As irony would have it, my puberty wouldn’t arrive until I moved to America to live with Dad. It’s almost as if all those years of begging to finish my dinner was completely pointless, as Dad took all the credit for my healthy development into a young adult with little and no effort. Not that my Dad was a terrible cook, in fact he was a terrific cook when he had the time; but it was also a fact that Dad could’ve fed me anything remotely resembling human food, and I would’ve gladly shoveled them with complete disregard to the actual content.

Puberty is not without its awkward moments. Victims can easily identified by awkward body developments, strange facial growth resembling either the surface of pizza or the moon, hair growing in strange places and voices that turned into something that belongs on the muppets. For me, the worst side effect was my body odor, a foul and unstoppable stench that emanated from the suddenly overactive glands under my armpits.

Dad, having gone through puberty so very recently, if you consider big bang to also be a recent occurrence, did the best he could. He purchased for me, various brands of colognes to attempt to cover up the unstoppable beast that I’ve become. The result is similar to when shady restaurants tries to sell spoiled and rotten food by putting more salt and soy sauce into the dish. One day, one of my friend, who has been a very gracious and kind person up until that point in our relationship, had decided that he could no longer tolerate sitting next to me on the school bus on the way home, especially after a pick-up game of basketball. He turned and asked me, “Steve, do you know what a ‘deodorant is?’”.

“Yeah, sure, my dad buys them for me?”

“He buys you deodorants, are you sure?”

“Yeah, he buys me all these bottles of cologne and stuff.”

“No, Steve, deodorant is not the same as cologne.”

Americans tend to take their wonderful invention for granted: Cotton gin, steam engine, microprocessors. I personally think the greatest contribution that America has made for the human kind, is the anti-perspirant/deodorant. See, my dad was not the only person who did not have the knowledge of such wonderful invention that eliminated one of puberty’s most vile humiliation, the entire country (or island, or province, depending on your political affiliations) of Taiwan did not know the existence of such wonderful creation. I don’t know how teenagers in Taiwan dealt with puberty, because I was fortunate enough to be away from the combined airspace shared by a couple dozen body odor-emitting teenager all sitting in the same classroom.

I wasn’t the only beneficiary of this new discovery. Even though Dad was years past his teens (despite how much he still wants to be one), he too found “Sure” and “Old Spice” was now his new best friend. Even though body odor wasn’t an issue for Dad, the possibility that he could smell even better, and become even more handsome and attractive than he already was (vanity runs in the genes), is an incredibly appetizing proposition.

The discovery of deodorant marks a fine example of unique experiences that Dad and I share in the period of time we lived together in America. A lot of those experiences are about cultural differences, events and knowledge that are taken for granted. We make fun of Europeans for not using deodorant, because from our perspective, we can’t fathom deodorant as anything but a day-to-day consumable. Rather, it is almost a cultural icon of sorts, embodying the hygenic value of American life.

Amongst those unique experiences Dad and I shared, the rituals of Christmas was also very new to both of us. Even though Christmas is a recognized holiday in Taiwan, we don’t go out and buy trees. Even though we understood certain gift giving aspect of Christmas, it wasn’t required for the family to gather around and open presents on Christmas day. More often than not, Mom simply took us out shopping for one or two toys that we really wanted. Not to mention in a religiously diverse environment such as Taiwan, Christmas has very little religious connotation to most of the general public. Jesus is not the reason for Christmas, Santa is.

That first Christmas, Dad took me out to visit his professor, Dr. Lee Spray’s house in New Jersey. There I saw my very first snowfall, had my own stocking hanging by the fireplace, and placed my first present underneath a real Christmas tree. We spent most of our holidays there, because Dr. Spray always treated us like his own family. Christmas tree, big dinners, fire place, and opening of presents.

After Dad finished his dissertation, we started moving around as he started looking for a job. Now being more than a couple of state borderlines away, we couldn’t visit Dr. Spray’s house anymore. That Christmas we spent by ourselves, with some of Dad’s close friends. Living in a much smaller apartment, we didn’t have a fireplace or room for a gigantic Christmas tree. Even though, Dad was insistent to keep the tradition going, we went out and bought a little plastic Christmas tree and placed it in the corner of our apartment. We didn’t have a fireplace or a big house, but we gathered around the little plastic tree and opened our presents just the same.

That was the last Christmas Dad and I spent together. He accepted a position at an university in Taiwan, and I moved to California to stay with my aunt. We were never able to celebrate another Christmas together, the schedules of our lives just never worked out that way. Dad visited a few times during summer time, and I went back to Taiwan a few times during the summer. Christmas time tickets were always too expensive, and it didn’t make much sense celebrating Christmas in a place where even plastic Christmas trees weren’t easy to find.

Christmas trees notwithstanding, even deodorant was a recent import product, and absurdly hard to obtain. It was also much more expensive than buying the same product in United States at the time. So everytime any family member had a chance to go back to Taiwan, Dad would always make sure they brought back a batch of deodorants with them. Of course, this was over fifteen years ago, and deodorant is now an everyday product, but Dad still asked people to bring some back.

This Christmas, I went to my aunt’s house for dinner. She always cooked twice as much as what we needed to eat, and then cook even more stuff for us to pack and take home. As she was packing stuff for me to take home, she ran off into the garage in search of something that she forgot to give me last time. It was a stick of deodorant.

It was from the batch that she brought back to Taiwan for Dad, but she never got to see Dad before he passed away.

I still have that stick of deodorant in my bathroom. It’s not a brand I use, and it’s almost like a memorabilia of all those unique, weird, odd experiences that Dad and I shared. I thought about getting a glass box and enshrining that stick of deodorant forever, but I’m not sure I want the family heirloom to be a stick of deodorant.

I just hope wherever Dad is, he’s not having problems with body odor.