Experiment 1 - Wave 1
Proposal
My origin piece for this assignment is a digital diary entry I made in honor of my late grandfather, including everything that I remember about him as a person, our interactions, and even borrowed memories I have of him from stories my family would tell me and/or each other. The purpose of the entry was just so that I won't forget those memories in the future. This entry was written with only myself in mind, although reading back, it feels less like a diary entry, and more like a straightforward collection of brain data. As the author of the piece, at the time my role was mainly being a data collector from a personal (but not emotional) standpoint. And simultaneously, I made myself the only audience to this piece whose job was to piece together the big picture of my relationship with my grandfather through what I know of him and what experiences I had with him. As I transform this piece into an elegy, the addressed audience will be my family, and the audience invoked will be anyone reading my piece, as the purpose is to introduce my grandfather through my eyes and pay homage to the beautiful relationships he had with me, and many others who had the chance to interact with him in any way, which is also the context of this new piece. Through writing this piece, I hope to build a stronger connection with my grandfather, honor him, reach my family and share my perspectives with them in thanks to them having shared their memories of him with me for most of my life. I also hope to encourage a larger conversation about grief and honoring people who are no longer present in our lives outside the premise of a therapy session, in a joyful (and perhaps artistic) way, that would refrain it from becoming a taboo subject to discuss. Therefore, I hope to reach a wider audience by submitting this piece to literary journals, potentially those that are student-led and/or has a strong demographic of young Asian readers.
Sketch Draft (Outline)
Memory arc
I remember taking naps in my grandparents’ bedroom. I don’t know if this is a false memory conjured up by all the stories my sister and my mom have told me about times grandpa would give them back rubs in their sleep, but i’d like to believe that that was a part of my childhood with him as well. I think all of it was real, because I do remember going home and thinking dad’s back rubs never measured up to his. I remember taking naps on his bed, him telling me weird stories and scratching my back until we would both doze off, and I would jerk him awake to continue telling me his tales, and giving me his comforting back rubs. I miss them a lot, or more accurately, the feeling of warmth and protection they gave me.
Me
I envy my cousins and my sister for the memories they have of him. I wish I could steal them, but that would never have felt real, or mine. My sister always said if she were to get married, she’d want to marry no one less than a man as good and kind as grandpa. If I had known him better, I think I would be saying the same. She also told us a million times about her kindergarten/elementary school years when he would pick her up from the bus stop and buy her sweets on the way home. Or after dinner he would always let her take a sip of his beer, which is why she has such an affinity to drinking it now. I wish I spent more than a few months of my life living with my grandparents at their house, and I wish he was the one who picked me up from school and let me sit on his lap while he drinks his nightly jug of beer after dinner. I wish more of my actions now are inspired by memories I have of him, or activities that we used to do together. Maybe there really are some parts of me that are unknowingly influenced by him, but if there are, I wouldn’t even be aware of them, because I have no memory of such things in my mind. I wish there was more fondness than regrets when I think of him, even though it’s irrational to blame my brain for such a natural cognitive malfunction.
Ông mình
ông ngoại là niềm tự hào của cả gia đình. con muốn ông nhìn những bức tranh con vẽ loằng ngoằng trên mấy tờ giấy trắng (hoặc mấy tờ giấy làm việc quan trọng mà ông quá hiền để bảo rằng con không được vẽ lên) sau mỗi lần con đến thăm cũng trở thành những con thú sống dậy trong phòng làm việc của ông. i hope you look at them as fondly as i look at you. nhớ ông nhiều nhiều x. mong ông đang uống lon bia chị Trang mang tới cho ông. chúc mừng năm mới quý mão ông nha. con và Bống và cả nhà nhớ ông nhiều lắm. con muốn dừng nhưng tay con cứ viết mãi, vì con chỉ muốn cho ông biết rằng những thứ con thầm thì mỗi khi con đến thăm bàn thờ ông chỉ là giả vờ thôi, hoặc con không muốn đứng lâu làm mẹ suy nghĩ nhiều, vì mẹ suy nghĩ nhiều lắm. nhưng con mà được ở bên ông một mình chắc con nhìn ông mãi thôi. mà chắc những câu này con cũng sẽ chỉ nghĩ trong đầu, chứ không ngày nào bên ông mà con nói ra được. con mong rằng những lúc con ở bên ông ngày bé, trước khi con còn biết ngại, con đã nói đủ thứ khiến ông vui. i hope you're looking over my shoulder as i'm writing this. I wish i would have experienced this grief differently based on others, then maybe i wouldve remembered more of him
Experiment 1 - Wave 2
Sample excerpt
We fondly refer to grandpa as “ông mình” - our grandpa. I don’t know where the phrase came from, and I was only present for its later phase, after it became a term of endearment, a reminder of warm hugs and musky sandalwood scent, and before it turned into something arbitrary. Those words feel heavy on my tongue, like they were never mine to begin with.
Grandpa was a philosopher - an academic like me, he liked eating fish (also like me), was a good back scratcher. That’s the spiel I give to people whenever I get the chance to mention him. The night he passed away in my uncle’s house, I was doing homework when my dad scooped me up, drove me and grandma over the speed limit, and I only remember staring out the window of his car until we got there, and the crying. It sounds like me, honestly. Me not knowing what the fuck to say because that’s ‘just the way she is’, me not knowing why i cried because i was ten and when you’re ten, no one teaches you the appropriate way to behave when your grandfather whose face you barely remember is on his deathbed.
Why could I not have thought of more to say? Why couldn't I remember how he looked when I saw him last? Everytime those thoughts run by me, I realize none of the spiel matters, and none of it is real.
I envy my cousins and my sister for the memories they have of him. I wish I could steal them, but that would never have felt real, or mine. My sister always said if she were to get married, she’d want to marry no one less than a man as good and kind as grandpa. If I had known him better, I think I would be saying the same. When she was in elementary school, he used to pick her up from the bus stop and buy her sweets on the way home. After dinner, he would always let her take a sip of his beer, which is why she has such an affinity to drinking it now. I wish I spent more than a few months of my life living with my grandparents at their house, and I wish he was the one who picked me up from school and let me sit on his lap while he drank his nightly jug of beer. I wish more of my actions now are inspired by memories I have of him, or activities that we used to do together. Maybe there really are some parts of me that are unknowingly influenced by him, but if there are, I wouldn’t even be aware of them, because I have no memory of such things in my mind. I wish there was more fondness than regrets when I think of him, even though it’s irrational to blame my brain for such a natural cognitive malfunction.
We have an ancestral altar at home. My grandpa’s picture on the altar is on the right, next to a picture of a woman I don't know, but who apparently was my great grandmother. Every special occasion, we would light joss sticks for them and pray, and I would stand there while mom closed her eyes and talked to grandpa while telling me to do the same, to wish for good grades in school, and just stared at his face. His picture is handsome, of him in a black suit with a maroon tie, smiling lightly, salt and pepper hair and face cleanly shaven. It was taken for my grandparents’ wedding anniversary, no idea how many years but it must have been long, because he seemed proud. I would look, pretending he was proud of me, and would not wish for good grades. I could never keep it short and always had to pretend to be done and fine when mom got ready to kick me out so she could clean up, and could never keep my eyes closed while praying (maybe that was sacrilegious), but I feel like it was better that way, how we communicated through eye contact. I miss you, I love you, I wish I knew more of you, I wish I could smell you instead of the smoky joss stick incense, I guess I want good grades too, if you have that kind of power, I hope you miss me, i hope you love me the most out of all your grandkids, i hope you remember my drawings on your official work papers, i hope you liked them.
Annotated bibliography
This elegy, written by a student at Tufts University and published in the student magazine, is a genre-bending prose piece written about/for her Chinese immigrant father. The author first introduced an anecdote of a memory of her with her father, then progressed into the emotions evoked from that memory, followed by the streams of consciousness and what she learned from these experiences with her father. The voice used in the piece was personal and emotional, invoking in the audience a sense of loss and grieving that would help to connect with the piece, and with the author herself. The title of the piece helped to frame the premise, along with the message this piece is delivering to an invoked audience - those who were born to immigrant parents, who must have experienced to a certain extent the tumultuous relationship and hardships described.
Adonis. “From Elegy for the Times.” The Paris Review, 2016.
This is a prose piece, written by Adonis about their grief with their country and its history. I could not retrieve much context for this piece, but what I found attractive was also the non-traditional prose, breaking the conventions of what an elegy should be fundamentally, logistically. The voice in this piece was strong and severe, formal but still evoking relatability and sympathy from the audience, thus making the tragedies, feelings of being trapped, and most importantly the grief that is at the very core of the piece known.
Pellegrino, Joe. “Conventions of the Elegy.” JOE PELLEGRINO, 2021.
This article was one which I referred to when first thinking about the structure of my elegy, although my piece was not how a traditional elegy would be conventionally structured. It conveyed some important foundational aspects of an elegy, along with its history as a genre. First, the article discussed some differing definitions of elegy as a genre, however with the central theme being that it is a poem with the central theme of loss and grief. The article then noted some important differences between elegy and other similar genres, from epitaphs to eulogies, offering some supporting examples that would pertain to elegy’s conventions. Some general expectations of the structure of an elegy was also discussed, with the skeleton including a lament of the dead, honoring the dead, and then a consolation and resolution, with some additional conventions that diversify the genre.