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Essays
by Thomas Dai
A luminous memoir-in-essays exploring place, identity, and what it means to grow up queer and Asian in the American South.
Thomas Dai has never gone by his Chinese name, Nuocheng, fashioned from the Knoxville (Chinese: Nuokeshiweier) of his childhood and the Chengdu his mother called home. Seen another way, Nuocheng also contains the cheng of Chenggong: success. In one breath, his name speaks of a hometown, a geography, a half-baked promise to succeed. For Dai, every name is like a map, and every map can define identity.
In Take My Name but Say It Slow, Dai writes of a river that runs only in the mind and a queer map housed on the internet; of love carved on the rocks of Taipei and Arizona; of pounding the racetrack in Wenzhou, watching his grandfather fade from the world. He recounts a relationship that would literally go the distance from the American Southwest to China and back again, and a road trip chasing the memory of Nabokov, the writer and lepidopterist. As he reflects on the paths his parents took to build a life in America, he also asks what it means to "return" to a place he never felt he could claim as his own.
Incisive and gorgeously written, Take My Name but Say It Slow offers a fresh perspective on placelessness, yearning, and belonging, and introduces a sparkling new literary talent.
"I read Take My Name but Say It Slow in awe of its exhilarating intelligence, its wit, and its deft inquiry into the fundamental human longing to be of the earth. Brilliance has never felt so inviting, animating." ―Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
"The real journey of the book is the interior one, the intellectual and, dare I say, spiritual one happening all the time as we move through time and space and culture and queerness and cartography and memory and history and science and so much more... . If I could take only one book on my next journey it would be this one." ―Ander Monson, author of Predator
"By turns erudite and tender, melancholy and joyous... . Thomas Dai finds a way to beautifully probe, on each page, questions of wanderlust and desire, memory and nostalgia, landscape and belonging. A bold, tender, radiant debut." ―Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River
This information about Take My Name But Say It Slow was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Thomas Dai teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho. He holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Arizona and a PhD in American studies from Brown University.
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