Learning to Live with Durians Again

Was my rejection of the durian, Southeast Asia’s King of Fruits, a betrayal of my cultural identity, of my life in Singapore?

It’s so smelly I want to cry, I text my sister.

My eyes are stinging, almost watering. I stand up to pace back and forth. Taking shallow breaths through my mouth, I try to limit my oxygen intake until the toxic fumes subside. It smells like a gas leak right now, if said gas were the demon child of a decomposing corpse and a hamper of month-old dirty socks.

I don’t remember you hating durians this much, she replies.

This is NEXT LEVEL STINKY. Must be a new variety.

My sister is intrigued. She texts Mom, who texts Dad, who confirms that it is indeed a new variety of durian that has blessed our home with its presence today: “the Black Horn.”

She forwards a message from Mom, who has been quoting durian prices like some 1980s Wall Street stockbroker: Yesterday, MSK $12 per kg; today, $20 per kg for best grade, Black Horn. I later learn that this is a misspelling and the actual variety is named Black Thorn. Too late—the sensation of a rhinoceros charging its horn into my olfactory bulb is already scorched into my being.

I’ve never reacted so strongly before. I can’t even open my eyes right now.

My sister can barely contain her excitement. She’s convinced the more distressed I sound over text, the sweeter the durians will be. She hasn’t visited us much since moving out, but my texts seem to have changed her mind: Just messaged Mom. I’m coming over tonight to try the durians! Very excited to try this black horn that has blinded my sister.

Maybe this is her way of saying she misses me.

I feel gaslighted by my family the entire night. I actually just smell sweetness, my sister announces when she arrives. Why are you being so sensitive? Mom asks. You used to eat durians with us. Even though you have a heaty body type and could only eat two pieces before your nose started to bleed.

Something is wrong with your nose, Dad declares. They begin their durian feast as I retreat into my room.

If I were to describe my family’s immeasurable disappointment in me to white Americans, perhaps the closest parallel would be May 17, 1966, when a bewildered fan yelled Judas! at Bob Dylan for betraying his folk roots and going electric. My wholehearted rejection of the durian, the renowned King of Fruits across Southeast Asia, seemed a betrayal of my cultural identity, my childhood with my family in Singapore.

I’m not sure when my physical repulsion to durians began. In May 2020, I moved home to Singapore after decades abroad. When durian season arrived in July, I could no longer stand being in the same room as this cursed fruit.

Back in my room, I douse my walls in Lysol, light a scented candle, and blast my favorite YouTube video in times of stress: 3 HOURS Tibetan Singing Bowl Chakra Healing. It is a strange sort of alienation, when you make the life-changing decision to return home, only to suspect that you no longer belong.

*

I first arrived in New York City as an international student, a durian fresh off the plane.

Your hugs suck, my new friends complained.

My accent passed as American, but nobody had warned me I was supposed to hug friends hello and goodbye. In the tropics, we were too sweaty all the time to be constantly doling out physical affection—or so I told myself.

Eventually, I learned how to hug. I learned how to listen, how to comfort friends when they were down: I’m sorry to hear this. Your pain is valid. I learned about academic freedom and the freedom of assembly, about Paulo Freire and Audre Lorde, about the joys of debating ideas for a better future.

But I always thought I remained a durian. My soul never felt at home in the United States, even when my mind and body hoped to stay. There, I’d read articles titled “World’s Weirdest Fruits That Look Like They’re From Another Planet” and recognize all the fruits I grew up eating: durian, dragonfruit, starfruit, rambutan, salak, jackfruit, mangosteen.

I always wondered whether Americans realized how exotic we thought their foods were too. Can you bring back walnuts and pecans and chocolate-covered blueberries from Costco please, my mom reminds me with each trip home.

Upon returning to Singapore in the middle of the pandemic, I’d hoped to be welcomed back into my natural habitat, this time for good. But the effusive enthusiasm of American small talk had spoiled this durian rotten. I’m not sure what I’d expected from my mom when I landed in Changi Airport and checked into my government-subsidized quarantine hotel (at the time, Singapore was under a tightly controlled lockdown with enforced quarantine), but it certainly wasn’t this barrage of texts:

Go shower now.

Go go go.

You bring back virus from New York.

My soul never felt at home in the United States, even when my mind and body hoped to stay.

*

Everything about durians commands space and attention. Their size. Their distinctive thorns. Their odor. Their hypermasculine names: Musang King (MSK, or Cat Mountain King), Black Thorn, Golden Phoenix, Sultan.

Durians don’t consider your feelings. They enact force fields that demand innocent bystanders adapt to them instead.

Is the durian the guy manspreading across three subway seats on the 7 train at rush hour, relegating the rest of us to the margins as we barrel into Manhattan? Is it the maskless anti-vaxxer with no regard for the rest of humanity? I thought I’d left this self-centeredness behind in America.

This outward aggression belies a surprising quality of the durian, though. When you tear open a durian’s prickly green husk, you find creamy, golden pillows of fruit within, newborns snuggled inside a womb. All this time, they’d been kept safe by the durian’s threatening exterior, blissfully sleeping in the dark. But that damned smell had now given them away, had sacrificed their nutritious flesh to birds and mammals, in the name of seed dispersal.

My durian self was fiercely protecting my inner child too, a child who seemed to live a happy existence, albeit one prone to memory lapses. My cousin once playfully mentioned, Remember you used to cry so much, your dad would lock you in the bathroom for hours, and you would cry alone in the dark until you eventually stopped?

I didn’t remember, but I realized why I remain claustrophobic to this day. And now the durian’s pungent odor seemed to activate the part of my brain I’d let fester for so long, the part hiding all my confusion and hurt and trauma regarding family matters. Convinced there was a deeper meaning to my overreaction, and wanting to defer to scientific evidence instead of only to Proust, I began researching the link between smell and memories.

Odors have a direct path to the limbic system, the region in charge of emotions and memories. Research has shown that anxiety disorders such as PTSD are sometimes triggered by specific smells linked to the subject’s trauma, resulting in subjects reacting strongly to threatening odors even before the odor message reaches the brain. Scientists found in a study that for fear-associated smells, the subjects’ brains processed the odor as four times stronger than it actually was.

Empirical evidence had vindicated me, but it wasn’t enough to overcome my aversion to durians. The lingering odor reminded me daily of my family’s inability to communicate honestly with each other, choosing to hoard lies and secrets until they fermented into an all-encompassing stench that suffocated us all.

I don’t share things with you because you always blame me first, and it hurts me so much, I would tell my mom in Mandarin. Can’t you say “I understand” instead?

I keep chrysanthemum tea for you in the fridge, she would reply in English, her way of telling me she was trying her best—chrysanthemum flowers are known for their cooling and calming properties. Sorry I did not learn how to talk nicely from my mother.

It saddens me that the soft, fleshy interiors of two thorny durians can never meet, except in the afterlife, when their husks have been destroyed.

*

The best durians never make it to America.

The shelf life of a durian lasts usually no more than two days after the fruit falls from the tree. Thailand and Malaysia are the biggest durian exporters, and the fruit’s popularity and complex shipping requirements mean that they are luxury goods, to be enjoyed within Asia.

This is all to say that there is a booming $20 billion dollar durian industry that centers East and Southeast Asia as the US sleeps, with little desire to seek validation from the West. In fact, demand from China is now so high that Asian consumers probably prefer that Westerners continue to pinch their noses in disgust, to avoid further price hikes.

Perhaps the key to reprogramming my senses lies in centering Southeast Asia in my life, rather than assessing everything relative to dominant American tastes. After years of hunting down frozen pandan leaves in Thai and Vietnamese grocery stores, being confronted with the fresh version—and the intensely fragrant, incredibly diverse vegetation of the region—was a shock to the senses. So was the realization that I had grown content with simulacra of Indonesian, Malaysian, and Singaporean food in the US (all too often grouped into one cuisine) while my relatives in Singapore and Indonesia indulged in The Real Thing.

Global trade has enriched most of our lives, but it has also fostered a monocrop mindset from the Global South, a remnant of colonialism. Farmers exclusively plant varieties that look good and travel well at the expense of taste, so that a flawless Cavendish banana from Guatemala can be displayed in a fruit bowl in a suburban home in Idaho.

It is such a joy, then, to rediscover the full spectrum of tropical flora and fauna of “producer” regions. In Singapore, I joined an ethnobotany group, where I learned that there are over thirty varieties of durians, over one thousand varieties of bananas, and over a hundred species of gingers. In this part of the world, many people actually care about the differences, ranking durian varieties as one would rank Kanye albums, arguing over which type of banana works better for frying, and prescribing the right ginger to use for a dish or an ailment.

I began tolerating the persistent durian odor at home by reimagining it as a Covid-19 test: Every day I smelled the durian was another glorious day free from the virus, as my sense of smell was clearly still functioning. But fans of the stinky fruits of Southeast Asia might actually be on to something—many of these pungent fruits are known for their “superfood” properties. Aside from durians, which can provide 100 percent of one’s daily vitamin C needs, my family also regularly eats petai, stink beans linked to boosting one’s mood and immune system. Were my aging parents actually taking care of themselves this whole time, while I remained oblivious to whole superfood trends?

I began tolerating the persistent durian odor at home by reimagining it as a Covid-19 test: Every day I smelled the durian was another glorious day free from the virus.

*

Last month, while cleaning my home, I found my great-grandfather’s journal. He migrated from China to Indonesia in 1927 at the age of thirty, the same age at which I moved back to Singapore. He lived his final years in a garden home, where he saw a vision of Jesus Christ while gravely ill, converting to Christianity as a result. His aptly named Spirit Garden was filled with local fruit trees he thoroughly enjoyed—bananas, starfruits, guavas, pomelos, papayas, jambus, rambutans, and malay rose apples.

I found it comforting that my great-grandpa didn’t discard pieces of his identity throughout his own migration journey. In fact, his “Westernized” side, his Christian beliefs, brought him solace in his painful final years. At the same time, he found joy in the delicious local fruits of Indonesia, his home for more than thirty years.

I think about reconciling my paradoxical sides one day too. Adjusting to a home you barely remember is neither a linear nor logical process and is more complex than simply shedding your prior, Westernized self. I’ve come to accept that it will take more time to fully adapt to life back in Singapore with my family. When the day comes, I’ll be able to savor the full spectrum of Southeast Asian fruits, to thoroughly decolonize my mindset, while appreciating that the values I’ve picked up abroad have played a part in my personal growth.

In the meantime, I’m still taking recommendations for scented candles.