The funny thing about my house is that it’s beginning to smell more and more like the houses I remember growing up in Taiwan. This is a new phenomenon. Although my mother cooks regularly, our houses have always had some sort of foreign smell to them that always threw the balance off. In one place, our house had a very woody smell; in another it smelled slightly musty, no matter how hard you cleaned. In our house just before this one, our neighbors were a family of South Asians who cooked traditional Indian food with the windows wide open.
My parents live in a new, development home now, for better or worse. They’ve been here for about two years; my husband and I moved in a year later. Although I have a room designated as “my room”, it doesn’t feel like it. The bookshelves that lined a full wall of my old room have been replaced with a single, lonely bookshelf. None of the furniture is mine. The space is bare and white and unfamiliar. I was dropped into this room a year ago, expecting to stay only a few months. A year later, I still feel no connection to it whatsoever.
But tonight was different. My mother cooked tonight – steamed fish and leafy vegetables stir-fried with garlic – and the aromas from the steam and oil linger on in unexpected spaces upstairs. The fragrance of incense from my mother’s Buddhist prayers wafts through the air as well; it has slipped through the closed doors of the room that was once the guest bedroom of our house but has since been converted for her worship. The two odors entwine, and tonight, with the rain showers and humidity, it smells like the home where I spent the first few years of my life. It smells like my home country of Taiwan, inside my maternal grandparents’ small walk-up apartment in Taipei, with me tucked into a small cot atop a beige-painted, steel-railed bunk bed. I can imagine my grandmother walking in to check on me, although I am almost asleep, to make sure the edges of my frayed blankets will cover my feet. I can hear my grandfather in the bedroom next door listening to his evening radio operas, laughing light-heartedly at the actors’ comedy routines. And with the rain pattering on the window, I finally fall asleep…
This was my original home, and my emotional attachment to the place where I spent my first few formative years is deeper than I could have imagined. I grew from a seed; that place was the soil that sustained me.
I have flown very far from home.
I returned to Taiwan early last year, this time with a new husband in addition to my parents and my sister. My husband and I stayed at my grandparents’ house for a few days. All of us slept in that small apartment for a couple of days, but my husband, my sister, and I stayed at my aunt and uncle’s condo – about 10 minutes away by car – for the rest of the trip. It was a decision I later regretted, not because it was not comfortable at my uncle’s apartment, but because even when I was so close to my original home, I was still so far away. I left Taiwan feeling strangely unfulfilled.
But some strange mix of things in tonight, though, takes me back. Here in America, thousands of miles away, in a house I never expected to live in, I feel as if I am breathing in my natal home.