On Smell

As some of you may know, I'm quite interested in smells. Smell is unlike our other senses, it's related to memory and language in a different way, and experiencing smell can be quite a visceral experience.

Since I've come to China, most of the odors have been pretty unpleasant. Cars and construction equipment create pollution that makes the air hazy and eliminate any possibility of smelling natural, clear summer air. Many street vendors sell a product that gives off an unbearable stench that resembles rotten fish. I can't see how anyone could possibly eat it (a rare thing for me to say), but one of my teachers said it's actually a kind of tofu. Walking down the street, it's not uncommon to be engulfed by the smell of sewage wafting up from the sewers. Of course the smells are not all bad, much of the food smells strongly of garlic, which I love.

This generally negative olfactory environment has, however, given me a new appreciation for perfumes. I recently read The Emperor of Scent, which is about a scientist working to create a new theory of how our olfactory sense works. It's quite a fascinating book, and the scientist who is the subject of the book, Luca Turin, loves perfume and has the uncommon gift of being able to describe it. After reading this book, I smelled some of the perfumes he liked, but I still preferred the smells of nature and really did not think that man-made scents had very much inherent value, apart from the associations formed between them and their wearers. Being in a bad-smelling environment, however, makes a whiff of perfume seem like a breath of fresh air. When someone wearing perfume steps into an elevator or train, it's refreshing and satisfying. This must have been what it was like to live in any city before the modernization of sewage and waste-collection systems, and the experience has given me a new perspective on the value of perfume and on smells in general.