What happens when the people who connect us to a cultural identity disappear? Grace Loh Prasad’s debut memoir, The Translator’s Daughter, is a delicately wrought reckoning with her Taiwanese identity and its dependence on her parents. Born in Taiwan, Loh Prasad is just 2 years old when a tangential association with a blacklisted missionary family motivates her parents to seek refuge elsewhere. Her father receives a fortuitous job offer in New Jersey, and off the family goes, a move that would end up being pivotal for the author.

“We grew up American by accident,” she writes, “wayward seeds on distant shores.”

They eventually make it back to Taiwan, but too late for Loh Prasad, who settles in California for college and remains there. From then on, she exists in a state untethered from her parents, Taiwan, and the extended family’s mother tongue of Taiwanese Hokkien, a language that slipped from her grasp as soon as her feet touched foreign soil. With only annual visits to sustain her, Loh Prasad writes that she sees part of herself diminish with disuse:

“My Taiwanese persona was stashed away decades ago, gathering dust, no longer useful, and not much more than a memory.”

Still, that persona lives on so long as her parents do, and therein lies the memoir’s beating heart and its aching center of grief. Loh Prasad’s admiration and love for them is palpable in these pages as she describes her father’s fluency in four languages and his lifelong work of Bible translation that led him all over the world. Her mother, a professor of theology and Christian art, is no less accomplished, but she is additionally the nucleus of the family, the one who remembers all the important milestones, buying the gifts and picking out the perfect accompanying card and giftwrap.

Both parents act as the conduit for language and culture and smoothing away the sharp corners of otherness that living in America has given Loh Prasad. Despite their protective buffer, she is too astute to see the cultural disconnect as anything but the loss that it is. “I am forced to acknowledge what has been lost,” she writes, “a family, a language, a way of life, an identity…the unlived life, the person who might have been, if things had turned out differently.”

And then Loh Prasad finds herself in yet more unfamiliar territory: the land of grief. Alzheimer’s takes hold of her mother, bringing with it night wanderings that end in injury and Loh Prasad’s endless guilt as she must hear about these incidents from her home in California via email from extended family in Taiwan.

Through such incidents, Loh Prasad poses agonizing questions about her filial responsibility that have no answer. From afar, she hears scattered details of her mother’s decline, while each annual visit tells her just how much worse the truth really is. The eventual loss is devastating, but her father’s decline from Parkinson’s is what, in Loh Prasad’s telling, fully seals her fate of dislocation:

“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?”

It’s a question that lingers at the end of this memoir. Loh Prasad writes with quiet confidence as she probes her past. In the book’s 23 chapters, she often repeats facts and events already detailed, an effect that is not so much redundance as reinforcement, as if telling herself her own story enough times will net her not only her identity, but her family, her country, her roots, her place of belonging — herself entirely.

The immigrant experience is sometimes touted as a blessing in an increasingly globalized world where being a cultural chameleon is the new currency. To speak multiple languages, to be at home in multiple places, is to be a citizen of the world. Loh Prasad, however, tells the story of how it was and is for her, a story that reflects the voices of those who are not so much confidently straddling cultures as stuck in the fissure between them, grasping for the lost hands that once held theirs.

Priyanka Champaneri lived and studied in Taiwan in the summer of 2023. She is a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow and the author of The City of Good Death, her debut novel.

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