Stay True
Stay True / Hua Hsu / Penguin Random House, September 2022 - $26 (Hardcover)
The summer before senior year at Berkeley, Hua Hsu’s friend Ken is killed in a carjacking. The tragedy happens hours after Ken’s housewarming party, a moment that, even stripped of the narrativizing that comes with retrospection, signaled adulthood—its inevitability, its coherence. Leaving the party early, Hsu half-promised Ken to go swing dancing with him the next day, a plan he’d delayed many times. Its frivolity offended his stubbornly curated persona: his esoteric music, his zine, his “showy, disciplined zig to everyone else’s sloppy zags.” Though he grated against most mainstream tastes, including that Ken—a fellow Asian American—belonged to a frat, he loved Ken, with whom he existed as “a mismatched pair moving through the world. We noticed the same things.”
After, there was no swing dancing. The promise of progression collapsed. Hsu turned more obsessively to writing and to blaming himself for the events of the night, and his friends moved on in their separate ways. A few years later, returning to Berkeley on grad school holiday break, Hsu reflected: “How much of the confusion surrounding our paths was generic postcollege stuff, and how much of it owed to how our lives had been recalibrated around these new scales of fear and failure?”
In this way, though Stay True is about Ken—and succeeds as a full, uncompromising portrait—it’s also an attempt to understand why one’s life is the way it is. It’s a typology, a disaggregation of all that has potentially (re)calibrated Hsu’s life: the immigrant story that his Taiwanese parents can be fitted into (and that the book then moves an appropriate distance away from, to its credit); the American music he inherits from them and discovers for himself; his discovery of Asian America; his political involvements; his experience teaching at San Quentin; a few girlfriends and a few academics.
As I read, I wanted to thank Hsu for a bundle of successes: for being a very good writer and a remarkably reflexive personal archivist, for modeling what it means to write “with love and duty” about another person, for crafting an anti-eulogy. And for his own grace. He forgives himself for his own college-aged snobbery, his animating mission to be different, and his consuming guilt for Ken’s death. The latter is eased by visiting a campus therapist in grad school (they are offered a free semester, Hsu writes, so everyone’s going). The last pages capture the last session. In it, he thanks his therapist for a key insight, one more profound than the dawning conviction that he is “legendarily self-involved”: he has learned “what to explain and what to keep secret.” This memoir, and the brilliant attunement it demonstrates, is the product of this lesson of restraint.
--Claire Shang