asianamlitfans | A Review of Grace Loh Prasad’s The Translator’s Daughter (Mad Creek Books, 2024) (Reply)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Well, as I continue trying to balance all that speculative fiction reading, I’ve been doing, I’ve been turning to creative nonfiction. This imprint called Mad Creek Books over at Ohio State University Press has been putting out some high-quality publications in creative nonfiction. Such is the case with Grace Loh Prasad’s The Translator’s Daughter (Mad Creek Books, 2024), which is an outstanding memoir that covers her transnational life, the life of her parents, and the bonds she continues to construct in the wake of the deaths of family members. Let’s let the official marketing description give us more context: “Born in Taiwan, Grace Loh Prasad was two years old when the threat of political persecution under Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship drove her family to the United States, setting her up to become an “accidental immigrant.” The family did not know when they would be able to go home again; this exile lasted long enough for Prasad to forget her native Taiwanese language and grow up American. Having multilingual parents—including a father who worked as a translator—meant she never had to develop the fluency to navigate Taiwan on visits. But when her parents moved back to Taiwan permanently when she was in college and her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she recognized the urgency of forging a stronger connection with her birthplace before it was too late. As she recounts her journey to reclaim her heritage in The Translator’s Daughter, Prasad unfurls themes of memory, dislocation, and loss in all their rich complexity. The result is a unique immigration story about the loneliness of living in a diaspora, the search for belonging, and the meaning of home.”

This description perfectly encapsulates the basis for this memoir. Prasad’s father engages in translations of the Bible, so Prasad in effect always has someone in her family who can help her with linguistic deficits anytime she is in Taiwan. The opening of the memoir is remarkable for the story Prasad relays about being detained in Taiwan for accidentally bringing an expired passport. She wasn’t flagged before getting into the country, and Taiwan has very strict rules. Prasad would have to get her passport somehow flown to her within 24 hours or she would be forced to leave. Given the length of the flight and the challenges of international travel, she does anything she can to get the passport to her, which includes trying to flag down a locksmith and even calling upon an ex-boyfriend to find the passport in her apartment and to get it on a plane to her. I can’t recall whether or not she had to pay for a seat on a flight to get it to Taiwan, but I am hoping not. Despite these instabilities, she ends up being able to stay, and things go on as best as they can. Yet things do eventually take a turn: her mother’s Alzheimer’s begins to worsen, while her father struggles to as the primary caretaker. Prasad has to find a way to balance her commitments to her growing family in the United States as with her responsibilities to her aging parents. Another wrench is thrown into the transnational equation when her brother is unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer and dies in less than a year. Then, her mother passes away, not from the complications of Alzheimer’s but from a late-stage diagnosis of colon cancer. Writing about her mother’s illness progression, Prasad notes, “I, however, cannot reverse the decline. I have no magic that will physically bring my mom back to wholeness, back to life. My only choice is to re-member her, to re-constitute her, through my writing” (141). This moment is of course one of the pivotal ways that creative writing offers solace in the face of loss, however partial this salve may be. Prasad’s father will also eventually succumb to various complications that arise from Parkinson’s, leaving Prasad without any nuclear family anchors to Taiwan, even though she knows that this homeland calls not only to her but also to her children. One of the most affecting chapters then is the last one, which takes the epistolary form of a letter to her son. Prasad gives her son a kind of map for the places she knows he will be interested in, the places that have been formative for their family. In this way, Prasad prepares for the time when she may not be there to guide him and thus acknowledges the limits that we all face on Earth. An emotionally-wrenching and beautifully crafted memoir.

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