Grace Loh Prasad: I Don't Have Instructions for the Language I've Lost

Chosen Tongue

Grace Loh Prasad is the author of The Translator's Daughter (Mad Creeks Books/Ohio University Press 2024), a debut memoir about living between languages, navigating gloss and the search for belonging. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Literary hub, Longreads, Guernica, Brevity, The Offing, Oldster Magazine, and elsewhere. A member of the Writers Grotto and the AAPI Writers' Collective Seventeen Syllables, Prasad lives in the Bay Area. We discussed Grace's experience of living Taiwan as a young child and losing a mother tongue. She also reflected on the challenges of navigating between languages and cultures and the search for belonging. Finally, Grace shared her journey of rediscovering her Taiwanese heritage and the impact it had on our identity.