[Mad Creek Books; 2024]
In The Translator’s Daughter, a meditation on the languages, places, and landscapes that make us, Grace Loh Prasad narrativizes her diasporic journey from Taiwan to the United States, and then to Hong Kong and back. Aware of how diasporic belonging resists straightforward narrativization, Prasad renders with clarity how time, with its ceaseless cruelty, inevitably impacts one’s relationship with one’s parents in diaspora. Framed through the lens of her shifting relationship with her parents across geographies, The Translator’s Daughter is a startling, aching account of Prasad’s own relationship to home, always fluid, never static.
In lyrical essays that utilize the documentative modes of photographs and diary entries, Prasad charts the history that brings her to the present: Born in Taiwan in 1969, Prasad moved with her family to the US at the age of two, and then to Hong Kong. Prasad and her brother both eventually returned to the United States for college, during which time martial law was lifted and their parents returned to Taiwan. While Prasad put down roots in California—a job, marriage, a son—she was also forced to reckon with the reality of having aging parents far away in Taiwan as her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Amidst this changing relationship to her parents and to Taiwan, Prasad, who had eventually forgotten Taiwanese in diaspora had to reconcile her own lost Taiwanese self against her present self.
Prasad opens the memoir with the section “Year of the Dragon, Part 1,” which features her account of a trip to Taiwan she took in 2000 impeded at every turn by bureaucratic obstacles; Prasad first misses her flight, manages to get it changed to the following day, and then travels to Taiwan, where the authorities inform her that her passport has expired, and she must have a current passport with her in the next twenty-four hours or she will have to return to the United States. Prasad eventually manages to get the passport to Taiwan, having to spend a night waiting in the airport. This anecdote, delivered with the clarity only memory allows, demonstrates to us the heart of the intertwined personal story and larger historical narrative at the heart of this; Prasad chronicles through this both the tense encounters in the liminal contact zones of her everyday life, but also an account of what it means to be a diasporic daughter to parents in a different geography. With an unflinching generosity, Prasad examines the ways in which even in diaspora, her and her parents’ caretaking of each other remains.
Prasad’s relationship with her parents is central arc through which The Translator’s Daughter takes its shape. In California, the geography of her everyday life, Prasad is forced to reckon with her parents’ aging in a distant geography, unable to help with their day-to-day caretaking. In “Going Home,” Prasad examines the tensions of her life as she writes of an instance where, amidst her memory slowly fading, her mother left her home, with her father unable to follow her due to a meeting, and Prasad herself in California. She writes of the tensions of being away: “In a way, it wasn’t my choice to make; I grew up American and barely spoke any Taiwanese or Mandarin. I would never be able to comfortably live in Taiwan.” Her mother is found, but Prasad remains on the outside, forced to reckon with the reality of what this loss of language means for her—she is always away from Taiwan, both geographically and emotionally, a fraught tension shaping her relationship to this geography perpetually.
In “A Seed Doesn’t Choose Where It Falls,” Prasad utilizes the third person to narrate a broader, far-reaching biography, taking us in seven pages across the varied landscapes of her life, forcing a distance between her voice as a writer and her selfhood negotiated against the varied geographies. Here pop culture, food, and language coalesce, but notably, Prasad tracks the progression of her self against the natural environment of the houses she grows up in across Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the US. Of a tree she used to climb growing up that she later visited, Prasad writes: “It was much taller now, but when she went to climb it, she found that the branches had multiplied and thickened, and she could no longer maneuver easily in between them. It is the first loss she remembers.” In the distance of “she” that Prasad allows herself here, counting loss is the way to track the progression of time, when her two lives are, in many ways, mutually exclusive.
Central in all of this is Prasad’s relationship to the outside world, which becomes her lens through which to understand her relationship to Taiwan and her parents. Prasad writes: “But now I feel a strange nostalgia for moon cakes because of what they symbolize: family reunions, sharing the togetherness of many generations.” Food becomes the vehicle through which she can negotiate the complicated relationships she shares with home, something that can make tangible the grief and loss of both home and family, and the wide-ranging relationship she has to place. Hope is ever-present, as her community in Taiwan, made up of aunts, uncles, cousins, help her navigate the bureaucratic systems and language of Taiwan, taking care of her as she takes care of her parents, both during the end of their lives, and after their deaths, even as Prasad herself reckons with the tension of not being able to be present herself.
In one section, “Projections,” Prasad blends film and diary, switching between meditations on films that allow her to read anew her own relationships to place, family, and home, and diaristic entries marked by date. Focusing on films from the geographies that shape her—Taiwan and the US—including, among others, A City of Sadness (1989), First Person Plural (2000), Murmur of Youth (1997), and Jam (1998), Prasad studies the recognition she finds in film through its visual nature. Examining specific scenes and moments from these films and their intersection with her own affective experiences of these geographies, Prasad writes: “Though Taiwanese is my first language, I haven’t spoken it since I was five, and the sound of it transports me to another world, a way of being I can barely remember.” Prasad, in these encounters with film, must reckon with the direction her life has taken, the way diaspora has rendered all geographies other for her, has split her selfhood into two. She goes on to refer to film as “the music of dreams,” and in reading these, Prasad’s imaginative understanding of her relationship to diaspora comes sharply into focus—archival through the diary entries, juxtaposed against the fantastical of the dream-like nature of language and the cinematic quality of film, Prasad draws a picture for us that at once blurs and pulls into focus the sharply drawn images of her own life, translating it into language for us as readers. She writes in the same section of her relationship to Taiwan: “Because in opening my eyes to this other existence—finding this other side of myself—I am forced to acknowledge what has been lost: a family, a language, a way of life, an identity.” Here, Prasad renders into language the speculative pasts and futures inherent to diaspora. For Prasad, what is lost can also be found, reclaimed, in dream, in film, in this projection.
Aware always of language and how it is experienced, Prasad’s relationship to language remains central as she examines the geographies that make her. The loss in her life of Taiwanese, and her later efforts to reclaim it are central to how she understands her own identity as the daughter of a translator. Prasad writes of her frustration at being away from her parents as they age: “Looking back, I now see the shadow for what it was: anger at having to choose between a life with my parents in Taiwan, or a life of my own in California. I could not have both.” Language and translation become the material ways through which Prasad understands her diasporic longing; her lack of Taiwanese is the vehicle through which she is forced outside of Taiwan, despite her familial belonging. Prasad’s relationship with her parents is thereby rendered for her only through language, only through English, the shared language she can access. Translation, for Prasad, becomes an act with tense history: It becomes the vehicle through which her parents are accessible to her, but also the thing that breaks her away from Taiwan, despite her father’s job as a translator.
Towards the end of the book, Prasad writes: “This eternal ache is what it means to live in diaspora. Home, for me, is not an answer but a question.” The Translator’s Daughter is a sharp and generous documentation of the ways we navigate our relationships to home and self, the way we seek lost selves, futures, pasts. An exacting and careful rendering of the places and people that help us make our lives across oceans and continents, The Translator’s Daughter is a lyrical and moving journey of the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of making and finding home.
Vika Mujumdar was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst, where she is currently an MFA student in Fiction. Her work has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, the Chicago Review of Books, Girls on Tops READ ME, the Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She edits Liminal Transit Review.
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