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.

For Thomas Dai, names are maps—maps that have the power to define our identities. 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 Chengdu 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 lepidopterist. And he reflects on the paths his parents took to build a life in America, and what it means to “return” to a place he never felt was his own.

Incisive and gorgeously written, Take My Name but Say It Slow offers a fresh perspective on motion, placelessness, yearning, and belonging, and introduces a sparkling new literary talent.