Stay True
Ratings46
Average rating4.1
15
Ratings46
Average rating4.1
From the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art. In the eyes of 18-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken--with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity--is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, a first-generation Taiwanese American who has a 'zine and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become best friends, a friendship built of late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the textbook successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Determined to hold on to all that was left of his best friend--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.
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Six days ago, listening to Hua Hsu speaking at the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, I found myself thinking: what a beautiful human being. An hour after that I got to watch him in the hallway, interacting with fans and other invited writers, demonstrating patience and kindness and grace; initial impression confirmed. Of all the books I bought that weekend, his was the first I launched into. In hindsight it was a poor decision: the better decision would've been to read <i>Stay True</i> when it first came to my attention a year and a half ago.
This is a book about friendship and loss and wisdom, and it will only really make sense to anyone over forty. Even then, probably only a certain subset of that cohort: the quieter, nerdier, introspective ones. Hsu writes with gentleness and humility toward his teenage self, reminding us of some of the absolute certainties we held at that age; of the ease with which we came up with opinions and how ill-informed those were. The details of his youth made no impression on me—I still have no idea what a zine is nor do I know any of Nirvana's music—but the soul is completely recognizable.
Memoirs, I've found, are often rooted in sadness. Either someone lived through a major (probably terrible) world event, or they're writing about death, grief, disease, addiction, mental illness, crime, or something of the like. Death does play a role in writer Hua Hsu's memoir, but not in a way that I would have expected. It is, as much as anything, a coming-of-age story about Hua, the son of comfortably middle-class Taiwanese immigrants, growing up in California and carefully crafting an anti-mainstream persona to compensate for not being cool. He enrolled at Berkeley, where a guy named Ken came into his orbit. Being Asian was really the only thing they had in common: Ken was Japanese, from a family who had been in the United States for generations, a member of a fraternity, wore trendy clothes and listened to trendy music. But they became close all the same, being friends in the way college students are, wasting time and being silly. And then Ken was killed in a carjacking. But the book isn't really about Ken's death, which doesn't happen until about 3/4ths of the way through. It's much more about Hua becoming a full person, which of course includes how the person he became was shaped by Ken's friendship and loss. The prose quality is very good, Hua's sharp intelligence and insight is evident throughout. But although it inspired reminiscences about my own college friendships, I struggled to really connect with it. The deep emotions under the surface are hinted at and alluded to but not really plumbed. Which, it feels emotionally vampiric to imply that someone needs to re-open their deepest wounds in order to feel a connection, but also there was just a lack of real vulnerability or rawness here. There's also not a well-defined narrative arc, which might have helped give it more momentum. It's solid, but wasn't at all spectacular for me.
