Personal Narrative: Coming Back To America

The fresh smell of new books, the milky smell of babies, the moldy smell of old houses, the smell of newly-mown summer grass…When you perceive a new scent, your brain automatically links it with an environment, a occasion, a person, an object, or a moment; when the same scent come to you again, you would conjure up the bounded memory. Although there is no holding back the wheel of time, scent is always our super-power when it comes to memory.

'But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid …show more content…
In the past few years, every time I came back to America from my vacation in China, as soon as I got out off my airplane cabin, such special scent would immediately greet me -- along the long hall way, where passengers lined up with a myriad of luggages, I would be quickly wrapped around a scent of fatigue, melancholiness, uncertainty, and anxiety. Albeit the room of customs is well lit, the dark smell scents the air, and circulates sluggishly in the closed space. Nothing felt right -- I felt like staying an isolated island in the middle of the pacific ocean, where I have burned all of my boats; as I realized that I was going to spend the next ten months on this unfamiliar island that is not my home, my heart started to be stiffened. Such scent has pushed me at the nexus of reminisce and homesick, rendering me to burst into tears for so many years when I first came to America. However, as time elapses, I could no longer perceive that strong scent of American customs these years-- I ceased to smell that once distinctive, off-putting, and melancholy scent while waiting in the line to pass the American customs, and no longer shed …show more content…
When I was a child, whenever I found there was no more moisture on the outside of the cup of the refrigerated milk, I knew that fall had come to Chongqing. Chongqing is foggy for the most of time, especially during fall. In fall, it rains frequently, mostly during late nights - poets throughout Chinese history describe it as "night rain in the Ba Mountains". To me, the soothing scent of rain that falls in fall is different from the one in other seasons; the scent mixes the smell of bubbling water and the jasmine that permeates Chongqing from the just ended summer, in addition to the smell of smoky baked sweet potatoes and the crispness of air from the upcoming