How I Smelled

Powdered yak milk. The writing at top and bottom is Tibetan. (Click photo for health benefits.)

If you’ve ever visited an Asian home, you may have been struck by a particular fragrance saturating the air: stir fry. Vinegar. Kikuman. Some Asian homes in America smell like soy sauce. In China they all did.

That made me wonder: if we associated Asians with the smell of soy sauce, what smell did they associate with Americans?

None, right? We were neutral-smelling. Weren’t we?

It was worth asking. “Do you realize,” I said during free talk, “that Americans think Chinese homes smell like soy sauce?”

“Really?” My students were fascinated, amused.

I continued, “What do Americans smell like?”

They didn’t even have to think about it: “Milk!”

Milk?

Surprising, but it made sense. The Chinese didn’t drink milk, didn’t use it in their cooking – in fact many were lactose intolerant. But Americans consume milk incessantly: baking, breakfast cereal, cheese, yogurt, ice cream. We practically bathe in it. Any wonder, then, it exudes from our pores in a sort of vanilla-esque way we don’t notice?

Still, my students had never been to America, so how did they form this impression? Was it a cultural stereotype, akin to our rude “Ching chong, ching ching chong” impression of their language? (Incidentally, I loved their mock English – guttural, choppy syllables of nonsense, mostly b’s, g’s and d’s, highlighting our language’s Germanic roots. Tuck in your chin and quack out a stern staccato version of babytalk for the idea.) Did Chinese travelers to America return with the same milk impression? It couldn’t have been based on me – I was only one person, eating a Chinese diet at that!

Except …

Except that during my first weeks in Beijing, the sudden dairy-free diet stunned me. My body craved milk. My mother, worried about the drop in my calcium intake, had packed me a box of dairy supplements, chalky tablets the consistency of Pepto Bismol pills that tasted, surprisingly, like milk. Within weeks I was scarfing four or five tablets a day. Was dairy withdrawal possible?

By the time the tablets ran out I’d discovered a local dairy source: powdered milk, sold at government grocery stores in foil packets of various flavors: soy, black bean, goat. My favorite was powdered yak milk, a creamy sweet Tibetan specialty. Each day I drank several glasses, mixing the powder with less and less water until eventually I spooned straight out of the packet, eating it dry.

No wonder they thought Americans smelled like milk: I must’ve reeked!

Powdered milk.

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