Take My Name But Say It Slow

A luminous memoir-in-essays exploring place, identity, and what it means to grow up queer and Asian in the American South.

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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.