Thomas Dai

2 months ago | memoirland.substack.com | Scott Oake |Thomas Dai |Elizabeth Austin |Mark Rowlands

Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by Sari Botton, now featuring four verticals:Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

Jan 23, 2025 | electricliterature.com | Thomas Dai

Skip to content Personal Narrative This is how I know an Asian South exists: I miss it Southing, noun 1: difference in latitude to the south from the last preceding point of reckoning 2: southerly progress The cicadas began to arrive in the South in May. I suppose “arrive” is the wrong word, as the insects had been in the yard for two years already when my parents bought the property back in 2006, their bodies buried eight or more feet deep in the soil, insect clocks set to a seventeen-year...

Jan 21, 2025 | longreads.com | Thomas Dai

Thomas Dai | Longreads | January 21, 2025 | 5,159 words (19 minutes)This is an excerpt from Take My Name But Say It Slow by Thomas Dai, published by W.W. Norton and on sale January 21, 2025. It was edited and adapted for publication on Longreads. Two things happened to me right before I moved to China in 2017: I fell in love, and I witnessed a solar eclipse.

Jun 12, 2023 | yalereview.org | Thomas Dai

I’ve lived most of my life inside these double binds, never sure how to distinguish what I do in service to myself, my well-being, and my “identity” from what I do to garner the admiration of oth­ers. This is surely a problem many of us have, to varying degrees of severity and self-consciousness. How do you know what kind of person you are—good? bad? entirely mediocre?—unless someone else, preferably someone with prestigious credentials, tells you?