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[FIRST IMPRESSIONS] “On Grief, Diaspora, and Grace Loh Prasad’s The Translator’s Daughter”by Rebekah Chan

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

It had been two months since my father died from Parkinson’s disease when I came across Grace Loh Prasad’s 2016 essay, “What David Bowie Taught Me About Art, Death and Letting Go.”

She led me through many other griefs I had yet to articulate, such as diasporic longing.

I read the essay, which recounts the moments of her final visit with her father, who also had Parkinson’s disease, in Taiwan, and likens his death to the journey in Bowie’s song, “Space Oddity.” I could not help but feel a sense of kinship with her. This affinity compelled me to read the rest of her essays in her memoir, The Translator’s Daughter. There, she led me through many other griefs I had yet to articulate, such as diasporic longing.

Prasad’s memoir is a love letter to her parents, Dr I-Jin Loh, a pioneering Bible translator in Taiwan, and Dr Lucy Tian-Hiong Loh, who was also a prominent member of the Taiwanese Christian community. The tribute is immediately apparent. Old photobooth photographs of Prasad as a young girl with her father appear beneath the dedication: “Thank you for making me everything that I am and for teaching me to love where I came from.”

Accordingly, the chapters of her memoir reveal where she came from and the difficulties of loving that place from afar. Born in Taiwan, Prasad leaves her country of birth for America with her family in the early 1970s, fearing persecution under the Kuomintang dictatorship. This event alters the trajectory of her entire life, and the separation from her motherland is one to which she repeatedly returns. Even the epigraph contemplates the plane journey that first carried her far away from her homeland:

… Words exchanged in a language I already know deep inside… Half a turn on the earth’s axis… Later they tell me It was for my own good: They traded my tongue for my wings.

Her memoir begins with another plane journey, this time from San Francisco Airport to Chiang Kai-shek International Airport in 2000. In fact, the memoir comprises many plane journeys and airport scenes that unfold between Taiwan and the United States. This commute becomes a physical representation of the two lives, two cultures, and two languages that Prasad must navigate throughout her life, particularly after her ageing parents return to Taiwan while she remains in America.

In the opening chapter, exchanges with airport employees over her expired passport reveal her precise predicament, or diasporic positionality:

“I’m sorry, can you say that in English?”
“Are you a Taiwanese Citizen?”
“I was born here, but I was two years old when my family moved to the US. So I guess not.” 
“What’s the matter don’t you speak Mandarin?”

Subsequent chapters and visits move between memories of her parents and childhood and encounters with her ailing father. This act of recollection is essential to both the book and her grief, as Prasad reflects: “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.”

The structure of the book is non-linear, frequently touching on particular events before returning to them and expanding their meaning, much like the waves of grief and memory. In shorter thematic essays, Prasad attempts to make sense of her own understanding of home. “I live in a constant state of longing to be reunited with Demeter, my mother, motherland, mother tongue. My life is defined by this rupture.” As the memoir unfolds and she loses her entire immediate family one by one, the magnitude of this rupture becomes increasingly clear.

Language is also a central theme. Her father’s scholarly linguistic abilities and achievements are often invoked in contrast to her own life and her feelings of linguistic inadequacy. Not only did he translate the Bible with a working knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, “but he was fluent in at least four languages (Taiwanese, Japanese, Mandarin, and English).” Who, then, would translate and connect her to her homeland now? Her loss is immeasurable.

“This eternal ache is what it means to live in diaspora. Home, for me, is not an answer but a question.”

Prasad’s gentle and honest writing came to me at a time when I was also attempting to come to terms with my own loss and my longing for culture and language, elements for which parents are often conduits. She wrote this memoir over a span of twenty years and guides us through her life, from a two-year-old who left Taiwan to her present-day motherhood in America. Towards the end, I marvelled at the hard-won wisdom she acquired through a remarkable life marked by loss and yearning across continents. We begin to sense an acceptance of, and ownership over, her diasporic longing. “This eternal ache is what it means to live in diaspora. Home, for me, is not an answer but a question,” she writes. Perhaps, for some, especially those scattered beyond their homeland, home will always remain a question.

^{How to cite: Chan, Rebekah. “On Grief, Diaspora, and Grace Loh Prasad’s The Translator’s Daughter.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 7 Feb. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/02/07/the-daughter.}

Rebekah Chan is from Toronto and has also lived in Singapore, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, where she completed her MFA at City University in Hong Kong. While in Hong Kong she served as Editor-in-Chief for her MFA legacy anthology, Afterness: Literature from the News Transnational Asia, and held the position of Community Manager for the Hong Kong Writers Circle. In Japan she wrote for the lifestyle magazine Tokyo Weekender. Her literary work appears, or is forthcoming, in Tupelo Quarterly, Blood Orange Review, Wild Roof Journal, Reed Magazine, and more. Rebekah is currently based in Toronto and writes about loss and belonging. Her writing is also supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. You can find her at @bx_writenow on Instagram. [All contributions by Rebekah Chan.]