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A Memoir
by Hua Hsu
Book Reviewed by: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 eighteen-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, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes 'zines 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 friends, a friendship built on 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 one of his closest friends—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.
Excerpt
Stay True
Back then, there was no such thing as spending too much time in the car. We would have driven anywhere so long as we were together.
I always offered my Volvo. First, it seemed like the cool, generous thing to do. Second, it insured that everyone had to listen to my music. Nobody could cook, yet we were always piling into my station wagon for aspirational trips to the grocery store on College Ave, the one that took about six songs to get to. We crossed the Bay Bridge simply to get ice cream, justifying a whole new mixtape. There was a twenty-four-hour Kmart down 880 that we discovered one night on the way back from giving someone a lift to the airport—the ultimate gesture of friendship. A half-hour drive just to buy notepads or underwear in the dead of night, and it was absolutely worth it. Occasionally, a stray, scratchy pop tune would catch someone's attention. What's this? I'd heard these songs hundreds of times before. But to listen to them with other ...
Pulitzer Prize
2023
National Book Critics Circle Awards
2022
This notion of defining oneself through music highlights the importance of finding one's place in the world. While the pursuit of identity is a goal for most young people, Hsu's status as a second-generation immigrant adds another layer of complexity to his quest. His writing is understated, a style that is the perfect vehicle for the content but may not be to every reader's taste. Likewise, the musical references that pepper this memoir are a strength in that they provide rich cultural detail, but, to a certain degree, they rely on the reader's familiarity with the references for their full impact to be conveyed. Nevertheless, Stay True is a visceral, honest memoir with the potential to connect with a wide readership...continued
Full Review
(737 words)
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(Reviewed by Amanda Ellison).
Jonathan Lethem, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn
Hua Hsu offers, with seeming effortless grace and lucidity...a map to his soul's becoming. He shows how he constructed an armor against the injustices of the world, one made only of porousness and transparency, the only armor worth donning. This kind and degree of sharing is a rare gift. Ocean Vuong, New York Times bestselling author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Stay True feels like one of those books that is the sum total of a writer's life in thinking, craft, and curiosity, made felt at last, so that when the sentences come, they come with a deliberate, patient, and precise force. Hsu takes on the central theme of a friend's violent loss and casts from that void a story that, somehow, despite the hurt and confusion, embraces the world around it with a steady and capacious centrifugal force. This is the endeavor of writing at its most open, meticulous, forgiving and tender—which is to say, this is writing at its best.
In his memoir, Stay True, Hua Hsu recalls his college years in the 1990s, including the role that zines played in the evolution of his identity: "Zines are a metaphor for life…It's your creation and your voice."
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a zine as being a short form of fanzine, a kind of amateur-produced magazine designed for fans of niche interests. Unlike a traditional glossy magazine, they are typically made cheaply, photocopied and stapled together or folded like a pamphlet. In keeping with their DIY nature, they can also be glued, taped, or sewn. A zine's circulation is usually small — they are often disseminated to fewer than 1,000 readers. Zines offer unfiltered perspectives and their aesthetic is homespun,...
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