Park Place, where the rent in the Monopoly board game, which is Depression Era prices, mind you, actually cost about the same as it did for us in 1987

I made reference to the St. Joseph’s Condo on 8250 Park Place Blvd Houston, TX 77017 on Hai and Judy’s post recently. Just saying the words Park Place makes me want to eat Funyuns.

8250 Park Place, as found on Houston Citysearch

They say smell is the strongest sense linked to memory. I agree, and think this is so because sight and sound are so constant that to remember specific linkages to those senses would be nearly impossible. Not taste, because we generally find ourselves eating the same things with the same ingredients, so the monotony of taste doesn’t present much of a singular experience for our memories to cull from. Not touch, because sight and sound generally interfere with the sense of touch; plus, we’re always touching something of some sorts, whether it’s the clothes on our backs or the rings around our fingers, and like the other senses, the inundation of touch makes it far less special. Also, whatever men find pleasing to the touch, or whatever women enjoy, even if one is said to find these opportunities on a regular basis, there are also other senses involved in such moments that can often overpower the touch, even if that moment of touch is rare and indeed very enjoyable itself.

Smells, on the other hand, are egalitarian. No matter how repulsive you are, you still get to smell. Touch is nice, but not everyone gets to. If I want good smell, I can just walk to any Popeye’s parking lot and get my fill.

Our sense of smell is not in constant use. Our brains quickly grow accustomed to a room’s smell after we’ve spent a few minutes in it, so any new scent that registers in our heads, we are likely to remember because it actually does represent a break in the normal flow of the moment. And smell isn’t interfered with by imagery, or sound, or touch. It’s sometimes accompanied by taste, but doesn’t have to be.

I’m concurrently planning for tomorrow’s lesson for 6-7 year olds and getting in a Dr. Seuss frame of mind:

Oui oui

Kelly

Smells are free

you see,

for you, and for me!

Smell is the most powerful because you can only hide from it for so long. If you don’t want to see something, close your eyes. If you don’t want to taste something, don’t put it in your mouth. If you don’t want to hear something, put on some headphones and listen to GWAR on high volume. If you don’t want to touch something, don’t. If you don’t want to smell something, you can breathe with your mouth for a little while, but either through a morbid sense of curiosity, or the thought of ingesting these particles through your mouth grosses you out even more, and you eventually succumb to smelling it through your nose.

I’ve been inside a good amount of Vietnamese homes and restaurants in my couple of months here, and every single time I step foot inside one, I’m harkened back to Park Place. Vietnamese cuisine uses some pretty specific ingredients, and a hundred kitchens in a small apartment complex pumping out breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the same time, all generally making the same dishes, is going to have a certain scent. What that scent signified to me was very confusing as a youngster. The St. Joseph Condominiums (from here on out only to be referred to as ‘Park Place’) consisted entirely of Vietnamese-Americans, was right smack in the middle of a predominately Latin-American neighborhood, directly surrounded by African-American apartment complexes, and bordered to the south by, of all things, a pretty decent golf course.

“Golf is a rich man’s sport? I live right next to one. I’m rich?” I would often try to reason inside my 8 year old head.

It was home, and it made a lot more sense to me then than it does now. Regardless, what I smell here, I smelled everyday in Park Place. I could only connect these dots after arriving to Vietnam.

Perhaps I’m far overstepping my boundaries by speaking for everyone else who spent a few years living at Park Place, but I’ve deduced that this is why those years have remained so poignant to us: if we were Vietnamese-Americans, in Park Place, we were living as Americans in Vietnam. Walking around Park Place, you’re in Vietnam (at least Vietnam in 2011). There’s no difference. Unbeknownst to us who do not have memories of Vietnam from childhood, we were living in Vietnam at Park Place, but had no way of knowing it with nothing to reference. For us with only memories of America in our childhood, entering Park Place, when we had to move there from a very racially diverse suburb twenty minutes away, we had to re-examine our identity not only as Vietnamese-Americans, but also, just as immigrants, moving to a segregated neighborhood straight out of The Wanderers.

 Twenty-seven guys with the last name "Wong'; all know Jujitsu and kill you with one judo chop. 

There weren’t any turf wars, at least not the kind that involved chains and switchblades. In fact, there was actually pretty decent camaraderie between the minorities. But what we all had to come to terms with was our outsider status, that the fortress of high trees preventing us from seeing the golf course was equal parts the golfers not wanting us to invade their course, yet also, to prevent them from seeing how we were living.

These sentiments are all in hindsight. You don’t feel it when you’re surrounded by everyone else in the exact same predicament. I guess that’s the strength of community. We were all still on a boat, so to speak; the same boat.