Clarkesworld, May 2026
Shijun wakes on a Greyhound bus crossing the Canadian Rockies, an amber bottle of perfume in his bag and a message from his friend Jiayuan flashing on his watch. He is three months into an obsessive project and thousands of miles from home — a young Chinese man who has flown from Beijing to Calgary to try to win back his former girlfriend, Manzhen, on the day of her wedding to another man.
The story moves fluidly between present and past, its structure organized around scent and the involuntary memories scent unlocks. Three years earlier, Shijun watched Manzhen leave from a Beijing train station — her departure occasioned by his chronic financial instability, his inability to provide the settled life they had promised each other. He couldn’t say “please stay.” The smell of that platform, the sweet perfume at her neck blending with metal and ammonia, sealed itself into him. When he learned she had gotten engaged, he stumbled into a shuttered shop called Memory Fragrances.
The shop’s owner, Zuo Xiaotian, is one of the story’s most compelling figures: a man who was trafficked as a three-year-old and returned to his biological family at seven with no memory of them. His parents — a neuroscientist and a master perfumer — collaborated across their disciplines to create a memory fragrance capable of unlocking his suppressed early childhood. Drawing on research into the olfactory cortex’s deep entanglement with memory formation, they identified the scents most central to his first three years of life: his mother’s body, breast milk, the pinewood of his crib, gardenias from a downstairs garden. The process was agonizing, requiring repeated neural stimulation and substantial physical sacrifice from his mother. But it worked: the scent restored him to himself. Zuo now runs the shop as a kind of side project, his parents having moved on to Alzheimer’s research with the same technology.
Shijun commissions a bottle keyed to his decade with Manzhen — the lotus-scented summer river, the familiar lotion she wore, the layered sensory residue of a relationship. The production takes three months and costs enormously in both money and pain. He arrives at Manzhen’s apartment just before she leaves for the church and proposes she return to Beijing with him.
The scene that follows is quietly devastating. Manzhen is moved — the perfume sends her crashing back to that train station, to the warmth of their last embrace — but she is clear-eyed. She confesses that it wasn’t only jealousy over a coworker that ended them; she had simply needed someone to rely on during cold Calgary winters, someone Shijun couldn’t be. She has been waiting tables, taking a reduced scholarship, getting by. She chose stability over love. Shijun, looking at her pale face beneath the veil, cannot blame her.
He leaves. But the perfume is still working. In the bridal lounge, Manzhen presses the back of her hand to her nose and is flung a full decade back — to a junior high school autumn, osmanthus in bloom, Shijun crouching so she could climb onto his back after she’d fractured her foot. The scent of his sweat, the flowers, the grass, the specific warmth of being carried by him: that moment was where she first knew. The memory breaks her open. She asks herself whether she has spent so many years growing and struggling only to trade love for a shoulder to lean on.
She runs out the church’s back door and finds him still there, pacing outside the gates with the Rockies behind him. He turns. She weeps. He smiles.
The story was originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, January 2016.
Zhao Haihong is an associate professor at Zhejiang Gongshang University in Hangzhou and has been publishing SF stories in China since 1996. She is the winner of the National Award For Outstanding Children’s Literature and a six-time winner of the Galaxy Award, including the Special Prize-the top honor of 1999. Her self-translated stories in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Asimov’s. Her work has also been translated and published in The Reincarnated Giants: An Anthology of 21st-Century Chinese Science Fiction, Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction, and The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories.