I can’t remember which intellectual we were discussing at the time; it could have been philosopher Walter Benjamin or Hannah Arendt or linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf or any number of thinkers we’d studied in our yearlong freshman seminar. But I’ll never forget our instructor’s mischievous, conspiratorial aside: “You can drop these names at cocktail parties!”
Years would go by before I attended an actual cocktail party or had mixed drinks served in a glass instead of a red plastic Solo cup. But her joke resonated with me. She alluded to a world we might someday take part in, even if we felt naïve and unsophisticated then, we children of immigrants who hadn’t been raised reading cartoons in the New Yorker or didn’t land internships based on our parents’ connections.
We didn’t have to be intimidated, she could have been saying. Such shibboleths, which signify the speaker’s liberal arts education at an elite university, served as pass codes into certain circles, even if—or perhaps especially if—you eventually followed a professional track into finance, tech, law, or medicine. While the theory we learned might have compelled a few classmates into academia, most of us probably never discussed signs, signifiers, and semiotics with such fervor again. (Ceci n’est pas une pipe!) Nonetheless, memories of those lofty concepts came to be inseparable from that formative time in our lives.
Hua Hsu’s compelling memoir, Stay True, brought me back to the intensity of those days. How deeply we felt—about music, about friendship, about love, the highs so high, the lows so low—as we entered adulthood.
I’m intimately familiar with Hsu’s particular coming-of-age milieu and landscape. We’re roughly the same age, and like him, I’m the daughter of immigrants who traveled from Taiwan to attend graduate school in the Midwest before eventually settling in California—Hsu’s family in the South Bay and my family in the East Bay. Like his, my engineer father worked abroad for stretches of my childhood—mine in Saudi Arabia as well as Taipei. I was a debater, too, and I’m extremely curious about whether Hsu competed in Oxford or Lincoln-Douglas. And like Hsu, I was figuring out my place in the world while attending college in the Bay Area.
In my freshman seminar, we read excerpts from Virgil’s The Aeneid, and I was chagrined when a classmate (who’d attended a fancy boarding school) casually mentioned that he’d read it already—in the original Latin! My public school education—which I’d been told had been excellent—suddenly seemed to fall short.
With grace and self-deprecating humor, Hsu mulls over his required texts:
We were always asked to read things for which we were unprepared. How can Foucault possibly make sense mere days into college? But you read anyway, confident that there would come a day when you could pull from Adorno or Hegel. For now, you underlined the parts that sounded as if they applied to your life, your perspective, whittling these systems of thinking down into something usable, like a sudden disdain for Nike.
It reminds me of how immigrants fake it until they make it. Hsu doesn’t frame the assimilation process in those terms, but immigrants attempt rituals and mores of their adopted homelands long before they ever get the point, let alone enjoy them.
I’m also struck by how Hsu’s path parallels my journey as a young fiction writer. For his zine, he wrote what he describes as “endless, over-the-top reviews of obscure power-pop singles from Canada, mimicking the hyperactive styles I’d read elsewhere.” Likewise, for a time in college, I was convinced that to become an author of Literature, I had to write stories that featured white protagonists—for that was mainly what I’d been taught in school. I wrote Ann Beattie knockoffs about lost young women in New York (I’d visited only once). I had internalized the East Coast bias: not only for sports, but for the notion that the most important matters take place there and not in California, where the sunshine apparently isn’t conducive to brooding.
Thankfully, as I delved into the books of writers across various diasporas, I realized I wanted to draw on my background and my obsessions. Now I urge my students: Tell the story that only you can tell, in the way only you can tell it.
“All I knew about Derrida was that he was important,” Hsu writes. He goes on to recall learning that not only was the French philosopher and deconstructionist still alive, but he’d spent the mid-1990s in places like Irvine.
My interpretation of the subtext: Irvine, the epitome of Southern California suburban blandness, didn’t seem to have the grit and grime necessary for someone like Derrida and his intellect—or intellect at all! But read as a whole, Stay True makes the case that the Left Coast merits close attention, too, as the book turns a critical lens on personal histories.
Here, Hsu trains his analysis—often through an exploration of pop culture—on the intimacy of a deep Berkeley friendship. Hsu’s friend Ken Ishida was murdered on the cusp of his senior year. At the funeral, Hsu gave the eulogy, sharing their group’s memories of a singular, generous friend.
Decades on, Hsu invokes Derrida while pondering that duty and the project of this poignant memoir:
Maybe taking seriously the ideas of our departed friends represents the ultimate expression of friendship, signaling the possibility of a eulogy that doesn’t simply focus attention back on the survivor and their grief.
Stay True achieves just that, inspiring reflections among its readers that ripple into the present moment.•
Join us on July 20 at 5 p.m., when Hsu will appear in conversation with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Stay True. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
