Ten Years of Agarwood, Chapter One · Broken Agarwood

In the autumn of 2008, the typhoons came late to Dongguan.

Shen Zhiyan was awakened by a tang of sandalwood—no, not sandalwood, agarwood. On the desk in his father's study an old Hainan huanghuali incense box lay open; inside, a dark brown piece of wood rested on black velvet like a bone that had been split apart.

He remembered where this piece of wood came from. When he was seven, he had gone up Jianfeng Ridge with his father; at the end of the mountain path stood an agarwood tree so thick that three people with arms linked could barely encircle it, half its trunk charred black by lightning, gaping open. His father said that was "broken agarwood": where the lightning fire split the tree, the tree itself would bleed resin to heal the wound, and the deeper the wound, the thicker the agarwood it formed.

"Trees are like people," his father had said, crouching in the mud and tapping the charred cross-section lightly with the back of a machete. "No wound, no memory; no agarwood, no character."

Now his father lay in a hospital ward in Guangzhou, tubes in his body, unable to say those words anymore.

The Shen family incense shop stood in an old qilou building in Liwan; behind the glass counter were the abacus his grandfather had left behind and a television fuzzy with static. Shen Zhiyan had returned from studying business abroad and had planned to go to a fund company in Shenzhen; it was his mother who phoned late at night and pulled him back: "Your father is failing, and someone has to take over this business."

He had never believed in incense.

During his years abroad, the only things he received from his father were small wooden boxes at Christmas, with a few grams of crushed material inside and the instruction to "burn a little when studying tires you out, to settle your mind." He found the smell overpowering and mostly gave them away. Only now, as he pinched up that broken agarwood and brought it to his nose, did he find it was not overpowering as he had imagined: it was cool, like moss after rain, with a trace of sweetness hidden in the base note that could be detected only by holding one's breath.

A soft sound came from downstairs. An old man in a gray cloth shirt pushed the door open and came in, slightly stooped, a brass scale clutched in his hand.

"Uncle Zhou." Shen Zhiyan knew him. Uncle Zhou was an old hand who had worked for the Shen family for thirty years; in his early days he had traveled around Hainan buying agarwood, and now he only minded the counter in the shop.

Uncle Zhou offered no pleasantries. He walked straight behind the counter, set the brass scale down on the velvet, and stared at the piece of broken agarwood for a long while.

"Left by the boss?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"This piece is wild." Uncle Zhou scraped the cross-section with his fingernail; crumbs fell into his palm, and he held them under the lamp to look. "See these resin lines? They grew inward layer by layer along the wound; they weren't applied on the outside. Ninety percent of the 'agarwood' on the market looks oily and bright on the outside, but scrape it open and it's white inside—that's white wood soaked in oil."

Shen Zhiyan was startled. "Soaked in oil?"

"It's picked up in the last couple of years," Uncle Zhou said, blowing the crumbs away. "Someone soaks ordinary Aquilaria sinensis wood in essential oil and presses it; it looks dark and heavy and smells fragrant too, but that fragrance is dead—it gives off acrid smoke when burned. Truly fine incense is what the tree itself sweats out."

As he said the word "sweats," Shen Zhiyan suddenly remembered his father's saying—no wound, no agarwood.

That evening his mother called to say his father's condition had stabilized somewhat. Shen Zhiyan hung up and sat for a long time in the empty qilou. The damp of the Pearl River drifted up outside the window, and a thin mist had condensed on the glass. For the first time he looked carefully at the shop: in the old photographs on the wall, his young father stood before the rainforest with a bamboo basket on his back; in a stack of yellowed ledgers in the corner of the counter were records showing that in the 1990s a gram of qinan(kyara) could buy half a month's meals.

He opened his computer and searched for "agarwood." The first news item that popped up made him frown—in some livestream, the host was holding up a string of "sinking grade agarwood beads," priced at nine yuan ninety with free shipping, while the comments scrolled "ordered."

Uncle Zhou, without Shen Zhiyan noticing, had come to stand behind him. He clicked his tongue. "Nine yuan ninety? An agarwood tree takes decades to grow and decades more to form agarwood—does he think he's growing cabbages?"

Shen Zhiyan closed the webpage and tapped his knuckles on the desk.

He suddenly felt that what his father had left him was not a shop but a wound—like that agarwood tree split by lightning, waiting for him to bleed resin and form agarwood himself.

Outside the window, the typhoon has finally made landfall, and raindrops pound on the arcade's tin awning with a crackling sound. He sniffed the lingering cool sweetness between his fingers and, for the first time, felt that this scent was worth someone taking seriously.

*(End of Chapter One)*

> **Author's Note · What You'll Understand After Reading This**: Agarwood is not fragrant throughout the entire tree; rather, trees of the Aquilaria genus in the Thymelaeaceae family (such as Hainan Aquilaria sinensis) secrete resin to heal themselves after injury—from lightning strikes, wind breakage, insect damage, axe cuts, or fungal infection—and this resin combines with the xylem and, after years of aging, forms "resinous wood." The deeper the wound and the longer the aging, the richer the layers of fragrance. The so-called "oil-soaked agarwood" on the market is ordinary Aquilaria sinensis soaked in essential oil and then pressurized; it looks glossy but cannot withstand burning. In the next chapter, Shen Zhiyan will encounter for the first time what true qinan(kyara) is.奇楠。