Being an Asian Southerner Means Being an Anomaly, Squared
January 30, 2025 at 04:30PMDoes an Asian South exist? In an excerpt from his essay collection, Take My Name But Say It Slow, Thomas Dai reflects on growing up Chinese in the American South, in a suburb of Knoxville, Tennessee. He has since lived elsewhere in the US, as well as China (a period that Dai recounts in another excerpt for Longreads). “Yet none of these places,” he writes, “have felt like a permanent backdrop to my life in the way that East Tennessee once did.” Dai writes about his hometown through a unique lens, and makes beautiful, thoughtful observations on place, identity, assimilation, and belonging.
Perhaps this is also why the confluence of Southernness and Asianness has continued to elude me. The former is premised on land: stolen land, broken land, land which has been worked over for generations, but land nonetheless. The latter—if it’s built on anything at all—is built on dislocation and diaspora, on the dispersed and fragile networks forged by those who’ve learned to dwell in spaces few and far between.
This is all to say that there are Asian people in the South, millions of them, in fact, but that doesn’t mean they feel Southern.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/30/being-an-asian-southerner-means-being-an-anomaly-squared/
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