War of the Roses

There is a war in my life right now. The stakes are high – we’re talking about happiness and misery, health and sickness, sanity and the void; the sides are clearly cut and chosen, nothing short of the very forces of Good and Evil themselves, acting out their timeless, cosmic struggle for balance or domination within the confines of my own apartment. This is a war of smell.

I am alone in this battle, both as soldier and casualty. Due to an unfortunate series of events several years ago, my husband lost his hearing in his right ear, some of his mechanisms for balance within the vestibular system, and maybe most tragically, his sense of smell. This particular sensory void is a story in and of itself, as it seems to resurface at odd times: “Are you cooking garlic?” or “I like your perfume,” or even “This highway smells like glue,” (which it did). However, outside these perhaps extrasensory moments of olfactory awareness, I fly solo while navigating the dodgy smellscape that is China.

It is very possible that I am making a big deal out of nothing. For those who know me, you are aware that subtlety and understatement are not necessarily my strongest characteristics. On the other hand, it is equally possible that some of us are simply more finely tuned when it comes to certain experiences, quite literally, more sensitive. For example, I know for a fact that I have only a rudimentary sense of pitch, while my friend Heather, who has an angel’s voice, can discriminate between the very finest of tones (and excels at learning languages because of it). My friend Brian invested a tremendous amount of effort and time in cultivating an educated palate, and is now a learned sommelier, able to make categorical distinctions between wines that I would simply label as “red,” with encyclopedic specificity. While I am no genius of the nose, (read Parfum, by Patrick Suesskind, if you ever have the stomach and the chance – brilliant), I do rely heavily on its information when relating, understanding, really digging things. We all connect memory to the nose. Years after the fact, a brief whiff of one small thing in particular can bring back the terror of grade school (sloppy joes), the wonder of summer (marine diesel and fresh fish scales), the heady thrill of a first love (sawdust), a grandparent’s home (wet cornfield clay). Old Spice reminds me of my dad, as does the smell of new, leather, indoor-court basketballs. I refuse to hate patchouli the way everyone else seems to because I fell for a woman at a writing conference when I was 17; she wore clothes that her mother had sewn, and she wore patchouli. She has since become one of my dearest and longest-lasting friends, and that smell will forever transport me to the awakening sense of rebellion, sisterhood, devotion, creativity, and liberation. My own smell is very important to me – I’ve worn the same oil for years because I love how my friends sigh into my neck when they hug me. I feel obliged to keep that comfort constant and reliable for them. I burn incense depending on mood and enjoy the way different cooking smells put people at ease. Scent has a powerful experiential influence, and it often operates subconsciously – we may be happy or invigorated or relaxed and not know exactly why. I think this is worth paying attention to.

Therefore, when we moved into our first apartment downstairs here in China and I opened the door to be met with a sickly smug billow of mildew and some other, ranker, sharper stench, I knew we were in for a battle. The first day I spend racing in circles, flinging open cupboards and closets, heaving aside the heavy glass of the windows, fanning doors back and forth to create airflow. I had electric fans whipping the stale funk into a froth, and we scrubbed and bleached and mopped and dried. We wiped and sanitized. We scoured and rinsed. Summer in Chengdu is a steamy, relentless, petri dish of a season; the heat radiates into the night, and the air is moist and dense to the point of dripping. All surfaces are sticky and beaded with growth and dew. Clouds form indoors. The sky is a constant mist of water vapor and exhaust unreleased by breeze or the confluence of warm and cool fronts. Plants thrive. Hair goes limp. Our apartment was on the first floor, dim and closed in with bushes and vines. I quickly located the source of the rankness: someone had tried to cover the mildew smell by secreting small packets of gooey mothballs into every corner. Every drawer, every nook, every place where walls or boards or joists met, I found these stinky bits of poison. They pierced through the clammy, mouldering air with a high-pitched toxic reek that set the hair on the back of my neck on end – I caught myself gritting my teeth at unnatural times. I was tense. I hunted down each and every one of them and tied them up in bag after plastic bag, rushing them outside to the larger bin where we deposit our trash. We spent a hot and restless night tossing and turning on a damp mattress, my nose full of mildew. I thought I could smell in in my hair, on my skin. I feared finding mold on my body, and the next morning woke from surface-dreams of drowning only to throw myself in the shower and scrub my skin raw. I demanded a new mattress from our boss/landlord, and accidentally caused a bit of a scene. We were directed to the third floor where a drier bed sat in an empty but essentially identical apartment. As it turned out, the third floor was airy and light and, most importantly, dry, and we were offered the chance to move. I was delighted.

It’s not that this new place is without its malodorous challenges. One of my favorites stems from the fact that, for reasons relating to late-developing septic system technology, no actual toilet paper can be put into toilets in China. Now, I am thrilled to have a flush toilet – I really am. Squat toilets are the norm in public bathrooms, as they are considered to be more sanitary – which, I suppose, they are, if you don’t count occasionally pissing on your shoes as unhygienic. The tough part of this system lies in the fact that we still use toilet paper – we just can’t flush it. That creates an unfortunate but necessary system involving a little trash can beside the commode and frequent trips to the big outdoor trash bin. Um, yuck. It’s like having to deal with bundles of dirty diapers all the time, but for big kids, which we all know is, well, worse.

It seems that this system automatically creates an atmosphere of smell-hell, regardless how much time one spends scrubbing or mopping or taking out the bio-garbage. In the frank manner of expats needing to discuss the daily challenges of living in a new place, our friends downstairs recently broached the subject over lunch. “So,” said Andy, an ebullient and often hilarious civil planner from New Zealand, “Does your bathroom, like smell like a public urinal all the time?” “Sure does,” we said. “Yeah. Mine too. Did the last guys, like, just piss everywhere, or what?” We noted that we had fiercely attacked the entire area with both cleansers and bleach, but that the smell seemed to arise at will. We all decided it must result from some mystery of the pipes.

Speaking of pipes, the kitchen has different issues, again owing to an odd design. The sink has no hot water – only a cold tap that spews forth liquid of questionable cleanliness. Once it came out milky white and frothy for a day and a half. We have an office-style watercooler that has both hot and cold spigots for drinking and cooking purposes. The sink is mainly for washing dishes and rinsing things that will later be boiled to death. However, the drain on the sink does not lead to pipes, as one would expect. It instead splashes down to a tiled area below the sink, which in turn has a drain. This is very convenient for emptying mop water without splashing it in a food preparation area. However, any food that makes it past the first drain often gets lost in the dark area of the second, resulting in a profoundly gross tendency towards rot that we have to combat with dedicated drain-cleaning on our hands and knees, often even scrubbing the walls of this staging area to remove any perishable tidbits that may have splashed up and hidden from plain view. If this were the only source of smell, then diligence would be sufficient protection against the creeping funk. However, the stench has its ways, and it seems that the drains themselves give rise to their own special magic when left to dry overnight and then rewetted with use in the morning. There is nothing quite like the odor of a rotten egg, in all its clinging sulfurous unmistakability, its ripe, choking gas – nothing except our kitchen drain. It’s really a wonder of scent-replication. It puts me in mind of those strange scientists who are paid by the department of defense to develop nonlethal weapons that incapacitate their targets by overwhelming them with disgusting smells.

One of the ways we combat these things is to keep the windows and the doors to the verandas open. Being on the third floor, we have little to fear from prowlers. Our windows are screened to keep out the few bugs that fly this high, and the breezeway lets in a beautiful muted light where I keep a soft chair and a miniature table for writing, and a spindly stand for a ferny little plant. Another porch opens off the kitchen, and although it faces another building and is made of concrete and is therefore dimmer and less clean, it is shaded chastely from view by some delicate berried vines and is an ideal place to dry clothes on a line. The air flow is nice. Nonetheless, there is always a choice to be made: the smell inside, or the smell without.

The pollution in China is legendary – rivers are dead, skies have been blotted out, the transition from bicycles to cars has been disastrous, the boom of industry analogous to the kind of smokestacks and stockyards of the West’s own industrial revolution. Yet, I am surprised how little of that one smells in the streets. The chemical air is like background radiation, like tinnitus – you get used to it, hardly notice it; it only makes you crazy in the absence of other noise. The funk of the streets is enough to occupy the nose and the thoughts; what wafts up to our windows from street level varies with the time of day, the weather, the mood of the alley below.

Some days are delivery truck days, and between the shouts of those directing the too-large vehicle into the small space between our building and the commercial row next door and the elaborate backing-up beeping of the truck itself, it often takes a while before I notice the plumes of exhaust pouring into our home via the open kitchen. Other days are market days, and the gutters run with the sour juices drained from fermenting jars, sluice from slaughter-buckets, pickled eggshells, hot peppers, sweet waters poured from parings of fruit and rinds. Some days are warm and carry up delicate airs from the flowering bushes in the courtyards below, along with shouts from the badminton court and the laughter of girls en route to class or dorms. My favorite days, the clean days, are those that start cool and end in rain, damping, heavy, leaden rain that washes the streets clean for moments at a time and pulls the smoke from the clouds. After a storm, there is only the scent of warm cement and leaves for a few quiet hours before the wet brews and the trash steeps and the aromas soak up the green tendency to life from the earth around them and exhale it all into the air in great decomposing sighs.

I bought bundles and bundles of incense at one of the stores outside Wenshu temple. The incense doesn’t have the thick, purple mystery that so many Indian incenses have. These flavors are sharper, thinner; one is nearly fruity, but mellows as it burns. I keep a stick or two smoldering in a dish of rice at all times – it doesn’t overwhelm the space so much as provide a filter for many of the stinks. It is like smelling the world through rose-colored glasses – everything seems a little better, a little more hopeful, a little more lovely and bearable.

To be clear, I am fascinated by the smells of China. One of my favorite things is to wander through the mall at the large southern gate of our university, an atmosphere that is equal parts shopping center, Road Warrior, and carnival. An enormous commercial complex filled with hair salons, noodle shops, underwear stores, shoe pavilions, and hotpot restaurants shares a lot with a dingy vegetable market and vendors who sell hacked pieces of meat hanging from rusty hooks. Chicken feet jut from barrels like they’re waving goodbye. Eels slither in tanks. At the entrance, a thousand electric scooters are parked, covered in the ubiquitous city dust, in front of state fair-style basketball shooting games and a moveable arcade. Vendors with pedal-carts sell huge dusty grapes and peeled walnuts, weighing them with dirty metal scales. Young Muslim men grill seasoned meat on portable barbecues; an old man turns cotton candy onto paper sticks; another fries dough layered with onions and minced pork. The smells are heady, clamorous; they fill the senses in new and bewildering combinations, sweet and spicy and gagging at once, sour and toxic and sexy. I would like to be a better nose-traveler, making notes everywhere of nothing but scents, cataloguing and inquiring and letting it all in, the smokes and the sweat and the food and the trees and the animals. In the meantime, I will continue to battle the creeping threat of stench in my home – the piss and the egg and the burning oil, the known evils and the mysteries. Paul is patient, and blissfully unaware of the demons at his door.

~ by knifemaker on September 23, 2007.