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Grace Loh Prasad, The Translator’s Daughter, The Ohio State University Press, 2024. 272 pgs.

Grief occurs in many forms. There’s the mourning of a loved one who has passed away, but there’s also the time leading up to this loss; a fatal diagnosis; a loss of autonomy; or a geographical separation that makes it impossible to see a loved one again. Grace Loh Prasad writes about all these forms of grief in her stunning memoir The Translator’s Daughter against a backdrop for a longing of home after her family goes into exile.

Prasad’s parents came from a long lineage of Christian clergy in Taiwan. They moved to the United States in the early 1960s for graduate work at the Princeton Theological Seminary and planned to return to Taiwan after earning their doctorates. And they did move back for a while. But when Prasad was only two years old and her brother seven, their parents had to leave Taiwan—which was still under martial law and would be for another two decades—because of their friendship with outspoken opponents of the Chiang Kai-shek dictatorship. This exile would differentiate Prasad from her parents and grandparents; she would never live in Taiwan as they had.

Her memoir begins with a harrowing scene in the year 2000 that will resonate with anyone who has arrived in a country without a visa or a valid passport and finds themselves in a state of limbo. Before leaving for Taiwan to visit her parents from her home in the San Francisco Bay Area, Prasad mistakenly grabs an expired passport. The China Airlines ticket counter staff in San Francisco don’t ask for her passport and the expired date isn’t noticed until she lands in Taipei and is going through customs and immigration. This scene is a striking one because it shows Prasad’s close proximity to her parents on the other side of the arrivals hall and to her extended family beyond that in Taipei, yet she feels a world away until she can somehow get someone back in San Francisco to put her valid passport on a plane to Taiwan before she’s deported.

There’s nothing romantic or nostalgic about sleeping overnight in an airport holding area, but this scene is chilling because what Prasad experienced probably would not happen today. Most people now have mobile phones and therefore instant connection to the outside, even half a world away. Prasad instead depended back then on phone cards and pay phones and there were no instant answers as there are today. And boarding a plane with the wrong passport is probably less common post-9/11 with increased airport security around the world.

It was also a different time in Taiwan. In 2000, the year in which this opening scene takes place, there is great excitement about the elections in Taiwan. Prasad briefly meets Chen Shui-bian when he’s running for president. He ends up winning and becomes the first non-KMT president of Taiwan. Even a decade before that, no one could have imagined Taiwan would have direct presidential elections, which happened for the first time in 1996. She vividly captures a time that people now look back on as history.

While Prasad’s memoir certainly tackles her state of limbo when it comes to home—Taiwan, the US, and Hong Kong at different stages of her life—grief is central to her story. She hints at grief as she notices her mother’s failing memory and when her relatives report that her mother has been wandering outside her home. It’s difficult to understand onset dementia as it happens so family members often don’t realise when their loved ones first start experiencing the condition. Prasad’s mother is later diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

I liked how Prasad so eloquently puts into words how it’s often not the actual passing away, but a parent’s personality that’s whittled away by dementia that is most painful for close family members.

Part of it was that I didn’t want to admit—to myself or anyone else—that despite our best efforts, things were getting worse. So I swallowed this knowledge like a razor blade, thinking I would rather bleed invisibly that disturb anyone else with this nightmare.

Sadly, Prasad experiences more grief in the years to come after her mother’s death. Throughout the book she writes about her father’s work as a translator of the Bible. I found it fascinating to learn how he and other translators took a text that was originally written in Hebrew or Greek and interpreted it first into either Chinese or English and then translated that interpretation into an indigenous language in Taiwan or China. When Prasad’s father stops being able to speak clearly due to Parkinson’s disease, this loss is devastating.

All my life, my dad’s voice was enough for both of us. He was the one who always spoke for me, translated for me, eased my passage across borders, provided the bridge I needed without my having to ask. As the translator’s daughter, I was safe, I was accounted for, I never had to worry about being stranded. But what happens when the translator can no longer speak?

Her grief ultimately leads to strengthened bonds with her husband and young son, and the home they’ve created for themselves in the Bay Area.

The Translator’s Daughter was a delight to read and Prasad’s writing shines on the page. The only thing I wished she would have addressed more was her decade living in Hong Kong starting from the late 1970s when her family moved there for her parents’ jobs. Hong Kong, like Taiwan and China before 1949, has a long history with Christianity and associated schools and hospitals. I wondered in which capacities her parents worked and how Prasad navigated what she briefly describes as fitting in physically but not linguistically. This part of her story may have seemed like a tangent or diversion, but I wanted to know more. Perhaps her Hong Kong decade will turn into another book or an article.

How to cite: Blumberg-Kason, Susan. “Stunning Memoir: Grace Loh Prasad’s 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑇𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑠𝑙𝑎𝑡𝑜𝑟’𝑠 𝐷𝑎𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑡𝑒𝑟.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 29 Jul. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/07/29/daughter.

Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair With China Gone Wrong. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books‘ China Blog, Asian Jewish Life, and several Hong Kong anthologies. She received an MPhil in Government and Public Administration from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Blumberg-Kason now lives in Chicago and spends her free time volunteering with senior citizens in Chinatown. (Photo credit: Annette Patko) [Susan Blumberg-Kason and ChaJournal.]