A permanent foreigner

After her father’s funeral, Grace Loh Prasad finds herself alone in her parents’ apartment in Taiwan, sifting through everything they accumulated through their years of living on multiple continents. Her mother died a few years earlier. She can’t read Chinese, and there is no one left to translate the piles of papers in the offices. The unique stories behind these objects have departed with her parents. Still, as the last surviving member of the immediate family, Prasad must decide what is worth keeping and what will be trashed.

This memoir is an extension of that sorting exercise. Through a collection of beautifully written and moving essays, Prasad combs through her memories to wrestle with the consequences of migration, grief, and identity. It is a universally relatable experience from a unique perspective.

Her parents were professors in Taiwan during the era known as the White Terror—40 years of political repression that started in 1947 when the Kuomintang (China’s nationalist party) took over Taiwan. Thousands of Taiwanese citizens were executed and hundreds of thousands arrested and tortured. Because of their affiliation with pro-democracy dissidents, Prasad’s parents were forced to escape with their two young children in 1971. Prasad explains, “That’s why my parents had come to the States—to give me the voice they did not have.”