Overview

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.

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9781324066378

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Reviews

"""Thomas Dai’s essays are by turns erudite and tender, melancholy and joyous. Whether writing about American suburbs or cosmopolitan China, long-distance running or queer hookups, 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, New York Times best-selling author of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border ""At times profound, at times funny, often both—Thomas Dai, a solitary cosmopolite wanderer, travels the Appalachian South, inland Asia, the Arizona/Sonora border, gender fluid queer culture, and a wide range of Western and Eastern literatures, making their relationship seem not only inevitable but necessary. Each comes alive in his capacious mind. Filled with vivid, unforgettable observations, opening doors of consciousness about what it means to be oneself—and no self. I will not soon forget the image of a life as a river—source, cataract, union with the sea. Erudite but not arch, poignant, sexy, fun."" -- Fenton Johnson, author of At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life ""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.... Take My Name but Say It Slow is going to make you want to think about the place you are and the places you are not, or not yet, and the person you are and the persons you are not any more or not yet. If I could take only one book on my next journey it would be this one."" -- Ander Monson, author of Predator: A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession"

Thomas Dai's essays are by turns erudite and tender, melancholy and joyous. Whether writing about American suburbs or cosmopolitan China, long-distance running or queer hookups, 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 Cant�, New York Times best-selling author of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border 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.... Take My Name but Say It Slow is going to make you want to think about the place you are and the places you are not, or not yet, and the person you are and the persons you are not any more or not yet. If I could take only one book on my next journey it would be this one.--Ander Monson, author of Predator: A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession

Author Information

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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