“I was born in Taiwan in 1969, but I've spent most of my life in the States. Though I've visited Taiwan many times, it feels foreign to me, an alternate universe that does not intersect with my American life.”

A diaspora is a community of people who identify with a geographical area but live elsewhere. For immigrant and 1st generation Asian-Americans, “home" is not as easy as saying “where the heart is". 

Grace Loh Prasad, author of The Translator's Daughter: A Memoir, has been searching for home for a long time. She's the daughter of Taiwanese parents, Princeton seminary graduates, who raised their kids in America but returned to Taiwan when martial law ended there.  

Grace stayed. In America, she would find herself feeling like a “racial outsider and linguistic insider". Having forgotten how to speak Taiwanese, she would feel instead like a “racial insider and linguistic outsider" when visiting her parents in Taiwan.

Uncomfortably these visits would bring on a “bizarre sensation of going forward in linear time yet backward in consciousness, reaching for a distant, earlier version of myself that once felt at home there".

Grace eventually married and started her own family. As her parents aged and her mom's health declined, a painful sadness slowly set in. In time, Grace recognized the sadness for what it represented: “anger at having to choose between a life with my parents in Taiwan and a life of my own in California".

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

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