Hua Hsu has done something remarkable with his memoir, Stay True, which was recently awarded a 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Although the book—which focuses in large measure on Hsu’s undergraduate years at UC Berkeley—appears to operate in the tradition of the bildungsroman, it also takes on issues of identity and loss that are timeless, in more ways than one. Hsu is the Americanized child of Taiwanese immigrant parents who are uninterested in belonging, or even remaining, in some sense, in the United States. The author, a zine maker and indie rock aficionado, turns his back on the mainstream…until, at Berkeley, he meets an assimilated Japanese American frat boy named Ken.
This article appears in Issue 24 of Alta Journal.
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Their unlikely friendship, which ends when Ken is shot and killed at the age of 20 during a 1998 carjacking, forms the spine of Stay True.
The murder transforms Hsu and haunts his book. Not because it is something with which he can come to terms, but because it is something with which he cannot. Grief becomes the driver—not only for the narrative but also for Hsu. Stay True, then, is a memoir as a kind of public reckoning with all the pieces of a life that cannot be resolved.
Hsu, who is a staff writer at the New Yorker, understands that loss involves big emotions. The book works because it is deftly calibrated, in both its understated language and the nuance of its narrative. Hsu has always been an outsider, amid his own family and in the world. “The first generation,” he writes, “thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories.”
Still, what happens when those stories won’t stay finished? What happens when they can’t be put away? It is with the figure of Ken—who becomes a very real ghost in the machine—that Hsu opens up his memoir, reminding us that, as William Faulkner once observed, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Initially, at least, the two young men are unlikely compatriots, but they are connected by the need to make meaning (mixtapes, private jokes, and other rituals) out of the chaos of experience. Then, in an instant, Ken is gone, and Hsu is left to parse his loss.
What is the value of meaning if it can be destroyed so quickly? What is the solace of memory if those we recall cannot be preserved? Such questions sit at the center of Hsu’s inquiry, which, even a quarter of a century later, feels like something of an open wound. This renders Stay True a book steeped in a conundrum, which is, of course, the conundrum of being alive.
And yet, if there is no way to bring Ken back, Hsu can remember sharply, not to re-create the past but to carry it in some elusive way. “That’s the dilemma of life,” his father confides. “You have to find meaning, but by the same time, you have to accept the reality. How to handle the contradiction is a challenge to every one of us.”•
