Chapter 28
Hua Guoli
Ming dynasty. Her elder brother joined the Donglin Academy and derided her moli as immoral and anti-Confucian. The ensuing family schism was only resolved when the academy was shut down.
Heart note // Lift enthusiasm
Base note // Orange peel
When I wake up on Sunday, I feel like myself again. Mom makes me toast and butter, and I feel cared for in a way browning my own bread never achieved.
“You’ll be late for work,” she says.
“The store opens at noon on Sundays.” I pick up the buttery crumbs with my finger.
She slaps my hand away and takes the plate. “Disgusting, licking your fingers like that. Fine, Luling. Perhaps I’ll go for another walk.”
It’s well within my abilities as an adult to thank Mom for the help yesterday and tell her she should go enjoy herself. I can run my counter alone.
I say, “Do you want to come with me?”
She initially demurs. “No, no. I’ll be in the way.”
This always irritated me when I was younger, how this confident, headstrong woman would always become diffident and need to be convinced when it was something she really wanted to do.
I used to take it at face value, so I didn’t get sucked into her mind games, but the toast and tea have made me generous.
“It looks like rain, so it might not be good for walking,” I say. “You should come with me. Ana loved having you there yesterday.”
Mom looks at the fluffy clouds in the blue sky, and I think she’s going to call my bluff. Instead, she nods. “All right.”
We’re there an hour early, and I see Ana’s correct and the Ile de Grasse sign does look good.
I’ll leave it, but I won’t tell Mom I like it.
I don’t want to encourage her interference.
Mom doesn’t seem to notice and checks over my counter while I prepare myself for a litany of suggestions based on her experience yesterday.
It sets me off-balance when she says nothing about my marketing or branding or mentions the sign.
She only touches the soil in the jasmine and points out a new bud.
I follow her, almost bemused and waiting for the real Mom to come out, as she goes to the back and looks at my table, where I’m working on a few things for Ana’s jewelry. I pull out the vials and a few blotters. She puts aside her dislike for me wasting my time on non-moli work to sniff them.
“I’m not sure about this one,” she says, pointing at the third scent. It’s the floral, and I’d bristle except I’m not happy with it either.
“It’s too bland and typical,” I agree. “I wanted something fresh. It’s for a flower pendant.”
“Why not a green scent?”
This stumps me. “I don’t know. I got florals in my head because it’s a flower?”
She smiles. “When I was first learning, your waipo told me to think of my ideas like a triangle. She’d learned the technique from her mother.
The three vertices are the top, heart, and base notes of your fragrance.
Take one corner and find two more notes that fit.
That’s your second triangle. Then you keep repeating the exercise to see what you get.
That’s how I made World. It was a chypre before it became a marine floral, after pages of little triangles. ”
I like this, and Mom goes to make some tea as I let my mind drift. It’s an amusing way to brainstorm ideas, and by the time she comes back, I have a few different directions to work in. “I’m much happier with these,” I say. “Thanks.”
“How about some Iso E Super?” she asks, tapping a finger on my last triangle. “To amplify it?”
“I like it.” I make the addition.
“I did a scent like this,” she says. “Maybe four or five years ago.”
I frown. “I don’t remember that.” Although I flinched at my Luling series of birthday perfumes, I always smelled the new Yixiang scents Mom sent to me.
“It was for a moli scent,” she says.
“Oh.”
“It was one of the only ones I did that year.”
This makes my head shoot up. “So few? Are you serious?”
“Demand dropped,” she says. “People seem to care less about the magic of our perfumes. Or they don’t believe.
Like your father, they think it’s all science and they can find a solution for themselves online.
Or they don’t need my mood boost because they have so many other options they’re told will make them feel better.
My moli was always one of the weakest, especially compared to your great-grandmother’s.
She had people begging for her to cure their heartbreak until she died. ”
Mom doesn’t sound defeated, only like she’s sharing facts.
“Tingwen said her moli was a curse,” I say.
“I understand why,” my mother says, causing me to stop working in surprise.
“You never thought it was a curse,” I say. If ever there was a moli cheerleader, it’s my mother.
“When I had to watch each word I said? When I was already too different thanks to being Chinese? We didn’t live in Chinatown—you know that—so I had no community at school.
It was hard enough to make friends without telling them I couldn’t go out because Waipo was punishing me for forgetting to macerate a scent, or she wanted me to re-create the smell of a hyacinth in salt water, or something ridiculous.
I had to spend every spare minute in the store.
Of course I hated it. And loved it. That’s why I thought of it as a curse.
The hate in the love and the love in the hate is what makes it so difficult. ”
I don’t know what to say, and Mom shrugs at my expression. “I got over it. You need mastery before you can enjoy a skill, and that takes time and effort. Like your moli.”
Ana comes in then to say that someone wants to talk about perfumes. Both Mom and I stand up before Mom waves me on. When I come back after giving the woman a sample to try at home before she buys, Mom is hovering over my mods for Ana’s jewelry.
“5D is the best,” she declares.
It’s as if our argument didn’t happen at all.
I watch her apprehensively for the rest of the day, waiting for her to come back at me with some underhanded comment about my moli, or work ethic, or our fight, but she doesn’t.
It’s as if she listened to me for the first time in my life and got off my case.
It’s what I wanted—what I demanded—so why do I feel abandoned? Am I like my mother, needing to be coaxed into doing what I truly want? Because part of me, perversely, does want her nagging at me.
Like it’s proof she cares.
It’s early afternoon when Mom decides to go for a walk. The second she’s out, Ana turns to me with huge eyes. “Your mom is great. She’s so knowledgeable.”
I lean against a table, surprised at Ana’s enthusiasm. “About perfume, yeah.”
“Oh, that, absolutely. The room fragrance she made for Jayne? Like, who would have thought a bar should smell good? The way it matches Jayne’s ambience is incredible. She’s going to ask your mom if she can sell it.”
“That’s cool.” Although I’m not sure if Mom would think of it as a comedown for the Yixiang brand.
“She talked with me more about Jayne.”
“How are things there?”
“Good.” Ana’s face is dreamy. “We went to her place last night, and Jayne rigged up a blanket tent fort thing, and we huddled in there with the dog, and it was perfect—except the dog had really bad breath.”
“Yeah?”
“I think I have a girlfriend now, and we’re in love and going to have beautiful fur and non-fur babies.”
This seems like a moment where people would hug, so I smile at her. “I can’t believe you were going to give up.”
“I was wrong,” she chirps. “Thanks to your mom.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Sounds like you two had a great time.”
Ana sighs. “I know you weren’t home for a long time and family dynamics are messy, but I think she wants to spend time with you.”
I stare at her. “She what?”
“It is my belief that she misses you and wants to get to know you again. Your grandmother died a little while ago. Were they close?”
I open my mouth to answer yes, but then reconsider. Waipo lived in the house and they worked together, but were they close? I only assumed they were. “I don’t know.”
“Whether they were or not, it’s a sure thing she misses her mother and she’s reassessing a lot of her life, don’t you think?”
I poke at the glittery tiaras on the table. Mom was right: Repositioning them under the light gives them an eye-catching sparkle. I want to buy one so I can be a princess. “Probably.”
“You were gone from the time you were twenty,” Ana says. “They say your teen years are the formative ones, but I think that’s wrong. After twenty is when you turn into a person.”
“‘Miss Stacy told me long ago that by the time I was twenty my character would be formed, for good or evil,’” I quote idly.
“Anne of Green Gables, nice one.”
“Thanks, but it was Anne of the Island. Mom could have reached out during those years.”
Ana picks up one of my blotters and sprays it absently to wave under her nose. “Again, I don’t know anything about your relationship, but you seem almost closed off with her now. Would you have been open if she’d asked you to come back home?”
“She never did,” I mumble.
“Oh.” Ana bites her lip. “Because she was giving you space?”
I shrug. The lack of invitations stung until I reframed them in my mind as what I’d wanted in the first place.
If Mom was more welcoming, would I have actually ended up going back home?
She seemed content to have me gone, as if with no power, I had nothing to offer.
It wasn’t my plan to have this turn into a therapy session, but the words come out before I can stop them.
“It’s fine to say she wants to catch up on lost time now, but the only thing that matters to her is the store. It always has been.”
“Then why is she here and not there?” Ana asks.
“Because she wants me to come back and run it with her,” I say firmly. Ana doesn’t need to know the real reason Mom’s in Toronto.
Ana’s eyebrows rise. “Really? She didn’t give me that impression at all. She was asking me a lot about how I structure my online store and why I decided to share the space.”