Episode 19: At 86, My Grandmother Regrets Two Things

 In this exquisitely poetic essay, first published in The Diagram and republished in Creative Nonfiction, Diana Xin takes our listeners back to her grandmother's rural village where she boils water for drinking and hangs her laundry on the line. "To accumulate so many years and so few regrets: this must be a life well lived," the writer explains. She takes us through the tragedies of her grandmother's life, the loss of family as one after one children and grandchildren move away, out into the world, into what seems like prosperity. But the writer is torn between the bounty of her grandmother's world and her own, more modern accommodations in Seattle. Come listen, get swept into Diana Xin's textural world.  

Transcript

Tavi Black and Christine Junge  0:13  

Hi, I'm Tavi black. And I'm Christine Junge.

And this is The Personal Element where we listen to an essay we love, and then discuss what makes it so good. This month were discussing Diana Xin's essay "At 86. My grandmother Regrets Two Things", which was first published in The Diagram.

Christine Junge  0:32 :  Also, music this month comes from one of our favorite bands, Salmon Like the Fish.

Diana Xin  0:40  

 | AT 86, MY GRANDMOTHER REGRETS TWO THINGS |
Not the cement poured over the courtyard where tawny dirt once dusted her ankles.

Not the air and how it has thickened, gritty as the cataracts clouding her irises.

Not the tooth that prostrated itself into the bed of her gums and refused to get back up.

Not the walnut she cracked open with the hilt of a rolling pin, only to find the nut inside black and shriveled.

Not the money her children gave on her last birthday, tucked under her pillow and then stolen a few weeks later by someone who came through the village and broke the lock on her door.

Not the day her husband went to collect coal from the mines and was rammed in the torso by someone else's cart.

Not the last words she said to my cousin, the one who died at 16, run down on his motorcycle by a driver still unknown.

Not the ways in which all my other cousins have flown, to work and school and government posts or new business ventures or fledgling food stalls, into solid or rocky marriages, slow separations, longer and harder labors.

Not the flights my sister and I took to America, aged six and three, an ocean beyond her reach.

Not any of the times she has stood outside the blue metal doors of her front gate, hands clasped behind her back as if to keep herself from grasping as she sends off another child, or child of child, or child of child of child, face crowded with worry, back stooped lower each year, statue still until they turned out of the long dirt lane echoing with departures and awaiting her own. 


The two things she regrets, she has told them to me twice, so I know she has done some thinking on this. To accumulate so many years and so few regrets: this must be a life well lived. I am back with her for three days, after three weeks of travel elsewhere. The countryside is where people run to after they have mis-stepped on some other path. It is safe here. The chase continues elsewhere. Each night, my grandmother pulls the bolt over the blue metal doors and checks the padlock on the chain, letting it swing back with a clang that resounds like weaponry. Now we are shut us into our quiet routines. A rooster crows at first light. Goats bleat the stars away. My grandmother crouches on a footstool outside, tending charcoal shaped like cut flowers and stacked inside a piped stove. She boils water for drinking and cooking, each morning a porridge of millet and yams, brown eggs to unshell on the side. I haul buckets of water to every room and hand-wash my laundry next to the well. My grandmother studies my technique and teaches me to gather the sleeves so two ends meet before I begin my wringing. There are ways to fold a life that renders it a new shape—impossible to lay smooth the same way again. There are books I've folded shut before I finished reading, never questioned their endings. When the last of my socks are pinned to the clothesline, we move our benches to follow the afternoon sun. Five pairs, my grandmother marvels, but her laugh is not quite the same full sound I've come to expect, so I demur to tell her about the other two, tucked safe inside my suitcase. I pick a pomegranate from the tree and shuck each seed with my teeth. My last visit here, all my uncles brought beer and baijiu. My aunts busied their hands with rounds of dumpling skin. In the courtyard, my cousins' children chased the chickens and each other, pissed puddles against the date tree, showed off new tricks on bicycles and baby shoes that squeaked. Now they have all gone elsewhere. Most days, my grandmother sits alone. Her second regret: That she has never seen the land I left her for. By the time my mother corralled the paperwork, she was too old, her eldest son said, to travel so far. The dirt and water of a new country would not be compatible to her health, so she stayed here at home and never saw our wealth, our bounty. Does she believe in green-grass lawns groomed by an HOA or plumbing hidden behind plastered walls? Always she asks about temperature and weather, worrying that we let ourselves grow cold. Her first regret, I won't share here, but who is to say I don't carry a parcel of her anger? Something to fuel the bones. After each meal there are dishes to clean and scrape with dried sorghum leaves, slops to carry out for the goatherder. Then it is time for the next meal. In Seattle, a mess of mail waits on my kitchen table, each letter a new question I can't answer. How to follow a decision down each trail of divisions? How to find a path that won't lead you to stare across the water, a view of something better, what you could have had. Regret comes easy to me, perhaps desire as well. I crave the crop and regret the harvest before it comes. Choice leaves me a scarecrow. My grandmother picks for me a sliver of meat that shines with fat and grease, places it into my bowl, and though it is full, I make room for more. I've never known hunger, but I know how to stay hungry. When my grandmother laughs, her joy lilts up as it ends, expands to resist erasure. Eat, she says, there is plenty. There is so much. How shameful it is, to let such fortune go to waste.  

Tavi Black 6:14 : What I love the most about this piece, well, one of the many things I love about it is just the way it starts. How poetic and repetitive she is with the “not the cement poured over the courtyard over tawny dirt once dusted her ankle, not the air, not the tooth.” I mean, she goes on and on. It's poetry.

Christine Junge 6:38 : Yeah. And speaking of poetry, Tavi, you might remember this from our MFA days, but there's a term that's used for when poems when their title is really the first line of the poem. And I feel like that's what is going on here. Yeah, because the title is like, it's own. It's a full sentence. And it really does feel like like, Oh, this is just the first line of the story or the essay. 

Tavi Black:   I agree. I really wish more than anything that I could pull out that term. I would feel so smart if I knew what it was, but I don't know what it is. Somebody will write in and tell us. I really liked the way that that it's sort of like when you get an email and somebody uses the subject line to say the first line. 

Christine Junge: Yeah, that's, that's a funny modern day example. Because yeah, I totally know what you mean. Like it just kind of jumpstarts the communication before you even open the email. 

Tavi Black: Right. But what she does is that you could read this without the title and still know exactly what she's talking about, like the second line, “not the air and how it has thickened, gritty as the cataracts clouding her irises.” You know, this is an older lady-- cataracts clouding her irises. And, and she gives us these little hints all along, so that even if we didn't have the title, we would know what this is about.

Christine Junge 7:56  : And I love in this first section, where it's like you said, all the repeated ‘nots’, and these are things she does not regret. I love how she includes, like small things like the walnut is cracked open, only to find that the inside is black and shriveled. You know, which is kind of a small heartbreak of life. And then these like real heartbreaks of life, like the cousin of Diana, so I think that's the grandmother's, another grandchild is killed at 16. And obviously, that's like, you know, one of life's largest heartaches losing somebody you love, especially a child, or a young person. Yeah. So I like the juxtaposition of the small grievances, but these really large heartbreaks, and in the way that both the small and large kind of paint a picture of the grandmas life. 

Tavi Black: Yeah, these little vignettes. I mean, that's a really good point, Christine, how it's really giving us a full picture because of the small and the large. I mean, even just the opening line, “not the cement poured over the courtyard where the tawny dirt wants dusted her ankles.” I mean, some people might see the cement as a positive thing. You're getting this sort of modern convention where you don't have dirty feet anymore, but it the way we see it here, “the tawny dirt once dusted her ankles,” this beautiful vision of something that she you know, she could regret losing that. 

Christine Junge: Yeah, and I feel like all these things that she does not regret, they also kind of just give us a sense of the life of this woman. And it just made me think about how even if she only has these two regrets in life, all these like bad things did befall her, kind of in the way that bad things befall all of us and by the time we get to 86 there's going to kind of be a laundry list of small things and large things that that didn't go so well in our lives.

Tavi Black 9:48 : Agreed. I love how she sets it up in the title she regrets two things and then the “not this, not that.” I think you said earlier Christine, when we were talking about this, how it keeps you going, right? 

Christine Junge: Yeah, I think the thing that I loved most about this essay was the way that she builds so much suspense through it because, like the title, you know, that we’re going to learn, or you think we're going to learn the two things that the grandmother regrets, but then the whole first half of the essay is really, “it's not this, it's not that, it's not this.” When I was reading, I was like, “When are we going to get to the Yes, these are the things you regret?”

Tavi Black 10:27 : What does she regret? Yeah, mystery. And yet, the mystery continues.

Christine Junge 10:34 : Yeah. And I really felt like she was so skillful in the way that, like she wets our appetite. And then the kind of tells is the opposite for, you know, what is that? 10 or 12 repetitions? And then, and the writing is so beautiful. So it's not like I skipped. I was I was very curious. But it's not like I was so curious that I skipped to the end, to learn to get the ending. 

Tavi Black: You didn’t read the last page. 

Christine Junge: Exactly. Yeah. Because I really did love the writing so much that I wanted to kind of soak up all the little vignettes. 

Tavi Black: Yeah, and I feel like at the end of this, these beautiful, beautiful vignettes-- beautiful and tragic as well, she starts to sort of expand out into the world from this little village, where she talks about “not the way which my other cousins have flown to work, and to school and to government,” she's starting to send everybody out into the world. 

Christine Junge: And I feel like that is kind of one of the themes of the essay, the fact that this grandmother is living in this traditional village, and all of her family is going on to live more prosperous lives. But that means they've left her behind. It's at the end of this section with the ‘nots’ is one really long, ‘not’ which I won't read out, but it's getting more and more specific. Again, when she talks about, she sends off another child or a child of a child or a child of a child of a child, which is just such a beautiful sense of repetition of the, you know, Child, child child. But it also felt like to me, it kind of gives us a sense of like the lineage like, it's not just child grandchild, it's like, the child of that child, which some something about that wording really kind of hammers that point in the way that like, grandchild, great grandchild doesn't kind of do. 

Tavi Black: That's right, like the Bible, or book six of the Iliad, where they talk about lineage, and she really uses language in such an excellent way. A.J. Verdelle, my mentor, used to always talk about how repetition is holy, and meaning, be careful how you use it, it's very powerful. Don't overuse it. And I feel like Diana has a really good sense of when to use that repetition and how to use that repetition.,

Christine Junge 12:54 : And then jumping down. So listeners the essays on the page, it's kind of divided into, So there's all the ‘nots’ listed. And then the second section is one really long paragraph. The whole thing is just one long paragraph. Yeah. And I felt like that's a really interesting choice she made and I kind of I'm really eager to hear, Tav, what you think about why she why she did it that way.

Tavi  Black 13:18 : For me, yeah, I find that really interesting, too, that it's laid out that way, all these paragraph, paragraph, paragraph. And then the second part of it, where she says the two things she regrets and so in some ways, she's being clever and saying, okay, Two, this is the second part. I feel like that the first part is really poetic. The second part more like a prose poem, or even just prose. It's very descriptive. But I am really interested in why she didn't use any paragraphs here. I know she did it intentionally because you can see that's the kind of writer she is. But I feel like maybe with this prose part, she's--It's looks really condensed on the page, like it is really like, this part is really packed. 

Christine Junge: Yeah, what you just said reminds me of this podcast, I was listening to where the Poet Laureate of the US whose name I'm forgetting, but she was talking about how the breaks of a poem really allow it to either move quickly, or move slowly. And the more breaks you have, the more slowly it reads, because you're, like, taking a breath every time you see that break in the page. So, applying that to this, the first part would be like much slower and more like language, because of the breaks that the eye is taking or the breath is taking. And then the second part is so you know, that's just one chunk of text where your eye just reads a lot faster, because there are those breaks. 

Tavi Black: Oh, wow, that's really that's a really great observation. Yeah, I feel like this part is so rich in image and setting. Like we're really there with her grandmother. But let's talk about where she says the two things she regrets. We think, “Okay, now we're getting into it.”

Christine Junge: Yeah. And then she kind of tricks us. Because, yeah, that first line, and then, you know, there's another, that kind of meandering for, like, I don't know, 10 sentences or so. And I don't mean meandering in a bad way. But she's describing more about the grandmother's life. And there's some, like, truly beautiful lines there. But I was waiting, like, “Okay, so where, like, where's the regret?” And then we get to the line of the second regret. And, you know, sometimes I'm, like a fast reader. So I was like, “Oh, I must have just skipped over the part where she talked about the first regret” And then I went back and again, we reread and I was like, no, there is no first regret. And then of course, she gets to it eventually. But she does kind of play a little trick on us there. 

Tavi Black: Yeah, it was a master trick. Definitely. I had to go back to and thought, “how did I miss that?” I thought I was reading carefully. Yeah, really? Excellent. And before we get down too far into this, I really want to just mention this one sentence I love which is, “the countryside is where people run to after they have misstepped on some other path.” Wow. Powerful. You know, I live in the country. And I thought, Wow, interesting theory. Like, she could be right. Yeah. I mean, not everybody, obviously. But not even maybe misstepped. But have taken other paths, certainly, and found out. Wow, okay, I'm going to go here. I'm going to go back here.

Christine Junge 16:55 : My favorite line from this section is “the goats bleep the stars away.” I mean, what a beautiful way of saying that, you know, the night is fading and the sun is coming up and the goats are making a noise like, that also describes exactly what she says. But man, the goats bleep that stars away. Like, what a beautiful image.

Tavi Black: Beautiful. Yeah, I'd never would have written that sentence myself. I'm so glad she did. And while we're talking about our favorite sentences, I also really love “there are ways to fold a life that renders it a new shape, impossible to lay smooth the same way again.” So embedded in all of these great images of the countryside of her grandmother's life, there's really deep philosophies. 

Christine Junge: Yeah. And she's, they're just talking about folding laundry. So of course, like, that also just echoes the folding and the folding in like a practical way of folding laundry, and then like the more philosophical way of folding a life. 

Tavi Black: And, and when they're talking about folding laundry. Christine, earlier, you also mentioned the five pairs of socks, right? 

Christine Junge: Yeah, I love this detail. Because so the, you know, doing the laundry of my grandma points out like, man, you have a lot of socks, five pairs, like, you know, kind of in a jokey way, like who needs five pairs of socks. And then then of course, Diana thinks, “Oh, damn, I have more than five pairs, I have two other ones with me that are tucked away.” Yeah, and it really did provide a nice contrast between like a modern day rich American life versus the countryside of this village where it sounds like the grandmother thought it was so indulgent to have five pairs of socks, whereas like you were, I probably have 20 pairs of socks, which, you know, the hole in one and missing the other. And we don't think twice about it.

Tavi Black 18:44 : I mean, yeah, you're right. It really basically that little section could almost, you know, she had to pare this down. You know, sometimes you do writing exercises, where you have to pare it down to just a few words, if she had to do like a five word. What do they call micro stories or flash fiction? She could just talk about the socks. 

Christine Junge: Yeah, totally. 

Tavi Black: Right after that bit. There's this little sort of regression back to the last time she was there. So I feel like she's sort of skillfully going like okay, we're here. We're here. And then the last time I was here, let's bring it back. Let's, let's bring in some of my history. “The chickens chasing each other pissed puddles against the date tree,” just to the alliteration there is really great. 

Christine Junge: And I feel like she draws a picture of this huge family gathering. And then the stark line “now they have all gone elsewhere.” I feel like this essay has a few hearts, but one of the hearts is the the kind of cost and benefit of moving away from where you grew up. Because it sounds like the benefit is that you know, the grandmother gets to see her children and grandchildren living a prosperous life that they wouldn't be able to live in this village. But of course, the downside is that the family is scattered all over the world and not together anymore.

Tavi Black 20:00 : This is a story of so many of our lives, we move away from family and there's no one there to take care of the elderly. But after that section, we get to the part where she lists her second regret, the our moment of “like, what, how did the first?” and so here a little bit more about what is there in her world that are my grandmother's marveling about the plumbing and the grass, and then we get to this section, which is really, really reflective. And to me, this is the part that really brings it into the personal essay, versus a poem or a short story, where she's trying to-- “her first regret I won't share here, but who's to say I don't carry a parcel of her anger, something to fuel the bones.” Just those two lines are so beautiful, say so much. 

Christine Junge: Yeah. And I thought a lot about the concept of like intergenerational trauma where like, if your parents have lived through famine, or war, or the Holocaust or something like that, not only do you kind of inherit that history, through like, the stories they tell or how they raised you, but also like, the DNA level, there's this trauma that is passed down, like literally a cell, like the cellular trauma that makes its way into the next generations blood, which yeah, which I just think of that is fascinating. And it seems like that's what she's going at here. Like the concept of like, maybe the grandmother's regret is something that was so big, that it really, it just crosses generations.

Tavi Black  21:45 : Yeah, I, as you know, Christina did some work in domestic violence. And we learned a lot about secondary trauma, which is just being around people with a lot of trauma and sort of absorbing it into our own lives and, and how we can, you know, avoid that. But, I mean, this is just another level, right? That they're just learning about now that even if you're not around it, even it was just your parents or your grandparents, it could actually be in your body that trauma and how it affects our DNA. It's fascinating, isn't it? 

Christine Junge: Diana does such a good job of implying that concept without like going, you know, going into all of the scientific detail or anything like that. 

Tavi Black: And right after that, there's this line that maybe Christina, I'm hoping that you can kind of illuminate for me, where she says, “how to follow a decision down each trail of divisions.” I wrote a little like, I was like, ah, what is she saying here?

Christine Junge  22:46 : yeah, it's funny, I really liked that line. Because it's kind of something I've been thinking about a lot in terms of like, so when you're making a decision, you try to like, you know, think out all of the, like dominoes that are going to fall because of this decision, all the ramifications. But there's only so much you can actually do like you don't, you know, you don't know how that decision is going to make you feel or make other people feel or what's going to kind of come because of it. So for me, I was that's what I was thinking of when I read that line, that she's trying to follow a decision down each path to see like where it ends up. 

Tavi Black 23:30  : Yeah, I knew you could help me. It's pretty great.

Christine Junge 23:32 : Thanks, I so I'm going to throw it back a you, Tav. A few lines down after she's talking about “craving the crop and regretting the harvest.” And then she says, “choice leaves me a scarecrow.” And I love the line and I can really picture you know, like picture a scarecrow and this field of crops that she's already described, but I wasn't quite sure what she meant by “choice leaves me a scarecrow.”

Tavi Black: You know, I think that what she probably means is that if you have a scarecrow, that's very, you know, the way they look in the field, right? They're very stiff. They're like, they're not real. They're not moving. Like maybe she is made immobile by trying to make this choice. And she can't she's trying to decide should I be here with my grandmother? I love her. She's got all this. But I have this life. That's back in Seattle.

Christine Junge 24:23 : Yeah, that's, that's really smart. Thank you. Yeah, I feel like this is one of the benefits of discussing these essays with with you Tavi. Or like in a classroom setting or something where, like, even if you were to read this on your own once or twice, you'd certainly get a lot out of it, and particularly on a second reading, but it's always so nice to hear other people's thoughts on them and kind of contemplate it on a deeper level. 

Tavi Black: Definitely. I mean, this this work is so layered there's so much going on. I mean, at on the surface you think well, it's just about her grandmother, she's just like describing this woman that she really loves. But it's about so much more than that. She packs in so much in this in this essay and that we learn so much about Diana without her really ever telling us anything. I mean, all we really know is that she lives in Seattle, right? 

Christine Junge: Yeah, I feel like that's something I thought about a lot as we were preparing to talk about this that I didn't quite get just from reading it was that, yeah, like she gives us no details about her. Like, we don't know how old she is, or if she's married, or what kind of work she does, or how she spends her time. All like, like you said, Tav, the only thing we know is that she lives in Seattle, in her grandmother lives far away, and in a small village. But yet we do get a sense of who Diana is based on like, what she's thinking about and how she's describing things. And what what she chooses to include and what she doesn't include.

Tavi Black 25:53 : I mean, I think that's a really good point to Christine, is that there's so much about writing that we think about often as what we do include, but you're right, it's so much of writing is editing and what we take out and what we decide not to include.

Christine Junge  26:10 : Yeah, and I'd love you know, as we often say, like, if we had Diana here, that's something I would ask her about, like whether that was a conscious decision to leave herself out of the essay? Or if she just, you know, if she felt like, well, I'm getting, I'm embedded enough in all the details that I'm giving up my grandmother, that I don't need to include myself. Yeah, or how she thought about that. 

Tavi Black: Yeah, I mean, we're practically neighbors, just right away. So maybe I'll run into on the theory and ask her that question. 

Christine Junge: Yeah, all right.

Tavi Black 26:41 : And, you know, coming to the end of this, it's really, it's, it's a really beautiful ending as well. I mean, I love the line. “I've never known hunger, but I know how to stay hungry.”

Christine Junge 26:55 : Yeah, and I, that made me think back to the line, where she talked about the regret kind of seeping from the grandmother's life through the generations, because maybe what she's saying there is that even though Diana grew up in a prosperous country, that the idea of hunger or the feeling of hunger is kind of passed down, because it wasn't that long ago in their family history that they didn't know, hunger. 

Tavi Black: Right. And, you know, she does this masterful weaving of you know, just even the fact that at the beginning, she used about the walnut being black and shriveled. And that, to me is sort of talking about, like how, oh, we had this bounty, and it was not good. It was rotten, you know. And then at the end, her grandmother's saying, Oh, we have so much there's plenty. 

Christine Junge: Yeah, and I love that ending to that the grandmother who is living, what we would consider a difficult existence without indoor plumbing. And, you know, without it sounds like without, like access to the same kinds of things that we have access to. She's coming at it from like a place of like, oh, my gosh, look at the bounty that's in front of me, you know, like, there's so much food that I can share with my grandchild. And that means there's plenty, how shameful it is to let such fortune go to waste. I feel like that's like such a good lesson that we can all kind of take to heart that. You know, we all have so much here in the US. And it's easy to kind of forget that and complain about, you know, little things like the grocery store was out of eggs or whatever, whatever it is that like, you know, when in reality that just means that we always have eggs like, which is a pretty fortunate thing. 

Tavi Black: Yeah, that's it. It really is. She comes full circle. It's a gorgeous piece. I'm so glad that Diana let us talk about it on our podcast. 

Christine Junge: Yeah. Thanks so much, Diana, and listeners. We will see you next month.

Tavi Black: Until next month.

Tavi  Black 28:53 : To learn more about this podcast, visit us online at personal element podcast.com. There you'll find links to the essays we discussed information on how to follow us on social media, and more.

Christine Junge: And so you'll never miss an episode. Please subscribe to the podcast, whatever podcast app. Thank you!