Things That Can’t Be Translated
by Featured Writer:
Grace Loh Prasad
Totoro, Tapei, digital photograph, 2016. Courtesy of the author.
Things that
can’t be translated
Grace Loh Prasad | Feb 2024 | Issue 30
The way you know how your grandma’s house smells, the kind of oolong tea she drinks, her fondness for soft caramels and flashy orchids, but you don’t know how to write her name.
Remembering the opening lines of an old Taiwanese folk song well enough to sing the words even if you don’t know exactly what they mean.
Being worried you won’t recognize the unlicensed private cab driver your parents send to pick you up from the airport, but Mr. Chen always recognizes you and makes cheerful one-way conversation in Taiwanese on the drive back.
The way the security guards at your parents’ apartment complex nod in recognition when you come for your annual visit and wave you in without any questions.
The split second when a store clerk says something to you in Mandarin, and the way their face changes when you respond awkwardly in English.
The feeling of following your cousin to various government offices and signing paperwork you can’t read and don’t understand in order to renew your passport, pay inheritance taxes, enroll in health insurance, and other formalities. She’ll do all the talking and fill out the forms for you, all you have to do is write your Chinese name and hope the clerks don’t laugh at your childish penmanship.
Knowing you are in one of the great culinary capitals of the world but you can’t enjoy most of it because you can’t read the menus or speak the language well enough to order food.
The way the waitstaff immediately knows you’re a foreigner when you ask for a glass of cold water in a traditional Chinese restaurant.
When you can’t tag your nephew in a FB post to thank him for adopting your dad’s dog because you don’t have a Chinese keyboard and don’t know how to type his name.
Being FB friends with your relatives in Taiwan involves liking a lot of photos but not much else, because you can’t read Chinese and they can’t read English. Whenever you post a new published story in the private FB group for your Taiwanese family, your relatives like it without reading it.
When you always have to check the anniversary date of when your loved ones passed away, because the date when it happened in their time zone is different from yours.
Grace Loh Prasad is the author of The Translator’s Daughter (Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press, 2024), a debut memoir about living between languages, navigating loss, and the search for belonging. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Longreads, The Offing, Hyperallergic, Catapult, KHÔRA, and elsewhere. A member of the Writers Grotto and the AAPI writers collective Seventeen Syllables, Prasad lives in the Bay Area.