Maybe it was because of the fights between Mom and Dad, about the land he bought outside Taipei without asking her…Or it could have been because of Tiananmen Square, the student protestors and the Tank Man, who occupied our young hearts with democratic fervor and patriotic lust…Or maybe it was because of the kidnapping of the daughter of White Jade Jade. For weeks, everyone in Taiwan followed the search for the famous singer’s daughter, who was twelve, same as me. So close was she to our age—my sister Lili was ten and Fenfung, fourteen—that we felt as if we ourselves were lost. Whatever the reason, no one—not me, not my sisters, and certainly not my parents distracted by their own cold war—noticed the first time my peculiar and short-lived power manifested itself so many years ago. None of us, with anxiety running in all directions, realized what was happening the first time I smelled an odor ahead of time, the first time I, literally, smelled the future. 

It hit me like a rotten egg.

Damn! I said. Who farted?

Hua, Dad said, watch your language.

It was almost dinnertime, and we were in the living room with the TV tuned to a police news briefing. This was before the ransom letter, before we knew for sure that the girl had been kidnapped. Lili and I were on the floor pinning red flags on a map of Taiwan, marking the locations where the girl might have been sighted. Dad was writing calligraphy on the flyers I asked him to make for the missing girl. Mom was de-stringing green beans at the dining table, and Fenfung, sprawled out on the rattan sofa, labored over a letter to her pen pal in the United States.

The sulfurous stink lingered. I pushed the thick rim of my glasses up my nose and scanned the room for suspects.

Not me, Dad said. 

I smell nothing, Lili said, sniffing.

Mom kept quiet, just stared out of the window doing nothing to the piece of green bean in her hand. She was still wearing her pink nurse scrubs, which Dad insisted she wear even though she only answered phones at his optometry clinic. I knew she was thinking about the land Dad bought, which I could almost see beyond the pine forest if I squinted really hard.

It’s Fenfung, I said. She’s not denying it.

Hua is hallucinating, Fenfung said as she erased a whole sentence from her letter with Wite-Out. Pa, how do you spell democracy?

The smell went away and I let the matter drop. I went to our bedroom to hang the map on the wall, but when I came out to get more tape from Dad’s stationery drawer, there was an unmistakable sound of someone passing gas.

Gotcha, Pa! I said. 

Tell your father to stop munching on those sweet potatoes, Mom said, as if I were her personal messenger pigeon, as if Dad weren’t right there. 

Stop munching on those sweet potatoes, I said and took his piece for myself.

The human mind is very suggestible, Dad said, tilting his head in his deep-thought mode, his calligraphy pen paused in midair. 

We all laughed except Mom. None of us noticed that I smelled the fart before it happened—I realized later. And something else: when I heard it, I actually smelled nothing. 

Then it happened again the next afternoon. (Continued…)

(Excerpted from Colorado Review, Vol. 49.2)