Grace Loh Prasad interviewed by Susan Kiyo Ito in CRAFT
Read excerpts from The Translator’s Daughter on Longreads, Lit Hub, and The Rumpus
Read an interview with Grace Loh Prasad in Write or Die
“The product of two decades of work, this moving memoir by Bay Area writer Grace Loh Prasad explores a life lived in-between: split by family migrations from Taiwan to the United States and back again, divided by languages and bonds lost and found.” —Hannah Bae, San Francisco Chronicle
“A compelling and poignant story that sheds light on Taiwanese culture and recent history. Essential for readers interested in Taiwan in specific or immigration memoirs in general.” —Joshua Wallace, Library Journal
“Prasad’s memoir is a tender tribute to her multilingual parents and a sensitive evocation of life as part of the Asian diaspora.” —Katie Noah Gibson, Shelf Awareness
“I love how memoir engages with the art of looking back, of trying to understand who we were, where we truly come from, and how we got to where we are. In The Translator’s Daughter, Grace Loh Prasad looks back with such thoughtfulness, care, and wonder. This is a searching, heartfelt memoir about family, communication, loss, and the very idea of origin stories.” —Beth Nguyen, author of Owner of a Lonely Heart
“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. … Prasad writes with quiet confidence as she probes her past.” —Priyanka Champaneri, Washington Independent Review of Books
“The Translator’s Daughter is a poignant memoir about the joy, sadness, struggle, and complexities of being an immigrant.” —Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews
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.
Grace Loh Prasad writes frequently on the topics of diaspora and belonging. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, Longreads, The Offing, Hyperallergic, Catapult, Ninth Letter, KHÔRA, and elsewhere. She is a member of The Writers Grotto and Seventeen Syllables, an Asian American Pacific Islander writers’ collective. She lives in the Bay Area.
Contents
Author’s Note
Year of the Dragon, Part 1
Album
Gaining Face
Year of the Dragon, Part 2
The Pig Festival
Projections
Seasons of Scrabble and Mahjong
Going Home
Vortex
Another Incident
A Seed Doesn’t Choose Where It Falls
Allegories
Last Time in Bangkok
Unbridgeable
What David Bowie Taught Me about Art, Death, and Letting Go
Double Life
Mooncake
Feathers from Home and Other Family Heirlooms
Uncertain Ground
The Orca and the Spider: On Motherhood, Loss, and Community
A Book from the Sky
Unfinished Translation
One Day You’ll Need This
Acknowledgments
Grace Loh Prasad interviewed on Politico
Listen to Grace Loh Prasad on the Academic Life podcast
Read an interview with Grace Loh Prasad in The Offing
Listen to Grace Loh Prasad read from The Translator’s Daughter on KALW-FM
Read about The Translator’s Daughter in the Immigrant Strong newsletter
“The Translator’s Daughter is a stunning tribute to the complexities of growing up as a third-culture kid, an honest and moving chronicle of the ‘abundance and loss’ of living across languages and continents.” —Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Green Island
“You can really feel the two decades Prasad put into this memoir. This is careful, considered prose and thought from a writer to both anticipate and learn from. A marvelous debut.” —Matthew Salesses, author of The Sense of Wonder
“The Translator’s Daughter moves from Taipei to San Francisco and back as if they were rooms of the same house, telling the story of a woman discovering her roots while simultaneously planting new ones as she creates a life on her own terms. Prasad’s sharp intelligence and fierce love for her family are on every page of this beautiful book.” —Grace Talusan, author of The Body Papers
“Grace Loh Prasad interrogates the distance between the homes we have and the homes we long for with the compassion and precision of one who has spent her entire life attuned to language. ‘We were always half a world apart,’ she writes; her essays bridge that gap in innovative ways, using family photos, mythical women, and Taiwanese films. Moving fluidly between the personal and the political, this memoir is a remarkable addition to Taiwanese American literature.” —Jami Nakamura Lin, author of The Night Parade
“The Translator’s Daughter is a soulful and profound meditation on family, diaspora, and grief. How do we construct a life far away from our loved ones, and what do we lose? How do we preserve all that we have been given? Grace Loh Prasad tackles these questions with honesty and beauty, while also illuminating Taiwan’s culture, history, and hard-won path to democracy. I savored this book.” —Michelle Kuo, author of Reading with Patrick
“Readers who have lost loved ones may find their own experiences affirmed in Prasad’s narration. … This is a memoir worth reading for those interested in immigration patterns and realistic portrayals of parent-child relationships.” —Mochi Mag
“Prasad combs through her memories to wrestle with the consequences of migration, grief, and identity. It is a universally relatable experience from a unique perspective.…Prasad lays bare the helplessness of trying to care for her ailing parents in her alien homeland. Through the beauty of her writing, readers gain insight into the layers of grief immigrants’ children wrestle with when parents die.” —Tony Tian-Ren Lin, The Christian Century
“Grief occurs in many forms. … Grace Loh Prasad writes about all these forms of grief in her stunning memoir … The Translator’s Daughter was a delight to read and Prasad’s writing shines on the page.” —Susan Blumberg-Kason, Cha Journal
“A sharp and generous documentation of the ways we navigate our relationships to home and self ... The Translator’s Daughter is a lyrical and moving journey of the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of making and finding home.” —Vika Mujumdar, Full Stop
“This compelling memoir-in-essays tackles feeling like an outsider, forced migration, belonging, and most prominently, the language barriers that build walls around us ... There is a longing and wistfulness in Prasad’s writing.” —Kim Liao, Electric Lit, “11 Books by Taiwanese and Taiwanese American Women”
