In 2014, Hua Hsu began his eclectic, often dazzling cultural criticism for the New Yorker with an online piece about the arrival of The Simpsons in China. He speculated about how the animated series’ “churlish sarcasm” and “punky disposition” would fare in a China not yet fully beset by the neo-authoritarianism of Xi Jinping and suggested that what made the show a hit in the United States was a sense of equilibrium about the world it created. “After all,” he wrote, “the Simpsons remain a family. Bart is demon-like, but he never truly breaks bad; Lisa dreams of more enlightened surroundings, yet never runs away.”

The search for a meaningful equilibrium is at the heart of Hsu’s coming-of-age memoir, Stay True, which looks destined to become a classic of its genre. Set mostly during his time as an undergraduate at Berkeley in the 1990s, the book employs the long-established patterns of the bildungsroman, the class of novel in which overcoming some conflict or setback leads to the protagonist’s admission to the world of adulthood. In Hsu’s memoir, he is delivered from his otherness as the son of Taiwanese immigrants through his “affiliation” with “a small tribe,” an artistically inclined, often Asian American circle of friends and lovers.

By the time Hsu arrives at Berkeley, he has already assembled important components of his future sensibility as a cultural critic: the interest in the “fringe territories” of culture, like Berkeley’s countercultural shops and the film Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon; the writing of his own zines to document his artistic discoveries, especially the more esoteric reaches of popular music; and the search for a lasting authenticity, “that quality that made you yourself.” For Hsu, this “authentic self” begins with the thrift store wardrobe he cultivates, the “disintegrating cardigans” and “thick, polyester shirts” that make him look “like a hobo.”

What is beautifully mysterious about Stay True is the extent to which its narrative propulsion doesn’t depend on the predictable conflicts of coming-of-age stories. For example, he isn’t alienated from his immigrant parents, who are devoted to their child but don’t follow the stereotype of overbearing Asian caregivers (tiger moms, helicopter parenting). His father, who has returned to Taiwan as a semiconductor executive, faxes charming, heartfelt advice among his corrections of Hsu’s math homework. “Your goodness and strong points are always in our hearts,” he writes to his son, “although we are not always saying them.”

Similarly, despite setbacks, Hsu expresses a quiet yet rebellious confidence in whatever cultural destinations his interests lead him to. He flunks his AP French test because he’s written an essay on how “tragique” the death of the very un-French and uncanonical Kurt Cobain is. Although he “desperately wanted to be the kind of person who understood poetry,” he ceases his formal studies of literature at Berkeley after he makes a comment in poetry class and the instructor disagrees. This decision doesn’t lead to uncertainty about his own critical abilities but to a redoubling of his efforts to develop his own countercultural aesthetic. He is aware of the canon wars then engulfing American literary culture, but cultural change doesn’t unnerve him: what is replacing the canon, women’s writings and multiculturalism, is, to him, “a meaningful intervention,” even as he learns how “dead white guys” like Herman Melville were important to the formation of an American identity.

The young Hsu finds that infatuation and celebration, not the anxiety of influence, are a more productive way of identifying “patterns that would bring the world into focus.” He loves anything he feels he “discovered,” like the bands Pavement and Polvo. He falls under the spell of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. He writes a thesis “mimicking” the political-theory professor who teaches him “wild juxtapositions…frantic rhythm…rhetorical feints.” Most of all, he cherishes the collegiate friends he finds “to be different with.” The one who makes the deepest impression is the other central figure of Stay True: Ken, kind and charismatic, whose death in the middle of the book threatens to dampen permanently the high spirits of Hsu’s meticulously constructed sensibility.

As he describes the evolution of their friendship, Hsu demonstrates a preternatural skill at recalling the transitory perceptions, tiny voltas, and subsonic bass rhythms that underlie any important relationship. In a superb scene recounting their repeated viewings of a classic art film, Chris Marker’s La Jetée, Ken moves from being, in Hsu’s eyes, an easygoing, assimilated Japanese American frat boy to being someone with whom he shares the mutual understandings and enthusiasms of true friendship. The film itself, a sci-fi rendering of a man grappling with the moment of his own death, presages the inner process that Hsu will undergo after Ken’s sudden death: “He’s caught in a loop, and whatever is fated to happen will happen. We watched it and then watched it again; each time, his world ends.”

The real-life tragedy of Ken’s killing shakes the tightrope that Hsu is balancing on, but what pulls him steadily to the other side is the still-unfulfilled promise of adult life. Stay True, magnificently balanced but not predictable, affecting but not sentimental, intensely specific but not arcane, demonstrates that art is not merely the kind of loud extremities of creativity that the young Hsu was attracted to but also a joyful equilibrium in the face of tremulous sorrow. Out of despair, he gradually attains an artist’s awareness of the ways in which his calling in life, writing, can transcend the ordinary self-aggrandizement of literary ambition and become a form of generosity and love: “the smell of secondhand smoke on flannel, the taste of pancakes with fresh strawberries and powdered sugar the morning after, sun hitting a specific shade of golden brown, the deep ambivalence you once felt toward a song that now devastated you.”•

Join us on July 20 at 5 p.m., when Hsu will appear in conversation with CBC host John Freeman and special guest José Vadi to discuss Stay True. Register for the Zoom conversation here.