, I will always smell like me. I will always smell like home.