With its fragmentary timeline, which captures the author’s feelings of disruption, displacement and helplessness, this collection of autobiographical essays really comes to life in the last third of the text.
As suggested by its title, language — and the cumbersome cultural baggage it conveys — is a preoccupation of the book. Prasad’s wrangle with her linguistic shortcomings dominate her narrative, but nowhere is she more isolated than when her father, a polyglot Bible translator, is rendered mute by illness.
As she visits him at Mackay Memorial Hospital, she reflects that she is no more special than any other visitor to his bedside. “I’m not the wonderful filial daughter who deserves praise for travelling so far and at such expense to be with her dad in what may be his final days,” Prasad writes.
Soon after, in an elegant touch, she declares herself de trop — a modern-day superfluous hero, minus the affluence and privilege — searching for a place, if not a purpose. “It’s unspoken, but clear to me now: I am overdue,” she writes. “I am too little, too late.”
Various individuals — relatives, Indonesian caregivers and a seminary student — all play, if not more important, then more immediate roles in her father’s life. Reflecting on her father’s affection for Miss Ho — the student — the author notes that the young woman prayed for her professor during a previous illness. These supplications, Prasad’s father believed, hastened his recuperation.
“She has a special relationship with him, and I don’t question it,” Prasad writes. In keeping with the spiritual nature of her upbringing, she concludes that “[s]ometimes the people who are the most healing, who have the most profound effect, aren’t who you’d expect.”
Relegation to the periphery is tolerable, but her voicelessness rankles. It is brought into stark relief through her father’s enforced silence. That he spent his life conveying words into different languages is an obvious irony.
“All my life, my dad’s voice was enough for both of us,” she writes. “He was the one who always spoke for me, translated for me, eased my passage across borders, without my having to ask.” With Dad at her side, she never felt “stranded” when facing the language and culture of her birthplace. “But what happens when the translator can no longer speak?”
Cast adrift in the multilingual environment of the hospital ward, where the visitors and staff communicate in Indonesian, Mandarin and Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese) — the latter of which she still retains a smattering — Prasad observes that she is “the odd one out, the one that doesn’t connect without my dad to link us.”
She realizes her father’s imminent death is not what scares her most. “What terrifies me is that I will never hear his voice again.”
As poignant as these and subsequent introspections are, there are instances when the author’s frustrations take on an unfortunate, whiny tone. From the get-go, Prasad seems to blame or at least implicate others for some of the obstacles she faces.
Having boarded a flight to Taipei with an expired passport, Prasad apportions a share of the responsibility for her predicament to the airline. Informed that she must pay for a night in the airport dormitory, she argues that she should be exempt as she is “not here by choice.”
This conversation is with the only China Airlines employee “who doesn’t talk to me like he’s an authority figure” as Prasad waits overnight at Taoyuan International Airport for her ex-boyfriend to access her apartment and have her valid passport sent over on the next plane from San Francisco. In the book’s acknowledgements, Prasad thanks China Airlines employee Pan Chin-ming, admitting “it’s unlikely you’ll ever see this.”
Elsewhere, she gets looks of suspicion when asking for candy, and disapproval when she can’t speak Mandarin to a border control official with a “military buzz cut” who scrutinizes her through “wire-rimmed classes.”
When another airline employee addresses her in Mandarin and is told “she doesn’t understand” by a counter clerk, Prasad is further irked. “Even if I don’t know all the words, I always understand the condescension,” she writes.
Of course, anyone who has experienced “othering” in Taiwan — particularly in bureaucratic settings — might sympathize. Her status as a third-culture child obviously exacerbates matters as she detects the incomprehension and silent judgment of Taiwanese who are confounded by her in-betweenness.
But these are not the only gripes. Complaints about being trapped in the family home of Sansia (三峽) are followed by anxiety about memorizing the short route between her cousin’s apartment and the hospital when she is in town. Navigating Taiwan — geographically and socially — is depicted as intimidating, an impression that even the most inexperienced tourist is unlikely to share.
Prasad’s terror over the appearance of a silverfish — a creature hitherto unknown to her — while clearing out her late mother’s clutter, and her concerns for a clutched camera while inching her way through a crowd gathered for then-presidential candidate Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), are just a couple of the episodes that sit uneasily with the philosophy of this Machete series as “providing a platform for work that intervenes in dangerous ways.”
Alongside some effective metaphors and symbolism (orcas and spiders as mothers and weavers of life tapestries) there is clumsy imagery. A dream about a boa constrictor injecting venom [sic] into her body could represent the nonsensical subconscious, though an acknowledgment that the author is aware of the impossibility of such an occurrence would clarify that this.
Other errors and oddities grate: The claim that former president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) met his wife in Siberia, rather than Yekaterinburg — thousands of miles East — and confusing Tomb Sweeping Festival with Mid-Autumn Festival, because friends were supposedly posting photos of visits to family graves during the latter.
There are also off-kilter references to local culture. These may be deliberate choices, designed to create a sense of an “unbridgeable” divide that makes Taiwan “distant and unknowable, a locked box,” as she describes it in the final chapter, a letter to her son.
But they are also hard to reconcile with Prasad’s presentation (in the same letter) of Taiwan as a place that “will call to you.”
Moments of tender affection for this forever out-of-reach homeland are dampened by less enthusiastic recollections. In the end, Prasad’s feeling of a spatio-temporal dislocation best sums things up: “I have the 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 here.”
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