Much of Grace Loh Prasad’s needed debut, The Translator’s Daughter, is about the aftermath of a choice she didn’t make. When she was only two years old, her parents fled dictatorship in Taiwan. She grows up in the United States, where a fluency with pop culture is more important than any working understanding of her parents’ native language. But things changed, quickly and unexpectedly when her mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, forcing her to confront the fragility of the bonds that tie her to her heritage.

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.

—Jina Moore Ngarambe for Guernica

When I was growing up, we lived on the sixth floor of a high-rise apartment building on Tin-Hau Temple Road. The road wound up and around a hill on the northeast shore of the island, which afforded us fantastic views of Hong Kong Harbor and Kai-Tak International Airport, situated directly across from us on Kowloon side. The runway occupied a thin strip of reclaimed land stretching out into the harbor, surrounded on three sides by water. With the quantity of air traffic coming into the airport, and the small amount of space in which to land, there was no margin for error.

My dad, when he was home, used to sit in an armchair in our living room and turn towards our balcony. Through his binoculars, he would watch the planes arriving and taking off, each precisely executed maneuver a small miracle, repeated hundreds of times a day. He could identify the planes by their tail designs — the stylized orchid of Thai Airways, the cherry blossom of China Airlines, the red crane of Japan Air Lines. He spent many contented hours in this way, meditating on the coming and going of these gigantic skybound vessels.

My dad always traveled for work. As a translations consultant at the United Bible Societies (UBS), he was often called on to lend his expertise to projects in far-flung locations. He brought me souvenirs each time he went somewhere new — a T-shirt from the Pacific island of Palau, embroidered handkerchiefs from Germany, a set of pencils covered with hieroglyphics from Egypt. It was hard for me to keep track of all the places he went. He spent two weeks of every month in the far corners of the globe, working wherever he was needed, while my mom stayed at home with us, patient as Penelope.

I once saw my dad’s passport, when we were taking a family trip somewhere. It was twice as large as any of our passports, filled with light blue pages the texture of dollar bills that were stamped, embossed, stapled and otherwise marked with evidence of his numerous border crossings, and its cover was weathered from use. My own passport was thin and crisp and new, even though it wasn’t my first. I first traveled overseas when I was two years old, and our family moved from Taiwan to New Jersey so that my dad could work at UBS. I was too young to have my own passport, so I traveled as a dependent on my mom’s passport—back then, a dark green Taiwanese passport embossed with the words “Republic of China.”

The next time our family went abroad was in 1978, when my dad was transferred to the Asia-Pacific Regional office of UBS in Hong Kong. I was nine years old. My parents had naturalized as U.S. citizens the year before, and I gained status with them. We were issued navy blue American passports from an office in New York. My brother, Ted, who was born in Princeton, N.J. when my parents were graduate students there in the Sixties, had always had an American passport.

From Hong Kong, it was easy to travel to Taiwan: just a one-hour flight. We went almost every summer to visit relatives. Every other year, we also spent several weeks back in New Jersey. My dad would work in the New York office of UBS while the rest of us spent our vacation visiting with friends and stocking up on American clothes, books, magazines, candy, and other things we couldn’t get in Hong Kong. Travel began to feel effortless to me. We were also part of a large expatriate community—my brother and I attended Hong Kong International School, where our classmates came from all over the world. Growing up in this milieu, travel and cultural exchange never seemed remarkable to me; they were just a normal part of our lives.

The first time either of my parents ever left Taiwan was when they flew halfway around the world to attend graduate school at Princeton. My mom went first, in 1959, and my dad followed a year later, after being delayed by compulsory military service. International travel was a rarity back then, and there were severe travel restrictions for Taiwanese people. My parents were permitted to travel abroad as students because they received scholarships to a foreign university.

The day my father left was an occasion, one for which cameras were drawn. In photos, he is holding an umbrella to shield himself and his future mother-in-law from the bright summer sun. She has her back to the camera and is fastening a silk flower to the lapel of his freshly tailored suit. In another shot, he is waving like a young ambassador from the stairway before boarding the Mandarin Airways airplane which will take him an ocean and a continent away to his new life. He looks proud as he bids farewell to all the people who have come to see him off—his parents, five brothers, four sisters, and numerous friends and relatives all gathered around at Songshan International Airport.

It would be almost a decade before he saw any of them again.

In Princeton, while they studied, my mom worked as a waitress, babysitter and cleaning lady, and my dad worked as a dishwasher and janitor. When they got married in 1963, my mom’s professor gave her away. I wonder what it must have been like for them to get married so far away from their families. A year later, my brother was born, and in 1968, after my dad received his PhD, the family made arrangements to return home to Taiwan.

He arrived, with his wife and first child, to fanfare not unlike his departure. A photo of their homecoming shows my mom smiling widely in the foreground, looking like a movie star, while in the background someone throws a lei around my dad’s neck. They have been transformed by their 10-year odyssey—they returned older and more sophisticated, no longer fresh-scrubbed students but a married couple with a son. They look thrilled to be back after so many years. My mom was visibly pregnant in the arrival photographs; I was born four months later in Taipei.

It seemed that they were home for good. My parents both got academic jobs at Taiwan Theological Seminary, situated on a lush mountain campus above the heat and bustle of the city. My dad was the first Taiwanese to receive a PhD in Biblical Studies, and at age 34, the youngest-ever dean of the seminary. My brother enrolled in kindergarten; my paternal grandmother took care of me while my parents were teaching. This was the life they had worked so hard for. All those years of education and sacrifice were paying off, finally, with a secure and comfortable life doing work that they loved.

In 1972, everything changed. My parents were friends with an American missionary family who also lived and worked at the seminary. Mr. and Mrs. Thornberry were professors; their children were among our earliest playmates. After expressing political views that were critical of Taiwan’s Nationalist government and striking up a friendship with Peng Ming-min, a well-known dissident, the Thornberrys were swiftly deported back to the States.

My parents worried they would be next; although they were not politically outspoken, they feared guilt by association. My mom explained that the Kuomintang had spies everywhere that reported on what you did and who your friends were. They even opened and read private mail, so my parents took care never to say anything controversial in their correspondence. Taiwan was under martial law, which meant the government had extraordinary powers to detain or harass people without cause. Sensing they were under government surveillance, my parents eventually felt pressured to leave. They have always been reluctant to discuss this episode, but my brother was old enough to remember it. He told me we left secretly, in the middle of the night.

Another set of photos — extra passport photos taken in 1972 before we left — documents this passage. My parents look serious, as if trying not to betray any emotion. Such a contrast to the homecoming photo in which they had appeared so joyful. We settled in New Jersey, not far from where my parents had lived as students, and they made a life there, again—one with limitations. My mother’s father passed away a couple of years later, but my mom did not return to Taiwan for the funeral. It was too expensive, and too politically risky, to go back.

In 1987, the year I graduated from high school in Hong Kong, martial law was lifted in Taiwan. In 1988, I left to go to college in California and my parents moved back to Taiwan. The year I found my own independence was the year they finally gained the right to go — and to stay — home.

Grace Loh Prasad’s book, The Translator’s Daughter, is out this month from Ohio State University Press.