Spice Must Flow

Lucia Tang on “oriental” fragrances.

On Facebook, there’s a picture of me reading Edward Said’s Orientalism in a Taipei dorm room just after getting a perm. I know this because of the caption, which reads “Said+perm.”

Considered from within the interpretive halo of this paratext, the hair in the picture looks stiff—weighed down, presumably, by perm products. In every Asian salon I’ve sat in, these products always smelled the same: plasticky petals, lab-bench evocations of fruit. Beneath them, the ammonia that went straight to the square of bone between my eyebrows.

That salon-perm accord is how Asia smells in my memory of the 2010s. I was an East Asian Studies major, and I spent every summer in Taiwan or the PRC, brute-forcing my kitchen-table Mandarin into something classicizing. My school paid generously for these months abroad. There was always enough money left over for a perm. No matter which salon I walked into, I’d leave hours later trailing the same sweetness and sulfur in my wake.

MERCANTILISM

THE PERFUME CABINET