Smells

As you know if you've read any of my other blog posts, I remember place and time very well by scent. (Music, too. It is some kind of sentimental shit.) I'm in Hangzhou, China right now. I lived in China around when I was four with my sister, mother and grandparents. As with any place, there are smells of things that only exist in Hangzhou. Smelly tofu is one. The smell of construction is another, because things are constantly being built here.

Today I smelled something. I think it was the smell of dinner, but what was cooking I don't know. What it reminded me of specifically was coming home from preschool to my grandparents' house and waiting (usually upset) for my Mom. What it reminded me of more abstractly was the feeling of homesickness and distance. I guess I missed the States when I was in China, and I guess I was capable of missing places when I was four.

Now I know that the way that these familiar smells are encoded into my memory must be through the vehicle of intense or stressful emotion. For some reason, I did not know this when, for example, in Seoul the natural gas emanating from the ground of the street reminded me of 1990s developing China. It did not remind me of the feeling of intense stress. Must think some more on that.