Letter to My Imaginary Daughter
by Grace Loh Prasad
Christa David, you showed me love. thank you., hand cut paper collage, 9 x 12 inches, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
Letter to My Imaginary Daughter
Grace Loh Prasad / NOV 2020 / ISSUE 3
Dear Daughter:
I want to share with you the things that are passed down from mothers to daughters, what I wish my own mother had told me, what you will tell your daughter one day. These are stories that will teach you about growing up, about what you wish for and what you are given, and what will be taken away.
1. The Little Mermaid
I am eight years old. We are Taiwanese immigrants in New Jersey—my father, mother, older brother and me. It’s the late 1970s and I am watching TV in our small apartment at the end of the block, one of many identical rows of brick apartment blocks in this working-class community. After a dinner of hot dogs and rice, I am allowed to stay up and watch an animated TV special on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Not the saccharine Disney version, mind you, but a faithful adaptation of the original fairytale created by Toei, a Japanese animation studio.
I am enchanted by this tale of a young mermaid who falls in love with a human prince. She saves him from drowning after his ship is wrecked in a violent storm, and brings him to a beach where he is later found and brought back to his kingdom. The mermaid dreams of becoming human so that she can marry the prince, so she goes to the Sea Witch and trades her beautiful singing voice for a magic potion that will cause her fishtail to separate into legs. She leaves her mother and sisters behind, drinks the potion and is reunited with the prince. They become friends, but his interest in this charming but mute girl is only platonic. She is a magnificent dancer, so he invites her to dance at his wedding to another woman. Compounding her heartbreak is the violence and pain of this transformation (left out of the Disney version); every step she takes brings the stabbing pain of a thousand knives.
But there’s even more at stake; winning the prince’s love is her only chance to gain an immortal soul—the ultimate prize. Disney skipped this part too: If he doesn’t return her love, the mermaid must either kill the prince or die and return to the ocean as sea foam.
Even though I am young, these dangerous consequences don’t scare me. I am enthralled by the Little Mermaid’s devotion, by her willingness to sacrifice everything for her love. I identify with her quiet perseverance, her ability to blend in and hide her origins, her otherness. Now that I am old enough to go to school, I have new friends. I learn new songs; I forget the songs of my ancestors, the language I was born with, which now exists only as music in my head. My parents still communicate in Taiwanese, so it remains close to me even though I can no longer call it forth. Like the mermaid’s tail, it remains hidden deep inside me like a vestigial organ, like a blueprint that will never be used.
Growing up, I have a lifelong need to be close to the ocean. But I am the one who is shipwrecked.
This is what it means to be a girl and to assimilate at a young age. You surrender your voice. You do whatever it takes to fit in, even if it hurts. You hide in plain sight, showing only the parts of yourself that earn praise. You allow yourself to be mistreated because you don’t know better. Don’t measure your worth by how pliant you can make yourself to please someone else. Love yourself first, in all your complicated wholeness, before you seek to love and be loved by another.
2. Psyche
I am twelve years old, a sixth grader at Hong Kong International School. We have lived in Hong Kong for two years, and though I look like the people around me, I remain a foreigner who attends an American school and speaks only English. At the school’s annual book fair, I pick up a paperback with a blue cover called Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis, whom I know as the author of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and other fantasy books. Lewis is also the author of many Christian classics. Till We Have Faces is neither of these; it is a fictional first-person retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth (originally penned by Apuleius) told from the point of view of Psyche’s protective older sister, Orual.
Psyche, the youngest daughter of the King of Glome, grows up to be the most beautiful maiden in the kingdom. Humans from near and far begin to worship her and neglect paying their respects to the goddess Aphrodite, who becomes jealous. Aphrodite sends her naughty son Cupid to wound Psyche with one of his love arrows, and make her fall in love with a monstrous beast. Meanwhile, Glome has fallen into ruin and the king learns he must sacrifice Psyche to the God of the Mountain to restore order to the kingdom. Psyche is taken to the top of the mountain and tied to a tree, then abandoned there for the God of the Mountain to have his way with her.
Cupid obeys Aphrodite and flies down to the mountain to punish Psyche, but instead of piercing her with his arrow, he wounds himself and ends up falling in love with his mother’s rival. He secretly whisks Psyche away to a beautiful castle in a secluded valley where she is lavished with attention by an unseen host—Cupid himself, who has made himself invisible and makes her promise never to seek his identity. Psyche cannot believe her good fortune; instead of violence and death she is living comfortably in paradise. She wants for nothing, but her only regret is that she cannot see her husband.
When Orual pays a visit to the castle, she is immediately suspicious of Psyche’s blissful existence and persuades her that any husband who refuses to show himself must be a hideous monster. Begged by her sister, Psyche agrees to light an oil lamp when her husband comes for his nightly visit, in order to see his true face—a plot that has disastrous consequences for the innocent bride and leads to a harrowing journey. The only way to earn back the trust of her husband and satisfy her angry mother-in-law is to complete a series of impossible tasks, including sorting a giant mountain of mixed grain and fetching a box of beauty from the Underworld to give to Aphrodite.
I feel sympathy for Psyche, who is taken from her family and thrust into a bewildering new life, only to have that revoked as well. I, too, have experienced a double loss, shedding one culture for another halfway around the world, only to end up close to where I started but in a different kingdom entirely. New Jersey was nothing like Taiwan. Hong Kong was nothing like New Jersey. Like Psyche in the wilderness, I have no guide to help me navigate my new surroundings. Being a third culture kid means being misunderstood and out of place, a seed planted in the wrong soil, swept up in a story that I didn’t choose. I spend years looking for an idea of “home” in somebody else, not realizing I need to seek it within myself first. Although I lack a template, I eventually build a life for myself, grain by grain.
This is what it means to become a young woman. You have been waiting for this moment for a long time with a mixture of hope and fear. You are initiated into the mystery of the body and its capacity for pleasure and terror. You don’t realize, or maybe you do, that beauty gives you power that you’ve never had before. You learn that men have the capability to be both princes and monsters and you have to work hard to see clearly which is which. You realize that you cannot find yourself by looking into your lover’s eyes; real knowledge and fulfillment are earned through individual experience and struggle.
Finding a life partner is good, but let me be clear: the goal is not to be chosen, the goal is to be the one who does the choosing, to be the heroine of your own story rather than the reward in someone else’s.
3. Persephone
I am in my twenties, living in San Francisco after graduating from university. My parents have moved from Hong Kong back to Taiwan, where I was born. Almost every year I visit my parents in Taiwan during Christmas break or over the summer. Once I went during Lunar New Year; once in the spring for a funeral. The annual ritual of the red-eye flight from SFO to TPE, no matter how many times I do it, is disorienting. At some point while I’m dreaming, we cross the international date line—the invisible border where one day skips ahead to the next. My brain understands the time change but my body does not. I feel upside down for days. Arriving in Taiwan, 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, that once swam confidently in this sea of language that now feels treacherous and unfamiliar.
I’ve met my Taiwanese relatives countless times over the years, but because of the language barrier I’m always an outsider; my parents have to translate and mediate for me. I move among these people who share a name and resemblance with me, but I never fit in. I spend time in their homes and eat from gorgeous platters of fruit—guava, pineapple, papaya, mango—while hardly saying a word. I leave, I come back, I leave again.
This constant cycle of travel and return reminds me of the myth of Demeter and Persephone, familiar to me from the Greek classics I studied in college. Like Persephone, I am the eternal daughter, destined to go back and forth between worlds, between my husband in California and my parents in Taiwan, between the life consciously chosen, and the collective unconscious that claims me, an unbreakable thread connecting me to my ancestors. I live in a constant state of longing to be reunited with Demeter—my mother, motherland, mother tongue. Homer described it centuries ago but this archetype is just as true today. My life is defined by this rupture.
Reflecting on this tension between familiarity and foreignness, between belonging and alienation, between my physical home and my psychic home, is what makes me a writer. Each visit to Taiwan is bittersweet, but I fill my pockets with seeds for my writing. The absence germinates; the loss becomes my harvest.
The myth of Demeter and Persephone personifies what it means to be an immigrant. You never quite get over the separation; you always feel a part of yourself has been left behind. You lose your motherland and your mother tongue, and you will never stop seeking them in one way or another. But it doesn’t have to be painful. Get used to traveling back and forth. Keep your passport up-to-date. Whatever you do, don’t let go of the thread. Living in two dimensions takes extra energy; it can be a source of frustration but also a source of growth and joy. Make a habit of planting seeds from one place in the other, and when you miss your soul’s home, use that longing to create something beautiful that can be shared.
4. Inanna
I am in my thirties, making a decent living as a freelance writer and editor in San Francisco. My visits to Taiwan take on new urgency when my mom begins having cognitive issues. She forgets her jacket at a hair salon, then when she returns to pick it up, leaves a shopping bag in the same place. She falls behind on grading papers and the daily demands of being a seminary professor. She repeats herself in conversations, asking the same questions over and over. She gets lost and disoriented in Taipei, a city she has lived in for 20 years. It is obvious something is wrong with her, but we don’t know what.
At first she just laughs it off and makes jokes about getting old and senile, and we go along with it. But there are cracks in her brave façade; at times she looks worried too, aware that things are slipping but unable to explain why. The year she turns 65, when she and my dad are supposed to begin their long-awaited retirement, she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Her lapses become more frequent and my dad worries that he can’t leave her alone. Her world becomes gradually smaller and more circumscribed, and my dad’s along with it. Museums, bookstores and other hobbies are abandoned. Social visits dwindle because she gets tired and overwhelmed easily. Before long, her orbit is restricted to four places: home, my aunt’s house, the doctor’s office and church. She stops cooking and cleaning. Her hygiene suffers.
When I call my dad to ask how things are going he tells me “things are really bad” and “she is getting worse” but because I am far away, I am skeptical. Everyone thinks my dad is overreacting because none of us are able to observe with the same intimacy how my mom’s behavior keeps changing, how each small failure chips away at the intelligent, accomplished woman he has loved for more than 40 years. Friends and relatives speak in hushed tones about how she used to be so sharp, had such impeccable taste, was such a beloved professor. They notice the shine wearing off but are not able to perceive how much deeper and more troubling the changes are.
My dad is the only one who can see the iceberg. It’s not until my mom runs away one night and gets lost and injured on a remote mountain path, that any of us can see the gravity of her condition, the frightening reality of what it’s like to be losing your memory and identity with each passing day.
One summer, I sign up for a course on Jungian psychology called “Separation, Sorrow and Individuation” where I am introduced to the myth of Inanna, the ancient Sumerian Queen of Heaven who is associated with the planet Venus and thought to be an antecedent to the Greek goddess Aphrodite. The most well-known story of Inanna, referenced in the Epic of Gilgamesh and in the poems of Enheduanna, is her descent to the Underworld to visit her sister Ereshkigal. Inanna is a goddess of extraordinary power and radiance, and she puts on her full regalia including a turban, lapis lazuli necklace, beaded breastplate, girdle and golden ring to signify her divine status. On her way down to the Underworld she must pass through seven gates, surrendering one of her royal garments each time until she is rendered ordinary, robbed of her beauty, “brought low” before being allowed to meet her sister, the Queen of the Underworld.
I burst into tears in the middle of the psychology class because I suddenly recognize my mother and the violent stripping away of all her worldly knowledge, her skills and manners, her status and achievements—her very identity. The journey into Alzheimer’s diminishes her little by little, reducing her to a pale shadow of the woman she was.
Inanna dies a symbolic death in the Underworld, but she is revived by her faithful companion Ninshubur who sprinkles the food and water of life on her corpse to break the spell and bring her back to the upper world.
I, however, cannot reverse the decline. I have no magic that will physically bring my mom back to wholeness, back to life. My only choice is to re-member her, to re-constitute her, through my writing.
The story of Inanna shows what it means to be a daughter, and then a motherless daughter. When I say to you “You will lose your mother one day. Cherish your time with her. Ask for her recipes and secrets now, before it’s too late,” I am not talking about me. I have no daughter. I am talking about all of us.
Grace Loh Prasad was born in Taiwan and raised in New Jersey and Hong Kong before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. Grace received her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College and is an alumna of VONA. Her essays have appeared in Longreads, Catapult, Jellyfish Review, Ninth Letter, Blood Orange Review, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Memoir Mixtapes, The Manifest-Station, Barren Magazine, and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Grace is a member of The Writers Grotto and Seventeen Syllables, an Asian Pacific American writers collective. She is currently finishing her memoir-in-essays entitled The Translator’s Daughter.
Christa David is a visual artist, writer and researcher. Inspired by the artistic works of Romare Bearden, Wangechi Mutu, Alma Woodsey Thomas and literary works of James Baldwin, Christa fuses the mediums of painting, collage and assemblage to create and recreate stories about home, belonging, faith, and identity. Christa hold a BA and MPH (Master of Public Health) from Columbia University. Her work is in private and public collections throughout the United States including the David C. Driskell Center, and has been recently on view at Longwood Gallery at Hostos College in Bronx, NY and PRIZM Art Fair at Art Basel in Miami. Her work was recently featured in Elle. Christa currently lives and works between New York City and Atlanta.