Becoming the Translator’s Daughter

The problem with being a “third culture kid” when languages aren’t handed down is the subject of Grace Loh Prasad’s new book, The Translator’s Daughter: A Memoir, out March 5 from Ohio State University Press. It’s a topic many in Hawai‘i will find familiar, only, in Prasad’s case, the typical role of child translating the new English-speaking culture of the U.S. to immigrant parents was reversed by her globe-trotting polyglot father’s job as a translator: Grace was usually the odd one out.

Here, in this essay, Prasad traces her process of discovery of the limitations of her upbringing even as she understands their origin in the deep affection and care of her father. She also brings to light the fascinating publishing empire her father worked for, one that few have ever heard about. —D.W.

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Growing up as a young child in New Jersey, I did not understand what my dad did for a living. All I knew was that he would disappear for ten hours a day and frequently went on long trips to faraway places. Sometimes he would drive the sixty miles from East Windsor to his office in New York City; other times he would take a Greyhound Bus that would drop him off at Port Authority and bring him back around dinnertime, when I would go with my mom to pick him up at the bus stop outside the Tiger Deli with its winking neon sign. 

Over time I came to understand that he worked for the United Bible Societies. As a child, I thought of UBS as a building—a tall office tower on Broadway, the most important street in New York, around the corner from Lincoln Center and its tiled plaza with a fountain in the middle. My mom also worked outside the home but only part-time, so she could keep an eye on my brother Ted and me while my dad devoted himself to his career. 

I was a toddler when my dad was recruited by noted linguist Dr. Eugene A. Nida to work for UBS, the parent organization for Bible Societies around the world. At the time, my dad was a respected professor and the youngest-ever dean of Taiwan Theological Seminary in Taipei. He was the first Taiwanese to have a PhD in Biblical Studies from Princeton Theological Seminary, where he and my mom had been graduate students in the 1960s. Along with his language skills—he was by then fluent in Taiwanese, Japanese, Mandarin, and English, with academic knowledge of Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic—this made him a perfect candidate to do outreach and Bible translation projects in East Asia where UBS was trying to expand. 

The invitation to work for UBS came at a critical time. My parents were happy to be back in Taiwan after their sojourn in the States; although they enjoyed working as professors and raising their young children among extended family, they did not feel entirely at ease. They had reason to believe that the Kuomintang (KMT) was spying on them; Taiwan was under martial law and Chiang Kai-shek ruthlessly pursued perceived political enemies in his quest to maintain power and one day regain control of the mainland. My parents were not openly political, but they were targets because of their close friendship with Milo and Judy Thornberry, an American missionary couple who also taught at the seminary and were friends with the Taiwanese dissident Peng Ming-min. After Peng made a dramatic escape from Taiwan and sought asylum abroad in 1970, the Thornberrys were deported back to the U.S. even though the KMT could not prove their involvement. My dad’s job offer from UBS a year later provided a convenient excuse for us to leave Taiwan. 

Ted, who was seven at the time, later told me that we left in the middle of the night, which certainly makes for a better story about fleeing an authoritarian government, but there are photos of us squinting in bright sunlight at Songshan Airport on the day we left, surrounded by family and well-wishers who had come to see us off. I believe both are true; that, despite the smiling photos, we left under duress because we knew what the KMT could do. Rather than strike directly, the KMT silenced their critics by hurting the people they loved. We could not take any chances; it was safer for everyone if we left. 

I was two and a half when we arrived in New Jersey. Having lived in Princeton for almost a decade as graduate students, my parents already knew how to get around and were comfortably fluent in English. This is where our story deviates from the typical American immigrant narrative. My parents didn’t emigrate to escape war or poverty, nor did they go with the intention of bringing over family members and permanently settling down. In some ways they were more fortunate: they didn’t have to give up their professional ambitions to work in service jobs they were overqualified for, just so Ted and I could take advantage of better opportunities in America.

 So many Asian American stories—from The Joy Luck Club to Everything Everywhere All At Once—center around the generational conflict between the first-generation parents who sacrificed everything and the children who are under enormous pressure to succeed in order to repay that debt. Our story was different; my parents’ struggle to assimilate was already behind them by the time we returned to New Jersey in 1971, which paved the way for my brother and me to simply grow up American. 

One of the defining experiences for many second-generation kids is being the first in their families to be educated in English and then having to translate for their parents, serving as intermediaries for any official communication with schools, banks, medical providers, and other institutions. For me, it was the other way around: When we left the U.S. and moved abroad, my parents were the ones who translated and communicated for me, who had the language mastery and cultural knowledge that made mobility possible.

Grace with her father, brother and grandmother on the day they left Taiwan, 1971.

When I was six years old, my maternal grandmother came to visit us in New Jersey for a few months after my grandfather passed away. In the mid-1970s, it was still rare for Taiwanese people who were not students to travel abroad. A-ma was tall and elegant with short, permed hair and prominent cheekbones. She was well-dressed and always wore jewelry and high heels. A-ma had a talent for making things, including a bright crimson cardigan that she knit for me with bows on the pockets. I wore it for years until my wrists extended past the sleeves and the buttons strained over my skinny chest. She was also an expert at making silk flower brooches and corsages, which we would wrap carefully in tissue paper and store in Danish cookie tins. 

One of my happiest memories is of A-ma introducing me to her favorite candy while we sat side-by-side on the dark green sofa watching TV. She was fond of Kraft caramels, soft buttery cubes that came in a one-pound bag with a few chocolate caramels thrown in for good measure. A-ma brought a sense of refinement to our humble apartment in suburban New Jersey. She did not speak English, yet her presence felt completely natural in our household.

One day she wanted to buy some milk to go with her coffee. We were alone at home–my parents were both working and Ted was at school. I took her by the hand and we walked up the hill to Krauszer’s, a small grocery store half a mile from our apartment and one of the only places I was allowed to walk to by myself. I used to go there to buy candy with the dimes and quarters I had saved up. The day I came in with A-ma, she put a quart of milk on the counter and looked at the clerk. He asked, “Is that all for you?” She paused for a long moment, then nodded and said, “Mmm.” I couldn’t tell if she understood or not. She held out her coin purse and I fished out enough to pay for the milk, and then we were on our way. Was I embarrassed? I had stood there mutely. I could have said “my grandma doesn’t speak English” but the truth is I didn’t know how to articulate what had happened. My parents spoke both English and Taiwanese at home, so this was the first time I was aware of a language barrier, of the potential for collision between my two worlds.

It is strange to look back now and realize that I was, for a brief period of my life, bilingual. I spoke both languages at that age, but like many kids who grow up in multicultural households, I didn’t think it was anything special. I wasn’t aware that the two languages were separate and not interchangeable. 

I came across a Polaroid from that time and my dad told me a funny story about it. In the photo, several men are sitting around our kitchen table playing cards. In the foreground on the right is one of my parents’ friends, a man with long hair, a shaggy beard, and clingy bell-bottom pants. He is drinking a beer. The scene looks very masculine and serious, except for a spot of color in the lower left corner: Me. My red and white ruffled dress and innocent expression clash with the rest of the photo, providing an unexpected note of sweetness, like a smear of jam on a roast beef sandwich. Upon seeing this image, my dad told me: Once, when you were little, you mixed up your English and Taiwanese. I gave you a dried plum to suck on and reminded you to spit out the pit. And you said, “I already pui’d.” 

“Pui” is Taiwanese for “spit out,” and I had conjugated it in English. My dad was quite amused by my linguistic inventiveness. I had jumbled up my languages, yet he understood me completely. 

When I started going to kindergarten, I stopped speaking Taiwanese. It wasn’t a conscious decision. My parents still spoke to me in Taiwanese but I began to answer back in English, the language I used at school and with my friends, the one I used out in the world. The change happened slowly and gradually without anyone noticing, the way helium leaks out of a balloon. My ability to speak Taiwanese diminished, then slipped away.

It wouldn’t have mattered if we had stayed in the States, but UBS had bigger plans for my dad. Not only was he a skilled translator and Bible scholar, he was also a respected consultant and manager who began to oversee large, collaborative translation efforts. For seven years he worked in the New York office of UBS. One of his first projects was serving as a translation consultant on Bibles for Native American and Canadian First Nations tribes. I still remember the gifts he brought me from his travels—a Native American doll with braids and a fringed suede dress, and a silver and turquoise cuff bracelet that I loved to wear. 

But my dad’s real impact came later. In 1978, after we became naturalized U.S. citizens, UBS transferred my dad to the Asia Pacific Regional Office and our family moved to Hong Kong. This allowed my dad to apply his training in Biblical Studies and translation to projects in the languages he knew best, and before long he was promoted to become the Asia Pacific Regional Coordinator, responsible for overseeing all UBS translation projects in the region. A 1980 article from an Australian newspaper, The Canberra Times, describes the enormous scope of his work: "Twenty-four translators coordinating about 300 Bible translation projects for a readership that is 60 percent illiterate are the responsibility of Dr. I-Jin Loh, coordinator for all United Bible Society translation projects in the Asia Pacific Region. Dr. Loh has been working with the UBS since 1971. Based in Hong Kong, his area of responsibility extends from the Marshall Islands to Lebanon and carries about half of the worldwide workload of the UBS."

Before settling down in our new home in Hong Kong, we took a long-awaited trip to Taiwan—my first time back since we left when I was two. By then I was nine years old and Ted was fourteen. Our extended family, while extremely kind and welcoming, could not conceal their shock that my brother and I had become foreigners. I could still understand a little Taiwanese, but the words felt funny on my tongue and I could no longer make the right sounds. Although it must have been uncomfortable, my parents defended us and explained patiently that it was not our fault that we had adopted the language and culture of the country we lived in. 

Still, I felt alien, disobedient, even ugly as it became clear to me that I did not meet people’s expectations. It was among my own relatives that I first felt a deep and irreversible sense of unbelonging.

Grace, mother and grandmother strawberry picking, New Jersey, 1970s.

Now that we had American passports, UBS could send my dad almost anywhere in the world. He spent two weeks out of every month attending meetings or conducting training in various Asian cities—Seoul, Jakarta, Tokyo, Manila, Bangkok—as well as Europe, Africa, and beyond. He traveled so much that he had to have extra pages added to his passports, which always felt like an overstuffed wallet.

When he came back from his trips he savored the comforts of home, released from the pressure of constant movement. But I suspect there was an inner restlessness, because his idea of relaxing was sitting in an armchair in our living room and looking through binoculars at all the airplanes arriving and departing from Kai-Tak International Airport, which we could see from our high-rise apartment building on Tin-Hau Temple Road.

Occasionally my dad would also aim the binoculars down the hill where he could see the bustling streets of North Point with its crowds of people, jumble of stores and signs, and an endless stream of buses, trams, and taxis. Our apartment building had a free shuttle that would take residents to North Point to do their shopping and errands, and we often went together as a father-daughter outing. When I was twelve or thirteen I would sometimes go by myself, and one time my dad told me that he had been looking through the binoculars and had seen me crossing the street. If I had been older I might have been annoyed, but at that age I was happy to have my dad looking out for me from a distance. Reflecting on this now, I’m filled with nostalgia for his protective gaze, for that feeling of shelter, safety, and love.

My dad routinely used several languages in his everyday work, which only intensified after taking the leadership role in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, I was having my first experiences with a language barrier and culture shock as a nine-year-old American kid suddenly transplanted to Hong Kong. My dad loved to tell the story of when we moved into our apartment. Almost everything was still in boxes, but we had some basic furniture and my parents managed to make a modest dinner of instant noodles in our still-unfamiliar kitchen. I remember he was in a good mood, saying “First meal, first meal!” as we sat down at the folding table to eat. Here’s the part that made him laugh: When I took my first bite I burst into tears, because the chewy wheat noodles were not at all like the soft white noodles I was used to. Forty years later, I still remember this taste and a feeling deep in my gut that I didn’t yet have the words for.

Ted and I attended Hong Kong International School where we could continue our studies under American teachers using an American curriculum. As a result, we socialized almost exclusively with Americans and other English-speaking expats while living in a thriving Chinese metropolis. Ironically, living in Hong Kong increased my dependence on English and drove me further away from Taiwanese. In New Jersey, we had been part of a Taiwanese American church and community so there were more opportunities to speak and hear Taiwanese. But we didn’t know any Taiwanese people in Hong Kong so the language receded from use, limited exclusively to my parents speaking to each other.

Gradually my parents were able to speak a fifth language—Cantonese, the main language spoken in Hong Kong. Although the written characters are the same, the pronunciation is completely different from either Taiwanese or Mandarin. My brother and I each picked up a bit of basic Cantonese so that we could bargain with street vendors and tell taxi drivers where we wanted to go, plus we also learned how to swear. Although our appearance allowed us to pass as locals, our ability to blend in ended as soon as we opened our mouths to speak.

Even though I lived in Hong Kong for a total of ten years, I identified as an expat—someone who did not expect to stay there long-term. It was only later that I learned the term “third-culture kid” which describes someone whose nationality is different from the parents’ place of origin, and who has spent formative years living abroad in another country or countries, leading to a layered and often complicated sense of identity.

Living in Hong Kong gave me a false sense of security that I could get by with English in a Chinese-speaking city; it was still a British crown colony at the time so all signage was bilingual and businesses that catered to an international clientele would have English-speaking staff. Hong Kong in the 1980s was far more cosmopolitan than Taipei; there were many more tourists as well as expats who lived there quite comfortably. Taiwan had fewer foreigners and less infrastructure to handle international travelers, and whenever we visited I counted on my parents to translate for me and show me around.

After graduating from high school, I never again lived under the same roof, or in the same country, as my parents. My mom came with me to California to help me enroll and get situated at U.C. Berkeley, but after that I was on my own. I visited them once a year, first in Hong Kong and then Taiwan after they moved back. I always stayed with them and never had to worry about meals or having to make plans—all of it was taken care of, and it was a relief to have a guide to help me get around and have a good time.

But things became harder when my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and my dad was consumed with her care while not being in very good health himself. This was when my extended family stepped in, and my various aunts and cousins filled the gaps and helped me do things that my parents would have otherwise arranged.

The truth is, I started to lose my parents long before they passed away. By the time of their last trip to the U.S. to attend my wedding in 2003, my mom’s memory loss was apparent. She was still in good spirits and could hold a conversation, but she kept repeating herself and could not remember anything we talked about. Although none of us wanted to admit it, she was like a child needing constant supervision, no longer trusted to make decisions or go anywhere alone. Her short attention span and inability to form complex thoughts meant she had zero opinions about my wedding dress, flowers, or catering choices, nor any advice to offer. My hopes for mother-daughter bonding at this time of immense change and celebration were not to be. She was still my mom, but she was no longer a parent I could count on for guidance.

With my dad, the decline was more gradual. He became a full-time caregiver for my mom as she slid deeper into dementia, which quickly became overwhelming and all-consuming. He had intended to spend his retirement writing and working on a few passion projects but had to curtail his plans significantly because my mom needed round-the-clock care. His free time evaporated and his well-being suffered from a near-constant state of worry and vigilance; now that my mom was no longer independent, he couldn’t be either.

Then, my brother who had been living in Thailand was diagnosed with advanced liver cancer and passed away less than a year later. My dad never expected to outlive his son, and by then my mom could no longer speak or interact with him so he bore his tremendous sadness mostly on his own. My dad’s younger brother, Uncle Ito, stepped in to make all the arrangements for my brother’s funeral in Bangkok which was a blessing, but it marked the beginning of my dad’s increasing frailty. He went from being the one who was in control and who was responsible for other people to being vulnerable and dependent.

Grace with father and brother Ted, New Jersey, 1970s.

My mom passed away four years after my brother, and again my uncle stepped in to help plan the funeral because my dad was completely overcome with grief. By then his Parkinson’s was so bad that he walked with difficulty and needed a wheelchair to get around. In the last two years of his life, my dad had numerous health crises and I flew to Taiwan each time, fearing the worst. The more incapacitated he became, the more I needed to make decisions and deal with the bureaucracy of his life in Taiwan, something I had no experience with.

When my mom was ill, my dad was the sole authority on what she needed and how to care for her. But now that he was the one in rapid decline, it was my turn to take care of him but I was not capable of advocating for him in the same way. I couldn’t confer with his doctors. I couldn’t fill out paperwork to renew prescriptions or make bank transfers. His eldest sister and her daughters—my cousins—along with hired caregivers provided a great deal of assistance during this time, which was crucial because I lived in California and could not be there myself.

Uncle Ito and Auntie Hui-chin helped by communicating and translating, ensuring that I had the latest information on my dad since his motor skills had declined so much that he could no longer use a phone or computer; for a while he even lost the ability to speak. My relatives did as much as they could but they could not do everything; by law I was the next of kin, and there were so many things that required my decision, my consent, and my signature. My aunt and cousins did their best to explain things to Uncle Ito, who lived in another city, so that he could explain them to me, but inevitably there was a lot of misunderstanding and frustration all around. The amount of help I needed—across a language barrier, geographic distance, and multiple time zones—so that I could do the right things for my dad, was exhausting both for them and for me.

In any other situation and any other time of my life, the person I would have consulted who would have known what to do, how to do it, and how to explain it in both Taiwanese and English, was my dad. There was no combination of my relatives and me that could fill that gap of knowledge and fluency, nor deploy it with the requisite patience and reassurance. How can you possibly understand what your life would be like without the sun when you have never known a day without it?

It was only then that I truly realized how bereft I was, how ill-equipped and unready for these challenges. All my life, my dad had been the one who served as a bridge, who translated for me and facilitated my participation and connection to Taiwan. When I was growing up, he didn’t want me to struggle so he always spoke for me. But the price was that I never learned to speak for myself. I realized that my dependence on my parents kept me in a childlike state whenever I was in Taiwan. No matter how old I was, or how successful and independent I was back in California, I would never have true autonomy in Taiwan without the language skills; I would always need their guidance and support. 

Without him, I was helpless—not only could I not do anything for him (without a great deal of assistance), but I couldn’t do anything for myself. In Taiwan my relatives mobilized to help me navigate various crises and deal with hospitals, banks, and government agencies. I appreciated this help immensely, but the downside of them automatically stepping in is that I never really learned how to ask for help. 

In Taiwan I didn’t have to, but in America I needed help all the time although I wouldn’t admit it, even to myself. In retrospect I wonder how my life would have been different if my parents had been nearby. What connections and professional networks might have changed my trajectory? What traditions would have been passed down, and what food would I have learned to cook? What kind of help and community would have made raising my child less lonely? Instead I simply learned to live on my own in the U.S. without a family network or close ties to a Taiwanese American community, like a succulent adapting to the desert. I’ve always been reluctant to ask my friends for the kinds of things that families do for you—picking up my son from school, pet-sitting when we travel, help with cooking or errands during sickness, serving as an emergency contact, and so on—because we could not reciprocate in the same way; my friends already had their own families that they depended on for that help. Losing my dad, even though he lived halfway across the world and had little impact on my day-to-day life in California, made me realize how much I still depended on him.

I have tried and failed to write this essay so many times. I have drafts and notes and fragments going back at least two decades, back to when my dad was still alive and well, the anchor on the other side of the world who kept me rooted to a larger story. Eventually I wrote a whole book to try to put into words my wordlessness, the loss of language that is my original wound, but even now I still worry that I haven’t quite gotten it right, that my words are not enough.

My dad did everything for me except prepare me for a life without him.

Grace with her mother and grandmother in New Jersey, 1970s.

When I was clearing out my parents’ apartment in Sanhsia after they passed away, I opened every box and cabinet and drawer to examine a lifetime of their belongings in order to decide what to keep and what to throw away. In one drawer I found about a dozen of my parent’s old passports. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood the significance of the dark blue, eagle-embossed U.S. passport—why it mattered so much, and what had been sacrificed to get it. We stayed in New Jersey for seven years because that was how long it took to become naturalized U.S. citizens—this enabled my dad to travel the world for UBS, but it also provided protection. The KMT could threaten and intimidate Taiwanese citizens with impunity, but they would be far less likely to go after a U.S. citizen and risk a diplomatic conflict.

Just as a passport provided my dad—and all of us—the ability to travel between countries, being multilingual allowed my dad to move easily between cultures. What is translation but another kind of mobility, from one language to another? In both cases there is an origin and a destination, and a certain status that comes with the right of passage. Both are tools that allow for exchange and shared meaning across a divide. The irony for me is that the cost of one meant losing the other. 

My dad was among the most educated members of his family with a PhD from Princeton and a career for which he traveled all over the world. The fact that we lived abroad meant that whenever we came back to Taiwan it was considered a big occasion and there would be many celebratory dinners and family gatherings. I’d like to think that my dad was the favorite brother and uncle, the one everyone looked forward to seeing, and I am certain this helped to soften people’s feelings towards me, the strange shy girl who forgot how to speak Taiwanese. 

As a translator, someone who thought deeply about words and their meaning, my dad was often consulted for advice on giving names. I remember during one visit to Taiwan soon after my cousin and his wife had a baby girl, my dad was given the honor of naming her. An extra advantage was his ability to do this in more than one language—he could suggest a Taiwanese name along with an English equivalent that was not just phonetically similar but had a compatible meaning. He gave Taiwanese names to all of his grandchildren—my son and my brother’s three children. 

A common convention in Taiwan is for siblings (and occasionally cousins) to share the first syllable of their name. My brother’s Taiwanese name is Sin-tat and my Taiwanese name is Sin-hui. “Sin” 信 (pronounced shin) has several meanings—first and foremost it means letter or message. If you examine its component parts or radicals, it includes the symbols for person 人 and words 言. A secondary meaning of “sin” is faith, belief, and trust. In just one word my dad managed to convey so much of himself and his wishes for us: he made his living from words, and so do I. He also expressed his strong faith through the names he chose for Ted and me. 

The second part of my name, “hui” 惠, means benefit, favor, or kindness, which aligns with the meaning of grace in the Christian sense—divine favor or assistance that is given but not earned. My dad could not have predicted the historical forces and future life choices that would determine the trajectory of our lives, the fact that his children would disperse to different countries and have to make it entirely on their own without the comfort, support, or resources of family nearby. At the time I was born, my parents had intended to settle down in Taiwan for good after their extended study abroad. But the seed of my journey was there from the beginning: my dad gave me a name that was meant to ease my passage wherever I went, to invoke divine protection, the mercy and goodwill of strangers, and undeserved/unconditional help that he one day would not be able to give. Perhaps he knew in some deep and unspoken way that he would have to let me go.

Grace with mother and father, Hong Kong, late 1970s.

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Images courtesy of the author.