You don’t necessarily know what will linger with you—what traces of high school and college, what songs and texts and moments of doing nothing in particular, will endure long after you’ve left that figurative and literal place. Friendships made while young feel as though they could last forever—but often, especially in an era when moving around the country for one’s job is the norm, the tethers loosen until one day they disappear, and perhaps they aren’t mourned at all.
The phenomenon of forgetting those with whom you have a weaker relationship has been disrupted, sort of, by social media, where you can maintain friendships long after their organic expiration date. After an extended period of being out of touch other than on social media, I had dinner with a college friend who commented on how little we understood, how unaware we were, when forming friendships in college, that we were forging some of the deepest bonds we’d ever have. A similar epiphany nestles in the heart of Hua Hsu’s moving, Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir, Stay True, the July California Book Club selection.
In early adulthood, I moved in parallel to Hsu, who’d gone the geographically short distance from Silicon Valley to Berkeley for college in 1995. Opening the book, I could remember reading in the newspaper that Hsu’s friend Ken Ishida had been carjacked and killed. Like Hsu, I’d been absorbed in the humanities and countercultural movements of the late 1990s. We’d known the same people, the same scenes, and similar touchstones. We’d lived in adjacent dorms. Seems likely we both grabbed coffee at Caffè Strada and late-night oversize pizza slices at Fat Slice or Blondie’s. We both spent nights talking with close friends who’d traveled with us from high school to college who, as Hsu puts it, were also “in search of patterns that would bring the world into focus.”
And so I first sank into the exquisite evocation of Berkeley in these pages with the profound pleasure of nostalgia—the Greek nostos, from which the word nostalgia derives, means a return home, and the book feels to me, more so than any other book I’ve read, like a homecoming.
The memoir demonstrates Hsu’s comfort and fluidity over a number of registers. His is a graceful account of loss and grief. It is an exploration of an unforgettable friendship between young men. It is a story about a son finding his place in the world through a deepening understanding of his parents. And it is a West Coast book that is strikingly beautiful and in touch with the world, not merely other texts. Its particularity feels rebellious—it refuses to capitulate to simplifications of Asian American experience, to water down anything of the real experience to pander to those who weren’t there.
The closer you read this book, the more marvelous you’ll find its fusion of the personal and the critical. You can break Hsu’s work down to its mechanics. In a quintessential move of contemporary California literature, he alludes to both “lowbrow” and “highbrow,” and he recounts cultural movements from the first person, making amusing and surprising connections as he goes: “Once I started middle school, I realized that my dad’s record buying had prepared me for the social hierarchies of recess.”
But this book is more than its deconstructed elements—throughout, Hsu honors a friend with an honest and generous awareness that you can love, seriously and platonically, a person who exists in the world differently than you do, who makes different choices. We all forget that in this age when groups so often feel calcified. There’s an ache in this book that can’t be boiled down to craft. Examination of a culture, Hsu’s work reminds us, is also an examination of the self as well as the place of the self in society and in relation to others.
Hsu’s search for what of the self is shaped by society—and which society—calls to mind his earlier, fascinating nonfiction study, A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific. In that book, Hsu explores the evolution of Chinese American literature as it contends with the question of who can claim expertise and the concurrent development of American attitudes about China. He focuses especially on the life of H.T. Tsiang, a Chinese immigrant born in 1899 who wrote ambitious books, streaked with abjection, and who was largely self-published, peddling his books in the streets—a fate that contrasted sharply with white author Pearl S. Buck’s. While Buck was critically acclaimed for her novel The Good Earth, historical fiction about China that created the country for generations of readers unfamiliar with it, Tsiang unsuccessfully attempted to shop his book to New York publishers.
Asian American literature is in a different place now, perhaps, or at any rate, one of greater abundance. You’ll recognize you’re in the hands of a master from the assured opening sentences of Stay True, which evoke the book’s themes perfectly. Hsu writes, “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.”
Within the first two-word clause, he announces that this memoir is a project about time and its effects. With “no such thing as spending too much time in the car,” he conjures the aimlessness of a certain kind of young-adult experience in California, the energetic movement toward nothing specific, the intense search for patterns on the ride more important than the destination, even if it all went, contraposed with today’s ubiquitous picture-taking—evidence-making—unphotographed.
His second sentence in the book’s opening passage conjures the depth of friendship that develops among young adults who are away from their parents and congregating together as much as they can in the process of forming another kind of family in college. Living within Hsu’s words is the ineffable, what so many of us can see and still hope for within our own friendships: an amalgamation of abandon, loyalty, and the furious yearning to be with one another. Most of all, the togetherness.•
Join us on July 20 at 5 p.m., when Hsu will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Stay True. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
EXCERPT
Read an excerpt of Hsu’s Stay True. —Alta
WHY I WRITE
Alta Journal books editor David L. Ulin asks Hsu about the experience of writing and publishing Stay True. —Alta
EVENT RECAP
If you missed the conversation with Charles Yu, Bonnie Tsui, and John Freeman, you can watch it or read the recap here. —Alta
FOURTH WALL
John Freeman writes about the seeds of Interior Chinatown in prior books. —Alta
MOTHER-CENTRIC LITERATURE
California Book Club editor Anita Felicelli reviews Jane Smiley’s The Questions That Matter Most: Reading, Writing, and the Exercise of Freedom. —Alta
RECOGNIZING DISINFORMATION
Assembly Bill 873, authored by member Marc Berman (D–Menlo Park), passed unanimously in the assembly and is now in the Senate Education Committee. It proposes that media literacy and critical thinking be incorporated into K–12 curricula. —Palo Alto Weekly
THE REAL IN FICTION
Read prior CBC author Percival Everett’s lecture turned essay on abstract novels. He remarks, “Nonsense is beautiful because it is a confidence game.” —Yale Review
AUTHOR TALK
Felicelli will moderate an event with Alta contributor and author Rita Chang-Eppig (Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea) at the Mill Valley Public Library on Thursday, June 22, at 6:30 p.m. —Mill Valley Library
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