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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: The Eldest Daughter

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I'm Helena de Groot. Today, “The Eldest Daughter.” The poet Rosanna Young Oh used to dream about being a poetry professor. She even started a PhD program. But one long, hard look at the academic job market changed her mind. Today, she's a marketing executive in the pharmaceutical sector. And when I went down to Long Island to see her and she picked me up from the station, she talked a little bit about her day using words like "sales goals" and "Q4," without any of the apologetic irony I sometimes hear from poets who work in marketing. No, Rosanna told me she's grateful for her job. She's learning a lot. She's met some really cool people, and she no longer has to worry as much about money. And Rosanna Young Oh has been thinking about work for many years, maybe because of her parents. They have a small grocery store, the kind of business that will give you slim margins and demand constant care. In one of her poems, which is titled “New Year's Eve,” she describes her father not at home having dinner with the family, but at the store wrestling with the freezer, defrosting, disassembling, cleaning, and then reassembling the thing before it has a chance to melt the contents into expensive garbage. I wanted to ask Rosanna about the store and the poems in her debut collection, titled The Corrected Version. So, I made my way down to the home where she grew up and now lives with her parents. And I was welcomed with bowls and bowls of ripe fruit, nuts, smoked cheese, salami, tiny pickles — pretty much all of my favorite things.

Helena de Groot: Oh, my God. I've tried to be polite and not eat the blueberries yet, but . . .

Rosanna Young Oh: The blueberries!

Helena de Groot: They are so big and juicy.

Rosanna Young Oh: Oh, good. Well, it's from my parents’ store. All of it is from my parents’ store. Yeah, they sell the best stuff.

Helena de Groot: It's so good. I feel like I'm losing the plot a little bit, about what is my job here. I just want to eat snacks and eat with you. (LAUGHS) Have you done a few interviews already for the book?

Rosanna Young Oh: Written, mostly. So, this is actually really lovely.

Helena de Groot:  Yeah. You labor in solitude for so long and then . . . So tell me, how long did you work on the book?

Rosanna Young Oh: Fourteen years. But five of those years, I left poetryland. I was not actively writing, because I was trying to make a living in corporate America. But then, you know, professor Glück — Louise Glück was my thesis advisor in college — and, basically, I still worship her, and she really taught me what the possibilities of a poem can be. And I remember thinking, when she won the Nobel Prize, I was like, "Oh my gosh, what am I doing?" I loved writing so much. And here's this person who basically achieved everything in American letters. And she had said nice things about my work. And I remember being so happy, and I kind of had this moment where I was like, why did I even think about . . . how could I not finish what I set out to do, which was that first book, you know? So, then I started getting back into it. I was very nervous and I had forgotten a lot of what I had learned, to be quite honest. But, yeah, so it was a couple of years of writing, trying to understand what the book is about, filling in the gaps. I wrote a couple of new poems in the last couple of years, and then it resulted in this collection.

Helena de Groot: And you said you took a five-year break, right?

Rosanna Young Oh: Pretty much a five-year break, right. Yeah.

Helena de Groot:  And as a person, you must have changed a lot in five years. What was it like to encounter those poems or yourself, you know, from five years ago?

Rosanna Young Oh: Yeah, that's such a lovely question. So, I had this moment where I was looking at the poems I had written, some in undergrad, some in my MFA program, and I'm very proud of them. And I remember being very proud of them then. But then I had this moment where I was like, oh my gosh, these are poems of a young writer who didn't know what it was like to make it in the real world, who didn't . . . I mean, I was a complete artist. You know, I just thought about poetry and music and art all the time, not really caring about making a living at that point. But now I feel like … I don't want to say it got hard, but I think the last seven years have been very tough, and I think I couldn't go back to who I was before. I cannot write poems just about beauty and art anymore, you know?

Helena de Groot:  Yeah.

Rosanna Young Oh: Even if I had to.

Helena de Groot: And can we go back a little bit to the moment where you left poetryland?

Rosanna Young Oh: Oh, yes.

Helena de Groot: Who were you then, and what was informing that decision?

Rosanna Young Oh: I started a PhD program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and it was lovely, because it was actually the first time that I took an Asian American literature course. It was the first time I thought deeply about themes that related to that. So diaspora identity. Before then, I was like a real student of the western canon. I mean, all these books are basically from the western canon and . . .

Helena de Groot: Oh yeah, yeah. The Brothers Karamazov.

Rosanna Young Oh: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: What is that? Emerson.

Rosanna Young Oh: The classics. You know, I have like three copies of Paradise Lost somewhere, though. Three different editions. I was like, I'm going to be a poetry professor. (LAUGHS) But, you know, people were saying, you know, you have to do the PhD without expectation of a job. And I thought, I can't. I cannot. I can't do it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Rosanna Young Oh: You know, I'm the first child, the only daughter in my family. At the time, my brother was a marine. He was in the Marines serving, and my younger brother’s an art student. So, I think I was like, "I can't do the PhD without any expectation, just for the sake of learning." I wish I could, but I couldn't, because I just kept thinking of my parents and their store, and then worrying about all three of us.

Helena de Groot: Did they ever tell you that, though, or was it just you inside?

Rosanna Young Oh: I think when I told my parents I was going to leave the program, they were actually like, "No, stay. You're actually, I think you could be good at it, you know." But no, I think it was mostly me, though. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And what was the fear? Sorry.

Rosanna Young Oh: It was just fear of not making my parents proud. And I know that sounds pretty juvenile and people outgrow that feeling. But for me, it was very important. They've led very hard lives, and I just couldn't let that happen. I just couldn't. And then, I think the lifestyle that is required of academia, you know, basically just going, potentially going to the middle of nowhere for a job, you know, that wasn't what I had in mind. When I was at Sewanee — the Sewanee Writers' Conference back in 2012, I had met someone who lost her mother while she was studying abroad in France. So I made a decision right there. Like, I'm not going to let that happen. I need to be near the family. But now my brothers are thriving. (LAUGHS) And, you know, that was then. Sometimes I'm like, "Maybe I should go back." So life is very interesting. You know, they're very successful. And I'm very, you know, I made the decision that I did then.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I want to ask you. I know that you told me on the phone, "Please, can we not, like belabor this sort of my parents have a grocery store." I will not.

Rosanna Young Oh: OK.

Helena de Groot: But of course, a lot of the poems in your book center around that fact. So, I do want to mention it, but like, I'm not going to make that the entire arc.

Rosanna Young Oh: We can talk about it, just . . . because I think hardworking, working-class people like my parents, that community, is under a lot of stress right now, and I think it's important to talk about them. But the typical immigrant narrative doesn't really encompass the whole complexity of that community's experiences. That's all I meant.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Well, do tell me when I go in the direction that you find boring or you know, the trope. But I am interested in the conversation around work in your household. But before we go there, can you just give me some of the facts? Like what did or do your parents do for a living?

Rosanna Young Oh: My parents have run their grocery store, a small business for over 30 years now. It's in a gated community, basically, which is important to note, just because people who've lived there watched me grow up.

Helena de Groot: Oh, wow.

Rosanna Young Oh: And some of them are thrilled that my book came out. (LAUGHS) My dad was like, here's a book. So, some of the customers are really like family members. And in fact, one of them gave me a copy of Jane Eyre.

Helena de Groot: When you were how old?

Rosanna Young Oh: When I was in the seventh grade. So I guess 12 or 13. But I would go to school. And then Sundays, for a long time, I would sit at the register and I would check out people. But sometimes, there were long spaces of time when we didn't have customers. So in between customers I would sit on a milk box reading books. And I think customers noticed that, that I like to read. And so she — I don't remember her name, but she was a retired school teacher, and she gave me my copy of Jane Eyre. And that book really changed my life. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Can you tell me a little bit about it?

Rosanna Young Oh: Well, first of all, I remember reading that book with a dictionary next to it because it's very dense. At least for a seventh grader.

Helena de Groot: Oh, yeah.

Rosanna Young Oh: And so my initial impression was like, oh my gosh, the language is gorgeous. And they're just these images that are so evocative and just so vivid. Then obviously, the character of Jane Eyre, I think, was moving to me. Because she could do anything despite her class, you know. I mean, I'm not a penniless orphan and I'm very privileged in some ways. I had a two-parent household who cared about my education. But something in her, in that character, made me want to succeed.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And reading your books sitting in the grocery store, did that change at all how you looked at that place, at the work, at the people who came in there?

Rosanna Young Oh: Yeah, in the beginning, I mean, I didn't want to. It was interesting. So, I started helping out when I was like ten because I noticed the person who runs [the] register has all the power. That's what it seemed like to me. Like that person calls all the shots. (LAUGHS) I was like ten, what did I know. I was like, dad, I want to try it. And he was like, sure, like, try it. It'll probably help you with your math or whatever and your work ethic. And we got to be together as a family in a way. So, you know, I did it. And then, once school started and school got demanding, it kind of stressed me out. And, you know, sometimes there are customers . . . I mentioned really kind customers, but sometimes customers, they, you know, they didn't think my family and I were a part of their world.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Rosanna Young Oh: So, they'd always compare me to their grandkids. And in fact, some of my schoolmates' grandparents were our customers. So, you know, when you're like in middle school, high school, those things matter. In the most . . . But now, you know, I'm proud of my parents. Like, especially during the pandemic, they did a real service for the community, I think. They stayed open. They worked really hard. And it taught me a lot of things. The work ethic, the determination to succeed, all of those things.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. So, let's get to that, the conversation around work in the household, you know. Was there a conversation like that? Or do you just have that because you saw them?

Rosanna Young Oh: Yeah. I just saw them.

Helena de Groot: They wouldn't talk about the importance of hard work.

Rosanna Young Oh: No, they just. I just saw them, like, literally demonstrating and living and really working hard. I think just seeing that, that influenced all three of us. They didn't have to talk to us at all. (LAUGHS) Like, we saw it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Rosanna Young Oh: It's interesting. Like, sometimes now my dad's like, you know, "Take it easy, don't worry so much." And I was like, "Oh, my gosh, that means a lot coming from him."

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Rosanna Young Oh: But going through the pandemic, that taught me too. I think that kind of taught all of us, especially with my dad, that work isn't everything. So, I'm grateful for that.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Your dad had COVID, too, right?

Rosanna Young Oh: He had COVID.

Helena de Groot: Pretty seriously?

Rosanna Young Oh: Yeah. He was hospitalized. Yeah, one of the poems, "Hard Labor," is based on that time. And I couldn't write about what happened until two years later. So I started writing that poem last year, in the spring, because my mother was sick, my brother was sick. And then, you know, they were . . . thankfully, COVID didn't hit them that hard. But my dad got — it hit him very hard. So I was calling the hospital. I have a friend who's a surgeon. So she was kind of teaching me or coaching me the medical terms and what to ask the doctors. The nurses asked my dad if I went to med school because I was so thorough. I mean, thanks to my friend. But, you know, I was calling every shift. I was making sure of that.

Helena de Groot: And what would you ask? What were the kinds of things that you wanted to know?

Rosanna Young Oh: So literally, how many liters of nasal cannula? What percent oxygenation saturation? Because the numbers — I forget what the thresholds are right now, but I remember at the time, like that would be indicators as to how much oxygen he needed. If he had to go on a ventilator, that would have not been a good situation, right? So that happened. I was going to the hospital to drop off food for the staff because they were working — I'm so grateful for the staff — they were really working their butts off. And you know, my brother, who's a marine, he was stationed in Korea. So he was wondering, like we were talking about what would happen if both of our parents die. There are moments like that. And then I went to the store and I needed to make sure everything was OK. So it was . . . One day, I'll write about it.

Helena de Groot: And could you go visit your dad in the hospital?

Rosanna Young Oh: No, no, we could not. We could not visit.

Helena de Groot: And was he in a state where you could like, I don't know, WhatsApp with him or?

Rosanna Young Oh: No, no.

Helena de Groot: And then while your dad was in the hospital, who kept the store open?

Rosanna Young Oh: I think we closed for a few days. And then once I went back, I opened it. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: On top of your full-time job?

Rosanna Young Oh: That was the weekend. So, yes, on top, but not on the same day. On the weekend, I was opening it.

Helena de Groot: Oh, my God. That sounds really intense.

Rosanna Young Oh: Yeah. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And your dad was how long in the hospital? Or out of commission, let's say?

Rosanna Young Oh: Probably like ten. I don't remember, probably, like ten days.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, ten days in the hospital. But then a longer recovery.

Rosanna Young Oh: Right. I mean, I'm grateful, though. We had access to good hospitals, the nurse would get back to me. I mean, I know people who couldn't even get that, you know? So, I'm very grateful. But yeah, there was a moment where I was like, "Dad, you're working yourself to death."

Helena de Groot: And you said that COVID also taught you that there are more important things than work or that work is not everything in life.

Rosanna Young Oh: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And that your dad was also the one who said, "You know, you should take it easy sometimes." When did you see that change in him?

Rosanna Young Oh: After he got better. (LAUGHS) I mean, I was talking with my cousin, because my cousin knows my dad, too. And I was like, "Hey, you know, he's gotten so much more mellow. "And my cousin was like, "You know, when you're confronted with your mortality, that happens." I remember thinking, it's OK if I get, that it doesn't matter … I don't care about my job. Even writing, I was like bargaining with . . . We're Buddhists. So, the Buddha, you know, I was just like, you know, I'll do anything. I don't care about anything else. I just need him to live, you know?

(BREAK)

Helena de Groot: Do you want to read that poem, "Hard Labour?"

Rosanna Young Oh: Do you want me to? It's kind of long.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I had, you know, I had another poem prepared, but I like how we've been working our way towards it. Would you, and you can tell me, would you find it terribly blasphemous if I would cut a little bit out of the poem?

Rosanna Young Oh: No. No.

Helena de Groot: You would be OK with that?

Rosanna Young Oh: Yeah.

Helena de Groot:
Great.

Rosanna Young Oh:

"Hard Labor."

1.

The bald truth was that my father first saw

the coronavirus as a blessing.

The grocery had never been busier.

On the phone,

he listed the debts he paid off.

He ate raw elephant garlic

by the bulb, the premium kind

he swore by.

Let me ship a case

to your studio in Astoria—

as though the enemy

were a vampire in plain sight,

and he dared it to a feeding.

The old lesson: you can’t save

a father who refuses to be saved.

His hospitalization, a vacation—

he has no choice now but to rest.

3.

My VP offers, Anything you need.

Remember: PR, not ER.

I confirm I know she means it.

In my gracious refusal,

I recognize my appetite for more work.

I help sell solutions to salespeople

who sell drugs to doctors

who sell them to patients.

I tell myself I am making a difference.

Between correcting documents,

I call the hospital. The staff

answer my questions as though

they’re being watched.

It must be something in my tone.

A white-hot exactingness.

A dashboard tracks the infected

with a map pinned with a scarlet constellation

of which my father is part.

Like a star, he has cooled into an idea.

I cannot recall his body or trace

the shape of his suffering.

What I need is certainty:

How many liters of nasal cannula?

What percent oxygenation saturation?

Someone always has to mind the store.

For four hours straight on a Saturday

I stand clacking at the register,

he tips of my latex gloves black

from rubbing coins and dollar bills.

The younger me would have bragged

about my competence.

Look, Appa, I am a machine!

The shelves are the barest they’ve ever been.

Death has made spendthrifts of us all—

even the truffle oils have sold out.

 I'm going to skip over a part here.

7.

The nurse warns that he has stopped

making sense. Could it be

COVID’s final trick?

Don’t cry, my father says in Korean,

a gentle order.

So, this is where forgiveness begins,

just as the Buddhist parable promises–

the young mother who,

after failing to find a single house untouched by death

and surrendering her dead boy to the forest,

appears before the Buddha,

her grief finally calmed, with upraised palms

free of mustard seeds,

like my naked hands now, paling to light in the sun,

the pines and cumulus pixelating in this neural world I am awakening to–

spring.

8.

Father has returned, marked

with the humility and innocence of someone

spared by a miracle.

What happened to me?

I can hear his breath on the phone,

like a book fanning apart

on its spine for the first time.

In my retelling,

he is a man, not a god.

I am his daughter.

I beg him,

Appa, you can save yourself.

And he listens.

Helena de Groot: Well, I want to move on from the work thing to art, because one of the . . . you know, since your parents work so hard and since that was sort of all consuming, it seems like, in your family life . . . What was the role of art and what was the conversation around art growing up in your household?

Rosanna Young Oh: My mother was a visual artist. She studied art, you know. And she's always been the sort of person who brings fresh flowers home. She's that sort of person. It's like, beauty for beauty's sake. And I think that really helped. My dad actually was in a literary club. He loves books. His favorite book is Ulysses.

Helena de Groot: Which he reads in what language?

Rosanna Young Oh: Korean.

Helena de Groot: Oh, I'd be so interested to know what . . .

Rosanna Young Oh: I know. And he'd buy all the books we wanted, or I wanted. And you know, one thing I'm very grateful for is him and my mom is exposing us to many things.

Helena de Groot: Like what? 

Rosanna Young Oh: Well, they exposed me to a piano, but it wasn't . . . I didn't really take to piano. I wanted to play flute. So, they really encouraged that.

Helena de Groot: They were like, "Sure, you can switch. You can do the flute."

Rosanna Young Oh: Yeah. I was like, "The piano is making me a little miserable." I love flute. It sounds so beautiful. And thank God they encouraged me. And I actually competed and I kept playing throughout college. So I'm very grateful for that. You know, sometimes I feel guilty because they could have used the resources that they invested in us, you know, for other things, like themselves. But yeah, I really enjoyed that part of my childhood.

Helena de Groot: And again, did you just see them do that, or was there more of a conversation around it? Like the value of art, literature and music.

Rosanna Young Oh: My dad, he would say . . . You know, my brother doesn't really like books. And my dad was like, you know, "one book will give you a lifetime's worth of knowledge." And my mother would say, I guess in English, I would translate it into something like: "Life isn't just about money, it's about enjoying things that you love." And if art can do that for you, you know, writing . . ." Yeah, there's a story. It's interesting. I'm going to, I think I'm going to get emotional. But when I was in the seventh grade — no it was in high school, I think I was a 10th grader — I won a contest at the local JCC, the Jewish Community Center. And I won the first prize.

Helena de Groot: Writing or what did you do?

Rosanna Young Oh: Writing. Yeah, it was poetry. And my mom was like, "You know, your dad was crying, but he doesn't show that."

Helena de Groot: Oh, so then your mom tells you.

Rosanna Young Oh: My mom tells me, you know. She tells me. (LAUGHS) She's the dad whisperer. Same thing when I got into my MFA program. I think she said that too. So, there have only been a handful of times.

Helena de Groot: So, you know that he's proud of you.

Rosanna Young Oh: I think. I don't know. I think. Yeah, I think he's OK with me for now. (LAUGHS) But when I was lost, when I was lost and I didn't know what I was doing with my life, I think it was hard for him to watch. Yeah. But, you know, I feel like every experience that I've gone through, it's going to show up in my poems.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Rosanna Young Oh: But yeah, when I was writing poems, seriously, for the first time, I remember thinking I shouldn't, I can't write about the story. It's not worthy of art. It's not worthy of it. It has to be paintings or it has to be something very cultured. And then . . . But I outgrew that. You know, the first poem in the book, "Homework," I think that's the first time I actually was like, I'm going to write about it. I'm going to write about it and I'm going to just do it.

Helena de Groot: Do you want to read "Homework?"

Rosanna Young Oh: Oh, sure. The epigraph is from a movie called Angel, and it's spoken by Angel's school teacher: "Your homework was to describe where you live. Unless I'm mistaken, you do not live in a 'great house cherished by the gods, 'but over your mother's grocery shop."

Yeah. "Homework."

I wrote in Mrs. Katz's fifth-grade class

in Jericho, Long Island, this short answer

for homework: "It's been busy for the past

few weeks at home because of Yom Kippur.

I stay behind the register to bag

the groceries. My dad wakes up at one

to buy fish in the Bronx. Sometimes I gag

if he smells bad. When mom's store chores are done,

her hands feel rough from rose thorns and steel wool."

I got a check-plus-plus for my concreteness.

The teacher wrote in red, "Your friend at school

can learn from you, present this after recess."

So I obeyed. A boy's life cut me through.

Should I pretend my stories are untrue?

Helena de Groot: Rosanna Young Oh's debut collection is titled The Corrected Version. You can also find her work in publications such as Best New Poets, Harvard Review Online, Blackbird, The Hopkins Review and 32 Poems. She's received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and New York State Writers Institute. Her poetry was also the subject of a solo exhibition at the Queens Historical Society, where she was an artist in residence. To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Zickefoose and Eric Van Vista. I'm Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.