In Thomas Dai’s essay collection Take My Name but Say It Slow (288 pages; Norton), Dai crafts deeply contemplative meditations on growing up Chinese American and navigating queer identity. The diptych of parallel reminisces that composes pieces such as “Running Days” and “Driving Days” evokes calm summers in Wenzhou made meaningful by his grandparents’ steady presence, as well as the particularities of traveling alone as an MFA student, styling himself after butterfly-lover Vladimir Nabokov and gay photographer Tseng Kwong Chi.

Dai’s astute observations about identity fold back on themselves in Eastern-inflected asides on Chinese philosophy and nonbeing, and through nostalgic memories that bring nuance and complexity to the clash of ideological positionings. A demonstration of insight as well as the witnessing of a transcultural Asian American becoming, the layered essays come peppered with regular Americanisms, from relays of firsthand dialogues on performativity to road trip cigarette diaries, to all the visits to Chinese restaurants along the way.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Dai’s recourse to how “Asian American” is commonly understood, and his piquant observation of how an agglomeration of various cultural backgrounds has been flattened to suit political ends. “Some of us have been here longer than others; some of us have more access to Ivy League colleges, boba tea, and cultural capital. Many of us don’t know what it even means to be Asian or American, let alone an admixture of both.” It’s with this rooted understanding of an identity category containing its own “share of internal contradictions and strife” that he writes on an international character and perspective on place.

For Dai, naming is a matter of cartography of the heart. He follows etymological chains to “a place named for a person named for a place,” a nomenclature through which he comes to know his spot on a map of streets and rivers. In explaining his own Chinese name for a stranger (Nuocheng, borne of the transliteration Nuokesiweir, or Knoxville, Tennessee), he discovers that he and his family’s Chinese names connect to geography—“a recitation not of ancestors, but of place-names important to a person, family, or clan,” not unlike how topogeny primarily functions among Indigenous groups “as narratives of migration, tales bespeaking both settlement and flight.”

The use of maps as a creative practice extends to his teaching post at the University of Idaho, where he helps his creative writing students create a cartography of queer desire, delving into the concept of finding a home—queer spaces—in the world. “If every map is essentially a claim that whatever it shows exists, then a map chock-full of queer moments asserts that queerness […] exists, not just abstractly, but as identities and bodies attached to specific points in space.” Queer moments made anonymously online—“momentary, ephemeral”—are reintegrated into a map as “loci that have proved integral to the shaping of individual queer lives: highly personal points of reference.” For Dai, queerness takes its residence from the activation of queer desires, while asking, Where do we go from here?

Danielle Shi is a writer and photographer based in Berkeley, CA. Her work can be found at Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, The Rumpus, La Piccioletta Barca, The Margins, and Common Forms.