The compulsively readable Stay True, Hua Hsu’s Pulitzer Prize winner, goes where few memoirs dare to tread: the minefields of male relationships, which tend to contrast starkly with those among women. An only child raised in Cupertino, California, by Taiwanese immigrants, Hsu, like many children of immigrants, straddled the barbed wire of a bifurcated identity. The book revolves around a needless tragedy, a lament for a friend lost too early and for his own desultory youth.
When Hsu’s father returned to Taiwan for business, the family bought two fax machines, ostensibly, Hsu claims, “so he could help me with my math homework.… I was very bad at math.” The book’s opening quotes copiously from the resulting faxes, ranging from geometry equations to asides about baseball teams and pop commentary: “I like the November Rain by Guns N’ Roses. The Metallica is also great.” The older man’s nurturing spirit hovers over the narrative.
Rife with allusions to ’90s underground bands and retail brands (Nikes were uncool), Stay True beautifully evokes the demographic changes that shaped Hsu’s nascent self. He postured as an indie-music snob to his peers while spending summers and winters with his parents in Taiwan, which “represented but a distant and imaginary former homeland.” He writes,
Silicon Valley’s suburbs were amenable to a kind of meandering, gradual transformation; flagging businesses were remade by new waves of immigrants, while strip malls began turning, store by store, into crowded islands of Chinese food and the latest in asymmetrical hair art. There were bubble-tea cafés and competing Chinese bookstores, parking lots mazy with modified Hondas and moms hoping to preserve their pale complexions with full-face visors and sleeve-length driving gloves.
In high school, Hsu was a caustic hipster, fueled by the guitar licks and edgy lyrics of Nirvana and Pavement. He gravitated toward others with similar tastes. However, during his freshman year at UC Berkeley, he met Ken, a Japanese American frat bro from El Cajon who stood out for his Abercrombie & Fitch wardrobe, passion for Pearl Jam, and seeming comfort with assimilation. The pair clicked over shared cigarettes, pancake breakfasts, and a bottomless appetite for ideas. Their bond grew: Hsu came to admire how effortlessly Ken inhabited his skin, always up for a good time, from birthday dinners to avant-garde films to his off-campus job selling children’s shoes at a Nordstrom.
Rich depths lay beneath Ken’s bland surface. Together, the friends dug into political theory, poring over Heidegger and joining ranks with Asian American empowerment groups. In time, Ken pivoted away from “abstruse theory,” sketching a plan for an International Regulatory Trade Commission. At heart, he was an institutionalist. Meanwhile, Hsu cranked out a zine stuffed with lefty bromides, eschewing Ken’s moderation in favor of a radical expression modeled on the Black Panthers. This was Berkeley, after all, where the spirit of the 1960s was only a protest away.
Ken is a vibrant presence throughout Stay True, his decency and charm cutting against Hsu’s pretensions. Hsu is more asocial here, less inclined to girlfriends, devoting Friday evenings to laying out his zine. Their conversations devolve into bull sessions, and that arch tone unwittingly leaks into Hsu’s narration. He’s a gorgeous sentence-writer and an expert choreographer of scenes, but the connecting tissue can wear thin. He cites Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher whose investigations into “authenticity” weren’t particularly original. (The ghosts of Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, and Sylvia Plath would like a word.) One exception is a stunning riff on the French sociologist Marcel Mauss, whose post–World War I scholarship mourns the intellectual talent annihilated in that conflict.
Stay True is a requiem for the disappointments inherent in male friendships, as well as a more shocking and unexpected tragedy. In mid-July before senior year, Ken threw a housewarming party in his new apartment. Hsu swung by early, en route to a rave and the loss of his virginity. Late that night, after the party was over, Ken was robbed at gunpoint and then kidnapped, tucked into the trunk of his car, and driven 30 miles to where he was executed in an alley. Hsu brilliantly shifts registers, from undergrad self-absorption to an agonizing grief that trails him to graduate school at Harvard, “the dutiful, surviving half of an inside joke.”
Afterward, one of their female confidantes, Gwen, approached Hsu. “Gwen asked me, were you and Ken really that close?” he notes. “They shared a closeness unique to friendships between young men and women. I knew that he was a sweet and vulnerable person, but she understood these qualities in a way that I never could.… Our friendship was staged in private, on balconies, in cars, walking in search of pizza. But how could I ever be sure?”
Stay True stays true to itself as it tacks back and forth: with Ken’s death, the world lost a bright candle, his potential snuffed out in an America inured to casual violence and a void of effective public policy. Hsu plants his finger firmly on our national pulse. His cri de coeur may be calm and controlled, but sorrow stirs beneath its surface, raw, unsettled.•
Join us on July 20 at 5 p.m., when Hsu will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and special guest José Vadi to discuss Stay True. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
