Chapter 23 #2
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 physical traits 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?”
“I am going to go through every step to make sure when you do it later, you know exactly what to do.”
“I know what to do,” I remind her. “I did it already. That’s why I came to Vancouver. It worked for Kelsey’s samples. I just don’t know why, or if these do.”
“We also don’t know if it works all the time. Let’s start at the beginning and make sure it’s not an issue with your process.”
I wait for her to mention giving them to a client to test again, but all she does is say, “Watch, Luling.”
I do. The first thing I notice is Mom’s calm.
She writes her huo with bold strokes, the characters so familiar that she would probably hesitate more if forced to think of each movement individually rather than letting them flow.
Unlike me, who held the bottle with hands shaking with dread, Mom exudes casual confidence.
She doesn’t look at me before she closes her eyes.
Then nothing.
Mom droops and nearly drops the bottle. “There,” she says with satisfaction before she sips from the tea she gave me.
“It looks the same as when I do it.” I frown. “What did it feel like? Walk me through it.”
She looks exasperated. “I told you to watch.”
I keep my temper. “I can’t see your thoughts.”
Mom puts the bottle down, and I go to the sink to get her some water. “I thought of the world around me and put the energy in. It’s best not to think too much, Luling. You need to feel it.”
I bring her the water and sit down again. “That’s fine for you to say now, but when you were starting out, I bet you thought about it. Every step.”
“No,” she said, looking at the bottle. “I believed. That’s the difference.”
My brain feels like it’s going to explode. “That’s not the difference! I believed. You don’t think I believed?”
“You were distracted.” She points at her huo.
“I remember when you chose your huo,” she says.
“I chose mine by instinct. So did your grandmother. You kept saying yours had to be perfect, it had to be right. You never understood the huo is only a conduit. It could be a sketch of a squid and work, as long as you believed it would. You lacked confidence in your ability to get it right.”
“I wasn’t distracted.”
“No? That summer was hard for you, when you were so sad about Rafe. You looked through every book in the house searching for the right huo. I have the notebook where you tried different ones.”
I stay silent. She noticed I was miserable.
She knew it was about Rafe. Yet in my memories of that summer, she didn’t say a word about it or once mention his name.
Odd—at the time, I took her not talking about Rafe as another rejection, that she was so caught up in my first moli she saw me only as the continuation of the Hua line instead of as a person.
Was I wrong? Perhaps she was giving me space, waiting for me to come to her.
Not mentioning Rafe was a kindness she tried to extend me.
She rubs her hands together to stop the shaking. Making a moli fragrance takes a lot out of someone.
“I’ll call a cab,” I say. “Let’s get you home.”
“I want you to—”
“It can wait,” I say.
Then she nods, giving in to me for the first time in her life. It doesn’t feel like a victory, because I’m not thinking of winners and losers. Perhaps one day we can simply be us, and it can start here.