Xiao! Wang Jing

“Wang, duck down a bit.”

“W…What? Why should I? Where am I? Where’ you guys bringin’ me? Please let me go I gotta go and finish my Common App tonight.”

I refused to move despite the rigid hand tugging on my arm, forcing me to keep on walking. The hand of the person that tied this annoying cloth around my eyes, probably that of Franky; it sounded like him, felt like him, and most of all, smelled like him. Well, I obviously knew that there had to be many others involved in this besides him. Not only could I smell a crowd around me, but I also heard the mocking giggles that have been irritating me ever since they “kidnapped” me in front of the Yoga house. The group mainly consisted of my homeroom classmates but with Liz missing. Liz and I have been together for 3 years; I recognized her scent within the radius of several yards. Unlike me, Liz was an outgoing, active girl, and it was quite strange to not have her participate in a prank played, especially, on her own boyfriend.    

 

“Chai hong Yoga house”, as its name suggests, is a small yoga academy located on Millwood Avenue, the main street of China Town Virginia, where my mom gives yoga lessons during weekday evenings to most of Virginia’s bourgeois housewives. It was awkward to have 15 “elegant” female Anglo-Americans gliding through china town in their silver Audi’s but my mom’s fancy resume of being an Olympic bronze medalist kept luring them in to this shaggy neighborhood for over ten years.

 

Barely ten minutes ago, was I there on the shaggy road, to pick up mom’s unlaundered yoga outfit. Now, I’m headed into some kind of a naughty mischief my friends prepared for me. I felt bad. And I meant it. Tonight was the perfect chance to finish my grand experiment with the perfumes. I’ve been working for almost 3 years now, to make the perfect scent for Liz’s graduation gift and I had only 2 months left until I finish it, give it to her, and finally enjoy myself cuddling with the perfect girl perfumed with the perfect scent. Even mom said she’ll be working late at dad’s restaurant, helping with the group reservation, or some teens having a birthday party. That bought me a ton of private time. I had no time to waste; my clock was ticking away. Whoever it was that was playing this time consuming prank on me, I would most certainly take revenge on as soon as it ended.

But for now, Franky was my one and only guidance, preventing me from bumping into stuffs. I could identify people, food, and the overall atmosphere by simply sniffing the mid-air, but not walls and ceilings. Some smelled like wet fungi but usually they smelled like nothing. 

“Ouch”

“See? I told you to duck down. It’s in part your fault. Who told you to be so tall?”

 

Okay. The first one on “People to Revenge” list was definitely Franky. My forehead began throbbing. I get the feeling it’s going to bruise tomorrow. I tried to take my attention off from the pain and on to something like “Where was I going?” My forehead told me that I was indoors, just past some kind of an arch-shaped entrance, and for the rest, my nose went on doing its job. With the eyes disabled, my nose became extra sensitive.

 

“Sniff”

 

Yuan xi, or Chinese parsley. Followed by sesame oil, rice, pork, ginger, garlic, spring onion, pepper, chilly, soy sauce, oyster sauce all blended and complementing each other as if… As if it was it was the smell of my father’s apron I remember as a child. The apron of a head chef in Beijing’s largest hotel always smelled like a mouth watering Chinese dish garnished with freshly chopped Yuan xi, in it catching the story of the chef’s hard day and telling it to his son. Cilantro, or Yuan xi, for me, was the smell of my dad with his generous smile, smell of home back at China, smell of warmth, smell of all things that were taken from me on that plane here to America. Tabooed from coming near their restaurant, attending boarding school, and being forced to become an “Intellect” unlike them for 12 whole years, I had almost forgot the scent of it. The piercing scent of cilantro grasped my fading memory of comfort; comfort that existed before our family was flew out of China in search for the American dream, while sitting on an intractable amount of debt. For the first time in 12 years, I felt warm, and then I realized that for the first time in 12 years, I had stepped in to a Chinese restaurant.

 

“Surprise!”

 

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the brightness it had been missing for an hour. Then first came the sight of Franky, then my friends, then the scene of a Chinese restaurant….Then mom? She looked shocked just as much as I did. A brief sense of empathy came across me, then in a matter of seconds; however, a gush of anger had swept it off its feet.

 

“What the hell??”

 

I could hear my heart pound in my ears.

“Tada~ It’s your Birthday Wang Jing!”

 

There was a cake on the table, and their eyes were full of silent pride of accomplishment. They did indeed succeed in surprising me. They had just broken my, no my family’s life-time taboo. And now, it was MY turn to show them what they had just done. The quiet, introverted Chinese nerd was off the leash. I grabbed Franky by his hair.

“What are you doing! Wang Jing Stop!!”

 

Just before I banged Franky’s head against the table, I saw the menu chart fall from my mom’s trembling hands, on to the floor. And that was when the time halted.

 

“……..”

 

Not a sound was made, nor a breath was taken. I let go of the hair. A handful remained in my fist, Franky screamed a scream of a pig and people started screaming along, but I couldn’t feel nor hear any of it. I read the title out loud.  

“Xiao Wang Jing”

My father came out of the kitchen with a rather embarrassed smile on his face as if I had discovered his little secret he had hoped to keep to himself. Or of naming the restaurant in the name of his son “The smile of Wang Jing.”

 

Suddenly, my senses came back with the olfactory sense reacting as the first. The soothing aroma of cilantro took me down. The anger, the shock, the confusion were all malfunctioning. I felt high in the scent of yuan xi, the Chinese restaurant, my father’s apron, and of my childhood comfort.

 

That night I was half out of mind, I didn’t do anything, say anything, not eat anything until I stood in front of my perfume collections,madly searching for the last scent that would satisfy the lacking 2 percent of my grand project. I carefully took the spoid, on the verge of going mad with excitement, and perfected the aroma of my memory. Basking in my own glory, it was only after I had put on the lid written “Yuan xi” back on the bottle, that I realized I had created a cilantro-scented perfume for my girlfriend.