I’m not sure what to make of this book. Although it started out well, exploring themes of Asian-American identity, the immigrant experience, coming of age, Taiwanese history, 90s alternative music, male friendship, creativity, and recovery from traumatic loss, in the end it left me suspicious and annoyed.
The book immediately appealed to me because Hua Hsu’s name on the attractive cover was recognizably Taiwanese and similar to my husband’s, whose first name is Hsing-hua. We read the book together over several days and discussed it several times on morning and lunchtime walks. I suppose we enjoyed our conversations about the book a lot more than the book itself.
Hsu’s immigrant parents met while attending graduate school at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Hua was born in 1977. In 1985, the family moved to Cupertino, California, a Bay Area community with a large Asian population that is now famous for the Apple headquarters. Hua’s grandparents and many of his aunts and uncles also moved to the Bay Area from Taiwan. During his high school years, Hua describes how he became interested in music, and he produced a music zine, like several of his friends. It was a fun, creative endeavor, allowed him to hone his critical skills, and it led to his receiving a lot of music for free. Little did Hsu know that his work on zines would later lead to a career as a professional journalist.
After high school, Hsu attended UC Berkeley, where he befriended Ken Ishida, a Japanese-American student. They were very different. Ken was self-assured, overdressed frat boy, normal in most ways; Hua was insecure socially yet confident in his style and musical preferences. Despite their differences, the two became fast friends. They frequently met for quiet smoking sessions on the balcony to discuss music, girls, dreams, and trivial opinions about mundane things that somehow seem important to college kids. Their friendship, however, was tragically ended when Ken was murdered after a carjacking. Not a spoiler; Ken’s murder is mentioned on the book jacket.
The book is Hsu’s memoir of their friendship and his recovery from the trauma of Ken’s death. Hsu didn’t write this memoir immediately after his friend’s death, when his memories were fresh. No, he wrote it over the past two decades, in between going to graduate school at Harvard, teaching English for 15+ years at Vassar and now Bard, writing music criticism for various publications (including The Village Voice), and becoming a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. In other words, this book was incredibly long in gestation.
Although I enjoyed the book, there was something about it that made me extremely uncomfortable. The book feels a bit phony.
Why do I think the book lacks credibility? Hsu pretty much admits it. His title, Stay True, seems intentionally ironic; he can’t remember how Ken’s satirical closing in letters originated. He mentions that some of Ken’s friends didn’t even know Ken was a close friend of his. He suggests a few times that maybe he got everything wrong. Although he’s a self-confessed pack rat who has saved everything, he fails to include some important documents that would have bolstered his story, made it more believable. For instance, where is the eulogy that he wrote for Ken’s funeral? How about an excerpt of the screenplay they worked on together? Where are the photos of his zines or excerpts of his writing for them? Show me the evidence. Instead, Hsu sows seeds of doubt.
Memoirs can help us feel a special connection to the author, but only if they reveal things. Hsu frequently doesn’t explain the motivation for his actions, making him at times seem immature, directionless, or secretive. For instance, Hsu gets involved with the Black Panthers in Berkeley after Ken’s death, but I have no idea why; Hsu never bothers to explain his motivation. Similarly, he never explains how he ended at Harvard or chose to teach inmates at San Quentin Prison (though he does wonder whether he’d be more successful teaching adults instead of teenagers). Nor does he explain why Pearl Jam and Dave Matthews Band, Ken’s favorite bands, are inferior to other bands he likes. Why?
Two sections of the book originated as New Yorker pieces. One is about Hsu and his father’s long-distance relationship, trading faxes to do math homework and share opinions of pop music, a truly charming story (see “My Dad and Kurt Cobain”). The other is Hsu’s story about Jacques Derrida on friendship (see “What Jacques Derrida Understood About Friendship”). Hsu tries to connect Derrida’s essays on friendship with his relationship with Ken, but the effort feels forced, and Hsu admits he doesn’t really understand Derrida, a notoriously abstruse theorist. In Stay True, Hsu includes many other academic digressions that seem only vaguely relevant: anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski’s work on the practice of gift exchange on Papua New Guinea, sociologist Marcel Mauss’s idea of delayed reciprocity, and Edward H. Carr’s 1961 book on historiography called What is History? Hsu likes to show off his academic chops, I guess, but not everything is connected to his friend Ken’s death. While at Berkeley, Hsu learned from his political science professor Michael Rogin that you could use history for your own end. Though Rogin died in 2001, Hsu still seems to be trying to impress him.
Structurally, there’s nothing particularly interesting or innovative about this memoir. The chapters are unnumbered and untitled. In between numerous digressions, the narrative is basically chronological, from Hsu’s adolescence in California until his adulthood in New York, which follows the ordinary memoir template. However, the narrative winds down toward the end of Hsu’s graduate study, never arriving at Hsu’s move to Brooklyn, his fifteen-plus years teaching at Vassar and Bard, and his position at The New Yorker, the presumed peak of a long-form journalism career that very few writers achieve.
Still, there are many other nostalgic things I enjoyed about the book. Hsu’s coming-of-age story made me think back on my college days and all those late-night discussions about books, movies, and music with my friends; those discussions seemed monumentally important at the time, but of course now they seem like mundane aspects of my past that fail to provide a lasting key to my identity.
There’s one touching scene toward the end of the book that briefly brings his friend Ken vividly to life: Hsu recalls a moment of kindness by Ken toward a child while working as a children’s shoe salesman in Nordstrom’s in San Francisco. For me, that was the most powerful tribute to Ken in the book. If Hsu had omitted the academic digressions, he’d have a shorter, more intimate memoir, perhaps only 80 pages long. Alas, Doubleday couldn’t have done much with that.
Hsu is a likable and humble narrator, and I pulled for him to get unstuck, to move on from his pointless obsession about his friend’s death. Instead, he spent years writing journal entries to Ken, and basically stalking Ken’s killers on the internet like an obsessed true-crime fanboy. When Hsu finally sees a therapist years later, he finds it almost instantly helpful. Too bad he didn’t catch hints from family members, friends, and lovers about getting help earlier to end his funk. But then perhaps he might have abandoned this prize-winning book.
I don’t know why Stay True won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for memoir/autobiography. It seems like a lightweight, self-indulgent book for such a distinguished prize, especially given its suspect narrative. As Hsu writes, “History is a tale we tell, not a perfect account of reality….You just have to figure out whether you trust the storyteller.”
Stay True
Hua Hsu
Doubleday
cool lima bean 