In his wide-ranging collection of essays, Take My Name but Say It Slow, debut author Thomas Dai reflects on the role of place and movement in forming his identity. Dai’s Chinese parents came to Tennessee to pursue academic advancement and work, and he grew up in a McMansion outside of Knoxville. His Chinese first name is Nuocheng, a portmanteau of Knoxville (Nuokeshiweier, in Chinese) and Chengdu (his mother’s hometown in China). This name, which was tucked behind the Americanized Thomas for his public life in the U.S., set the stage for a lifetime of traveling.
Dai’s essay collection tells various stories of this life in motion: a yearlong trip to China following his undergraduate education in New England, the attainment of a Master in the Fine Arts degree in Arizona, a road trip around the United States following the path of Vladimir Nabokov. Dai’s fundamental question is one of identity. What does it mean to grow up queer and Chinese American in Tennessee? How was his Asianness interpreted by those around him, and how does he interpret it himself? Though he travels to China often and for expanding lengths of time, Dai has no easy answers. Instead, he offers glimpses of what it feels like to see his Asian identity refracted in spaces that don’t seem to have room for it—“a yellow tinted image on a white, white sheet,” as he puts it when describing Mark Twain’s depiction of Asian characters.
Nonetheless, he does find echoes of himself: in his grandparents’ apartment in Chengdu, where he obsessively records everything, including the sound of his grandmother’s midnight prayers; and in Arizona, where he reflects on Chinese immigrants who made their way to the U.S. through the southern border; and, finally, in the beautiful essay “Southings,” which reflects on how it felt to be Asian in 1990s Tennessee. Through writing, Dai has sought to make his private thoughts public, to focus on ever-shifting interiors. He achieves an intimate travelogue that spans time, distance and desire. The reader begins to see Dai become himself. They can, as Dai puts it in his title, say his name, but say it slowly, and see the multiplicity of Dai’s origins and his possible destinations.
