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About The Translator’s Daughter

A Taiwanese American writer unfurls themes of memory, dislocation, language, and loss to tell a unique story about reclaiming one's heritage while living in a diaspora.

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 is the author of The Translator’s Daughter (Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press, 2024), a debut memoir about living between languages, navigating loss, and the search for belonging. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Longreads, The Offing, Hyperallergic, Catapult, KHÔRA, and elsewhere. A member of the Writers Grotto and the AAPI writers collective Seventeen Syllables, Prasad lives in the Bay Area.

Melissa Hung is a writer and journalist. She is the founding editor in chief of Hyphen. Her essays and reported stories have appeared in NPR, Vogue, Longreads, Catapult, and the anthologies Body Language and Disability Intimacy. She grew up in Houston, Texas, the eldest child of immigrants. After two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area, she now lives in New York City.