Having always been a little brother, I had to learn to be a big one when I was 10 years old. In the midst of the confusion of this new role, I found myself pressing my nose to this newborn’s head and inhaling as hard as I could. This “sniff kiss” was not an action I invented. Rather, it was an instinct forged through mimicry: I started noticing from this point that my father and grandmother both did the same thing to me.

As a kid from the diaspora, I lost myself in thoughts over one poem I could relate to within my deepest senses. It's written by renowned Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong, titled ‘Kissing in Vietnamese.’ I felt for the first time that there might be something bigger than me behind this peculiar habit that I thought was idiosyncratic. Vuong shares his experience with those sniff kisses, which he contrasts with western ones and their flashier display of affection. But this modesty makes the intimacy not less intense, as described in this part of the poem:

In researching my heritage to get to root of this habit, I have found that those kisses seem to be typical of Vietnamese people, anchored in the culture. Another aspect of the kiss that is shown here is that it’s usually done by family elders. There are similar customs in many Southeast Asia, according to a study that uses lexical semantic typology through “smell/kiss colexification” to demonstrate that the practice is unique to this region. It actually was a culture shock for European colonizers when they came to Southeast Asia, and many mentioned the quirk in their writings.

The entry for “hôn” (kissing) in the Annamite-French dictionary by Jean Bonet (1899). The description reads: “The olfactory kiss (by inhaling strongly through the nostrils as the Annamites do).”

For me it was never really about my cultural background; rather, it was a vital tool to feel and express affection in my own way. My feelings for it were straightforward: I liked the purity of inhaling the scent of my loved ones, as a way to sense them over and over. At the same time, as Vuong captures in his poem, the kiss could be fierce, born from an endless worry for those dearest to me that can only be soothed by this reassurance of life.

The sniff kiss had become so visceral for me that its cultural implication wasn't clear to me for a long time. It turned into a blurry concept in my mind, midway between an expression of love and a physical scent. The eccentricity of the quirk convinced me it was something my family and I made up, regardless of any country’s traditions. Even now, each time I tilt my head towards my grandmother, so she can sniff my forehead, I am reminded that in all of us there are dormant customs whose existence is beyond us.

Lê Phổ, ‘La Maternité,’ circa 1940s. 

It is up to us to uncover these hidden parts of our heritage by noticing that, be it over time or from a significant event, it is actually an inherited behavior. It might be hard, or even futile, but I find it beautiful that through an autoethnographic process, we can dig out an ancestral link from within each of us about how we love.