The smell of America

“Amoy States (It smells like the States)!” We screamed as we ripped the tape off the large box that arrived via freight. Inside we hoped to find various knick-knacks and tchotchkes from our relatives in Chicago – key chains, theme park shirts, M&Ms, recorded TV shows on Betamax tapes, my grandfather’s huge log of government cheese, and random clothing items. If we were lucky, a pair of shoes would fit one of us perfectly, or with a little help from tissues stuffed into their toes. We opened these boxes as if they contained new lives.

Growing up in the Philippines, the thought of America brought about images of abundance, brightly lit stores one walked into and asked for whatever they fancied that day, items that would be brought out in the exact color or size one imagined or saw in a magazine, being worn by a celebrity, or on a highway billboard.

This was all a far cry from what we were used to in pre-globalized Southeast Asia, when wearing down my sneakers was the only time I’d make it to the store. I would choose among a few local brands and cross my fingers that they had my size. I watched the lady with the microphone in SM Shoemart say shoes’ inventory codes in quick succession as she signaled the numbers with her fingers to someone in a hidden overhead storage room. It would be a couple more years before China churned out cheap Nike replicas. Until then, a box from the US smelled like love.

For the longest time I couldn’t identify this smell other than the emotions it would bring. It had a crispness, a sort of newness that represented everything that my world was not. My packed school lunch came wrapped in paper napkins my fishy sandwich soaked and tore, or plastic bags we had to wash and dry at the end of the day. A meal of stew would require reusing a mayonnaise jar, transported upright so its faulty seal would not get grease all over the books I carried in a hand-me-down backpack. Even Tang juice powder was expensive. We watered it down and added sugar so it wouldn’t run out too quickly. My parents refused to buy us Cheez Whiz or breakfast cereal. We settled for a local farmer’s coconut jam and rice porridge instead.

There was an empty Pringles can that contained all of our crayons. They were all broken, chipped, and fused together that it was impossible to draw in a single color. We had a box of random socks we shared between 4 siblings, and if you happened to grab the ones that were too stretched out to stay up, you had to find a rubber band to keep them from sinking into your shoes all day. They were all turning yellow and hardening with age. The garters had started to disintegrate from the heat and would leave bits of white rubber on your skin.

My brother had one big, yellow toy dump truck. I would haul pebbles in them when he would let me. Otherwise, I made my own toys from the Styrofoam packing blocks of office mimeographing ink. I attached a small motor from a broken toy car and hooked it up to a C battery. I taped flaps of masking tape to the rotor to serve as blades. I put my boat in a drum of water and turned it on. It spun around before the crucial addition of a masking tape rudder. It entertained me for days.

You can imagine our thrill of looking through an American magazine and knowing we had an aunt somewhere who had all of the advertised products nearby — the Barbies, the Matchbox cars, the Play Dohs and Etch-A-Sketches. We fantasized about the Hostess Twinkies ads in our comic books. We fought over the rare Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar that found its way into our home. Once, a pair of white Tretorn sneakers appeared inside one of the shipped boxes and our eyes lit up! After arguing about who it fit best, we discovered they were both left shoes. It broke our hearts.

It is often said that smell is the strongest trigger of memory. I learned this quickly when I moved to the US decades later and stores smelled like all of the boxes we opened with such joy as children. It made me feel like I had arrived in a place where I could buy whatever I wanted, and twice! But after a while I realized that the smell was actually a chemical mix I associated with cleanliness and newness – it was an aroma of plastic, detergent, cleaning products and packaging materials, and had nothing to do with the actual smell outside! At that time of the year it smelled of burning wood, crisp fallen leaves, and cold air.  

If I close my eyes in New York City in the summer, I swear it smells just like Cubao, but without the clacking of the cigarette vendors’ wooden box cases or the passing whiff of garlic peanuts or the kerosene used to fry fishballs in woks kept in place by chicken wire. Sometimes I buy some caramelized peanuts from a street vendor outside Central Park because of its nectary aroma. I pretend it’s sweet Nagaraya, and then I start pining for the scarcities of my homeland that the abundance of things in this country cannot replace.

I also learned that I couldn’t buy everything I wanted, or that I didn’t need to right away. I found out that America was a lot more than its mass-produced items and strategically stocked store shelves. The coveted white sneakers meant much less when I could buy them anytime, or when I saw them abandoned on city sidewalks, lightly worn and heavily ignored.

I found out that the homes and kitchens of my new country were nothing like the America I imagined from movies and pictures. And as quickly as I got here, the grass-is-always-greener phenomenon produced a whole new array of smells that pulled me back to the land I left – its grilled eggplants, its meaty tamarind stews, its briny coastal air.

Rudyard Kipling said, “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” These days when I walk out my door, I smell nothing. I’m both happy and sad because it means that this must now be home. – Rappler.com

Shakira Andrea Sison currently works in the financial industry while dabbling in several unrelated projects and interests. She is a veterinarian by education and was working towards an MBA while managing a retail corporation in Manila before relocating to New York in 2002. She blogs at shakirasison.com and is on Twitter.com/shakirasison.