Excerpted from Grace Prasad’s The Translator’s Daughter: A Memoir (2024), by permission of Mad Creek Books, an imprint of The Ohio State University Press.
On Tuesday, October 4, 2005, my mom was reported missing from her home. I didn’t find out until more than twenty-four hours later when I was in my office in San Francisco. My husband called and said, “Check your email. There’s a message from your Uncle I-to. It’s urgent.”
He declined to tell me what the message said and insisted I read it myself. My heart plummeted. In the few seconds it took me to log into my personal email account, my mind raced with alarming scenarios familiar to anyone with ailing parents who live far away. I braced myself for bad news, wondering how I would keep my composure as the details of my parents’ emergency punctured the fog of my dreary corporate day job.
I learned from Uncle I-to that my dad had been hosting a meeting of translators in his home office (the ninth floor), a separate unit in the same high-rise apartment complex as my parents’ residence (the fourth floor) in Sanhsia. They were discussing the progress on a new Taiwanese translation of the Bible, a multiyear project that would be my dad’s swan song – the crowning achievement of more than three decades as a translator. Although he was officially retired from the United Bible Societies, where he’d worked ever since I was two years old, my dad remains the senior consultant and most esteemed member of the six-person translation team.
My mom had been in the room with the translation committee since my dad could no longer leave her unsupervised due to her worsening dementia. The doctor diagnosed Alzheimer’s in 2000, the year both my parents turned sixty-five and were supposed to begin enjoying their retirement. There was nothing we could do except watch my mom become less and less articulate, and increasingly confused, disconnected, and dependent, until she could no longer tell what time it was, what day it was, or whether she had eaten five minutes or five hours ago.
Memory loss is the most salient feature of Alzheimer’s. We didn’t realize until later that we would be contending with a constellation of behavioral problems such as stubbornness, hostility, mood swings, and paranoia. After forty years of companionable marriage, my mom became angry, resentful, and suspicious of my dad, who in her eyes was no longer a caring, devoted husband but a dominating, larger-than-life force in her steadily diminishing universe.
That afternoon, as the meeting carried on without her, my mom became restless and upset. She decided she’d had enough of these “rude people” who were excluding her from the conversation and announced around four o’clock that she wanted to go home.
My dad—mindful of the committee that had traveled an hour out of the city to meet with him, since he was no longer free to attend long meetings in Taipei—didn’t follow my mom as she stepped out. She rarely went anywhere unchaperoned, but he did not want her constant interruptions to interfere with the group’s work. He thought my mom would either go across the courtyard to the fourth floor apartment, or go down the street to Tōa-ko·’s house. He continued the meeting.
A while later, he called the apartment to check on her, but there was no answer. Next he called Tōa-ko· to see if my mom had gone to her house, but she wasn’t there either. My dad apologized to his colleagues and ended the meeting, then walked the ten minutes to Tōa-ko·’s house, searching up and down the street as he went. By then it was past five o’clock; she had been gone for an hour.
“Wandering” is the name given to the tendency of Alzheimer’s patients to walk away from familiar surroundings and quickly get lost. For someone with dementia, what might seem like a harmless excursion can become a life-threatening situation. It’s estimated that a person with Alzheimer’s who wanders away and isn’t found within twenty-four hours has only a fifty percent chance of surviving.
No one had any idea where my mom went. She seldom ventured out anymore, and often didn’t enjoy being out for more than a short period of time before complaining that she was tired and wanted to go home. She lost interest in activities she once enjoyed like going to bookstores, museums and her favorite department stores. No matter where they were—at the local vegetable market, in Taipei at the doctor’s office, or attending a large family gathering—my dad would cut short whatever they were doing, make polite excuses if needed, and take my mom home.
He never believed he was doing anything but accommodating her wishes. So whenever she whined, “I want to go home” when they actually were at home, my dad was bewildered. “We are home,” he would insist. But my mom would put on her jacket and make for the door with a sense of urgency he could never understand. “Where are you going?” “I want to go home!” She’d howl as though he was detaining her against her will.
One of the things I’ve always admired about my parents is they truly had a marriage of equals. They both earned PhDs, they were both successful and respected in their fields, and they performed an equal share of domestic duties. They were a couple that other couples envied. After forty years of marriage, I don’t think they were prepared for how the disease would test their relationship, leading to a power struggle that was hopelessly lopsided. Out of necessity and love, my dad went from being my mom’s companion to being her guardian, a controlling presence in her life. The more her health declined, the more she needed him. But she resisted it too, and I know she felt the loss of her independence deeply.
It was a little after five o’clock when my dad and Tōa-ko· arrived at the police station to file a missing persons report. He calmly described his wife’s appearance: 70 years old, 5 feet 2 inches tall, slender, short black hair going gray at the roots, wire-rimmed glasses, dressed in a floral-print housedress and high-heeled shoes. He explained that she had dementia and was confused and disoriented. I’m sure he was calm and stoic as usual, his steady voice concealing his mounting panic. The officer nodded and took notes.
* * *
The last time I had seen my mom was a year and a half earlier when my husband and I visited Taiwan six months after our wedding. At times she seemed confused by the change in her daily routine since we were constantly going out, but she was otherwise calm and easygoing. My conversations with her tended to come back to the same topics over and over, as though she was trying to reassure herself that she knew the basic facts of my life: You live in San Francisco? In California? Are you in school? Oh, you graduated! I didn’t know. You are working now?
By then I was used to the repetitive questions, and more amused than alarmed by her non-sequiturs. She remembered my husband, Anil, and she remembered we were married, so I convinced myself she was doing okay. My dad would take me aside and say, “She’s getting worse,” and would tell me about how irritable she was and how she had occasional delusions, like when she insisted she was late to an important meeting. He’d correct her and say that no one was waiting for her, which would make her even more upset. I told him, “Dad, there’s no point in fighting over it. Just agree with her once in a while. There’s no harm in it. If you correct her all the time, you’ll just hurt her feelings.”
We had this same conversation on the telephone, numerous times, in the months following that visit. Even though my dad tried to describe the ways in which my mom continued to decline, to me it sounded like the status quo. I could not see firsthand what was happening to her, and the months stretched to more than a year. I wanted to visit, but there was always something holding me back. My job’s not flexible… I might be pregnant… We’re thinking of moving… We can’t spend the money right now.
I didn’t want to admit it, but I felt stifled by the new contours of my life. After finishing my MFA in creative writing, I was burned out and willingly put my writing on hold. I planned my wedding, got a full-time job, and channeled my energy into learning how to be a wife and an employee at a large corporation. But as time went by, I felt increasingly guilty about abandoning my creative life. Even though I set aside a few hours each weekend to write, I found it difficult to peel back all the layers to reach the state of heightened contemplation that I needed to write from my heart. I felt like I needed to travel away from myself in order to find the self that could write again. As much as I wanted to make the journey, I resisted it at the same time. Writing about what matters to me, about my family and my history, required a level of solitude and spaciousness that I no longer had and wasn’t sure I could ever get back.
What I couldn’t see at the time was just as my parents’ relationship was being tested by my mom’s dementia, so was my own. Unlike me, my parents had four decades of marriage behind them with many shared dreams and trials. They had learned how to compromise and negotiate, to accept the good and the bad in what was to be a lifelong union.
Meanwhile, I was still taking the first wobbly steps in my own marriage. My husband and I were both fiercely independent, having lived far away from our families for more than a decade. After years of each being on our own, we were thrilled to find each other. It was a relief to have someone to depend on and come home to, someone who’d open a bottle of wine to celebrate good news or run to the store for medicine if I had a fever. On the other hand, I was not used to being tethered, to being responsible for another person who in turn was responsible for me. Living in a different country from our families had given each of us a kind of freedom that wasn’t easy to give up. We were still learning to be vulnerable, to let the other person in, to give and ask for help in a way that didn’t come naturally.
A year into our relationship, we had our first big fight. I had given up my one-bedroom apartment in a chic neighborhood of San Francisco to move into Anil’s spacious two-bedroom in North Oakland, next to a golf course. I sold or gave away most of my furniture and we bought a few things to fill the gaps in our new, joint household. He had strong preferences when it came to decor, favoring dark wood furniture and linear patterns. For the most part I thought he had good taste.
One day we went shopping at Bed Bath & Beyond. Our cart was loaded with small appliances, new bath towels, and various other knick-knacks to satisfy our domestic yearnings. I selected a new comforter set in a muted gray-violet with a wavy stripe and floral pattern. It seemed like the perfect compromise between his preference for dark, masculine colors and my softer, more natural style. I showed it to him and was surprised when he scowled at me.
“Did you even look at the price tag? This is way overpriced!”
“But I don’t like any of the other designs. This one will go perfectly with everything else in the bedroom.”
“We are not spending that kind of money on bedding. No way.”
We stared at each other for a long moment. He was right; the comforter set was nearly twice as much as some of the others. He pulled out other options for me to look at. “What about this one? This one?”
Normally I am very receptive to other people’s suggestions. I hate conflict; I’m usually the first to compromise. So even I was surprised by how I reacted next.
“Why can’t I have this one thing? Everything we have now is something you chose, reflecting your taste. There’s nothing that reflects me at all!”
I stood there fighting back tears until he finally relented, embarrassed by my meltdown but also astonished at how fiercely I fought back. It wasn’t just about the comforter. Even though I usually went along with his decisions, I did not want this to be taken for granted; I was not ready to let someone else make all my choices for me. And yet, the act of getting married was exactly that—a pledge that I would trust someone to act in my best interests if, one day, I could no longer do that for myself. My mom’s dementia was the first real crisis we faced as a married couple, and one that forced us to confront the reality of marriage after the scripted perfection of our wedding day, after the honeymoon was over and the wedding gifts were put away. We were witnessing what it really means to love and commit to someone for better or for worse; in sickness and in health.
One night, when I was working late in my office, I had a conversation with the cleaning lady, Maria. I saw her a few times a week when she would come to empty out the trash bins in our cubicles. She was a sweet, older Latina woman who always greeted me and seemed to appreciate our brief interactions.
That evening, she asked me what I had done for Mother’s Day the previous Sunday.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Oh,” she sighed. “You don’t have kids?” She looked concerned.
“No, not yet.”
Her face brightened again. “Did you see your mother?”
“No, she lives in Taiwan, but I talked to her on the phone.”
Her face crumpled. “That is too bad! You have no kids, and your mother is so far away!”
For a moment I didn’t know what to say.
“Well, I hope you see your mother soon!” she said as she wheeled away her cleaning cart, and I turned back to my desk and blinked away tears.
I thought about my parents from time to time and wondered how they were doing. I kept reminding myself to call them more often, but I was always too tired or preoccupied or it was too late or I wasn’t in the mood. Days would go by, sometimes weeks, before I could bring myself to make the call. When I did, the conversations were brief and predictable. My dad would tell me that my mom was getting worse; that she was being difficult; that she was having delusions; that she sometimes refused to eat; and that the medication didn’t seem to do much for her. He could not elaborate because my mom was within earshot and would get upset that he was talking about her. To try and avert this, he would put my mom on the phone, and we’d have the following conversation:
“Hi Mom!”
“Hi Gracie!”
“How are you?”
“I’m fine! Thank you.”(She said this no matter how she was feeling.)
“Did you go to church today?”
“Church…? I don’t know. Let me ask Daddy.”
“Never mind, Mom. That’s okay.”
“Where are you? You live in…ah…?”
“Oakland, near San Francisco. You came here for my wedding, remember?”
“I did? Oh. That’s right.”
My mom would reach her conversational limit within a minute or two and put my dad back on the phone. After spending all of our time talking about my mom, I’d ask him:
“So how are YOU?”
He’d pause. “Well… I’m surviving.”
“Dad, I thought you were going to hire a housekeeper. You can’t do everything by yourself. You need a break.”
“We’ll see. Auntie Tōa-ko· is going to check with the agency for me.”
“How’s your health?”
Another pause. “OK. The same… I better go now! Mom is getting impatient. Thank you for calling!”
I’d go to bed thinking about the weariness in my dad’s voice and feeling like my heart was going to break from all the things that were left unsaid. I’d feel guilty about not doing more and helpless for being so far away. I would visit if I could.
And then I’d wake up the next morning and go back to life as usual.
I could not begin to perceive how things were changing for my parents, until I received that email from Uncle I-to. In an instant, I was forced to see that the shifts in my mom’s behavior and mood were not benign at all. She was now a threat to her own safety; she had crossed over into new territory that none of us, including my dad, were equipped to deal with.
While my dad was at the police station reporting my mom missing, the telephone rang. The officer picked up the phone and started taking notes. “Where? What does she look like? Hold on.” Someone had called the station to say he saw a woman walking by herself along a deserted mountain road and she appeared to be hurt. She matched my mom’s description. Another officer was sent to drive to where the woman had been seen, and he took my dad with him.
They drove up towards the mountains, along a wooded country road where there were few cars or people. Despite having grown up in Sanhsia, my dad didn’t know where the road led. It was twenty minutes before they stopped, at least five or six miles away from the center of town. My dad said he and the officer got out of the car and saw my mom sitting on the ground surrounded by a group of farmers. She was bleeding from her jaw and ear, her clothes were wet, and her pantyhose were torn. They guessed she had fallen into a creek along the road and injured herself. She was not wearing her glasses, but they were found in her purse, along with some tissues, an empty coin purse and a clean pair of underwear.
My dad didn’t ask a lot of questions when they found her; he was just relieved that my mom was safe. The officer drove my parents to the hospital in Sanhsia, where my mom was diagnosed with a “mandible fracture” and sent for immediate observation to National Taiwan University Hospital in Taipei. They stayed there overnight.
He didn’t contact me right away because he was with my mom at the hospital. I wasn’t able to reach him by phone until a day after it happened. I learned the facts from my uncle’s email, and he apologized for being the bearer of bad news and suggested that I call my parents more often.
I was ashamed that I was not doing more to help my parents. Although they never questioned my decision to stay in California after graduating from UC Berkeley, at times like this I wondered if I was a bad daughter for not living closer to them. In a way it wasn’t my choice to make; I grew up American and barely spoke any Taiwanese or Mandarin. I would never be able to live comfortably in Taiwan. Even if I did possess the language and social skills to do it, I had just made several major life decisions—getting married, signing a lease on an apartment, and getting a full-time job—that tied me more firmly than ever to California.
“I have to go to Taiwan,” I told my husband. The timing was terrible. Things were not going well at my job; my boss made me the scapegoat for problems in our department and I was convinced that she was trying to get me to quit. While I desperately wanted to leave, our financial situation and the need for health benefits required me to stay. Asking for a leave of absence—which I needed to do since I had used up my vacation time—would put me even more at risk. Anil was in the middle of interviewing for jobs after taking a year off to write a book. We both knew the importance of being available to talk to recruiters as soon as they showed interest; being away for any length of time would slow down his momentum.
On top of that, we had just moved into a new apartment the day before I received the email from Uncle I-to. This was our first big project as a married couple—finding a suitable place that was neither mine nor his but was truly ours and would give us room to grow and eventually start a family. We were eating off paper plates and sleeping on mismatched sheets as we slowly unpacked one box after another. Our struggle to recreate a functional household was like putting together a giant three-dimensional puzzle with millions of pieces. The boxes were just the start; we still had furniture and supplies to buy; change of address forms to fill out and phone calls to make; and new routines to establish. We hadn’t even had a chance to get our bearings in the new apartment yet.
Our lives were in disarray. At a time when we needed to focus on building and cementing our ties to each other, we had to drop everything to contend with my parents’ situation. My husband was unhappy about the disruption—we both were—but I was too overwhelmed with my own stress and grief to empathize with his frustration. I felt I had no choice; nothing was going to keep me away from my parents when they needed me.
It had been a year and a half since I last saw them, and I was not prepared for how much things had deteriorated, and how vulnerable they had become. I finally had to face what my dad had been trying to tell me for so many months: that my mom was slipping away. I felt an encompassing sadness at this loss, but also, hidden beneath it, a feeling I couldn’t quite name. Looking back I now see the shadow for what it was: anger at having to choose between a life with my parents in Taiwan and a life of my own in California. I could not have both. We were not like other families who lived their entire lives in close proximity. Once I graduated from high school, we never again lived in the same country. We were always half a world apart.
The soonest we could visit Taiwan was two weeks after the incident. I called my dad every other day to check on how my mom was doing. Her jaw and ear were bandaged up, and she complained that her side hurt. She was very tired for several days and didn’t try to walk out on her own. She did not seem to remember getting lost. When I talked to her on the phone and asked her how she was, she said what she always said: “I’m fine! Thank you.” Even as her conversational skills declined and she spoke English less and less, that reflex never failed.
The days leading up to the trip were a blur. I went to my job and acted as normal as I could, but I had a pit in my stomach that would not go away. I was haunted by the fact that I was going back to a mother who might be unrecognizable to me.
The image that I had of her, of an accomplished and dignified woman whose intellectual and social skills were gradually fading, was replaced by a more disturbing picture: a lonely, gaunt figure walking uphill on an unpaved road as it’s getting dark outside, undeterred by the dirt and pebbles that are ruining her nice shoes. She is not worried about who or what she might encounter on this desolate path; she hurries toward some unseen destination that remains just out of reach, yet she is convinced that she is almost there. She has been walking for more than an hour, ignoring the pain in her feet, unaware of how many miles she has covered. She trips and falls into a creek, soaking her dress and cutting her face on a rock. She almost loses her glasses, but that doesn’t stop her. Stumbling, bleeding, disheveled, it doesn’t matter… She is determined to go to that place that only she knows.
I want to go home.
