Take My Name But Say It Slow

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
"Thomas Dai’s far-flung, dexterous essays unfold with revelatory connections between cartography, biology, and intimacy, questioning what it means to be a body in motion. Each dispatch from across the world is reverent and spangled." -- Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches
"Filled with vivid, unforgettable observations, opening doors of consciousness about what it means to be oneself?and no self. Erudite but not arch, poignant, sexy, fun." -- Fenton Johnson, author of At the Center of All Beauty
"With a deep depth of heart and a meditative intelligence, Thomas Dai intricately charts a course through complex questions of identity, culture, history, and queerness. This is a book to savor and Thomas Dai is a writer to follow." -- Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body
"Heralds the arrival of an important new voice. The essays within delicately explore the intricate and shifting geographies of self, nation, and history in America, asking us to think about who we are and who we want to be, while dismantling the inherited cliches that get in the way of insight. A powerful and subtle debut!" -- Meghan O’ Rourke, author of The Invisible Kingdom
"Meticulous yet expansive, rigorous yet tender, Thomas Dai charts the terrain of modern, queer, Asian America with precision, wit, and heart." -- Larissa Pham, author of Pop Song

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.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.