In the wake of tragedies, it’s understandable to want to filibuster reality. To talk, to remember, to try if not to stall the truth then to at least ask it some questions. Find out how a disease developed, what made a driver sleepy, why a person chose a darkened street as a shortcut. Or which way the wave broke. Reverse engineering the tunnel of fate this way can make it seem less impersonal. Doing so, however, cannot seal a rupture in time, especially one the size of a missing person. Someone beloved. This exercise in reality-maintenance may slowly accustom the bereaved to the new world in which they find themselves. But it can also have the side effect of rendering the remaining image of the departed too much from the shadows of their absence. As if all of us are merely souls arrowing toward our particular destination.
I write this because I came to such a conclusion in grief, as I suspect you have, too—living in a world where those we love are taken from us. So, too, did Hua Hsu. Twenty-five years ago this week, when his friend Ken was murdered, he faced a choice. To chronicle the effect of death on himself or to remember his friend as he was before his life was taken in a brutal carjacking. In Stay True, as the title suggests, Hsu has chosen the latter way, and in so doing, he has written an exquisitely beautiful book about friendship and growing up in California. The book is a Gen X anthem and a profound meditation on Asian American identity. What a gift it is to anyone who has known a friend.
It begins, as so many California stories do, in the car. “Back then, there was no such thing as spending too much time in the car,” Hsu writes, and just like that we’re tooling around Berkeley toward College Avenue in a hand-me-down Volvo, Hsu at the wheel, trying to control the music that will be listened to on a drive to nowhere or to the grocery store: “the one that took about six songs to get to.” The car as rolling jukebox. The car as secondary apartment. It’s all here. Hsu lists some of the friends who’d ride along, the way they scrabble for shotgun.
Stay True moves like a pop song with six choruses, moments in which harmony is defined and redefined in new situations, with a new array of people. In the book’s second section, we meet Hsu’s family, who are part of the East Asian diaspora in which millions of people from China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Mongolia, and more came to the United States for a better life. Hsu’s parents came for graduate school from Taiwan, met in Illinois, and had him. His childhood, briefly sketched, brings him to California in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when Asian grocery stores, shopping malls, languages, and life are no longer entirely in the margins of Silicon Valley. Even if Asian Americans aren't always fully accepted, Asianness simply exists, and Hsu grows up within and without it.
Music would come to be the heart of Hsu’s life, but grudgingly at first. It’s originally his father’s territory. The records Hsu’s father buys, listens to, keeps tidy and undinged in their clear plastic wrappers have the appeal of so many dads’ bait and tackle for weekend fishing. It all seems a bit much until Hsu hears Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the radio and a pilot light inside him clicks on. He begins to make zines because he’s heard it’s an easy way to get free music. He prowls the import sections of record shops, searching out bootlegs. Later, it occurs to him that he was part of the final stage of that culture.
“Maybe those were the last days when something could be truly obscure,” he writes. “Not in the basic sense that a style or song might be esoteric. But there was a precariousness to out-of-the-way knowledge, a sense that a misfiled book or forgotten magazine could easily be lost forever.”
The same is true of people in a world in which technology has yet to leapfrog distance. When Hsu’s father finds better work prospects back home in Taiwan, he moves there, and arranging long-distance calls proves so difficult and tricky that Hsu’s family buys two fax machines and Hsu and his father conduct their relationship by fax. “California’s sunny day also influence the ‘thinking and behavior,’” the older man says once to Hsu. “Make people thinking ‘bright.’ Do you think so?”
There are so many things to admire in this book: its poise, its wonderful evocation of self-consciousness, its shape and marvelous design. Key to all of them, though, is Hsu’s deft touch with quotation. How tempting it must have been to include more. Instead, quoting lightly and just enough, Hsu conjures his father as a man equally keen to have a relationship with his son as he is simply to know him. A definition of love and friendship Hsu later expounds on.
What a glorious ballad to friendship this book becomes when Hsu arrives at Berkeley. To those who attended college in America, so much of this will be familiar—achingly so. The feeling of dread over who your roommates might be is perfectly drawn here. So, too, is the epochal nature of time when you’re 18. How endless a year is, and then how quickly, when things go well, you fall into patterns with friends. How you begin to define yourselves against yourselves, as if staking out roles in a sitcom. In Hsu’s life, that means living with his close high school friends Paraag and Dave in the dorms. It is almost by accident that he meets Ken.
Beautifully, tenderly, Stay True knocks the word accident back into a carom toward luck by virtue of how the memoir depicts Ken and Hsu’s unlikely meeting. Sarcastic, shy, committed to straight-edge values, as defined in punk subculture, Hsu could not have been more different from Ken, who is Japanese American and projects the comfort of someone whose family was always here in America, or at least a little longer than Hsu’s. When they first meet, Ken is bounding up stairs, at ease in his skin, comfortable with his voice, possessing good manners, like someone who has no beef with reality. Meanwhile, Hsu is years into an aesthetic of defining himself by what he does not like. Somehow Hsu winds up helping Ken move his things into the dorm.
What luck these two met, because despite differences, they become fast friends. Ken leans toward fraternity life, Dave Matthews, and girls; Hsu burrows ever deeper into thrifting his clothes, Marxist thought, and the early mazes of the internet. They meet in between for cigarettes, long conversations, and the kind of low-grade pranks college life is fueled by. In one of the more amusing scenes, Hsu describes Ken coming home from a party and the two of them assuming alternate identities to participate in an early right-wing conservative chat room on Aol.
While their friendship grows, Hsu is discovering the power of intellectual thought as if for the first time. Pausing to pull out Derrida, who wanted to disrupt our ideas of dichotomies, Hsu builds the theoretical foundation for why this friendship between supposed opposites worked so well. Doing so also sounds an important note to how life can be enjoyed. Drawing on Derrida’s ideas of recognizing oneself in the other—and knowing that friendship is temporally marked—Hsu reveals himself and Ken gleefully, sometimes desperate to make a mark against all odds. “We sought a modest kind of infamy,” he writes, describing how in a library beneath the painting of an old white man “we would write our names on slips of paper and sneak them into empty spaces underneath him, wondering how long it would take before someone noticed us.”
Ideas are the melody of this book. Postmodernism crashes into Hsu’s life and quickly becomes so ubiquitous in his classes that it can simply be reduced to that which is “weird.” Deconstruction as a literary method is so heavily used that it nearly turns Hsu tone-deaf to reading altogether. Here is the tailwind of political correctness and the rise of the right-wing backlash that continue to this day.
Another great strength of Stay True is how it reveals the ways an idea can be felt communally, especially when it assumes the force of culture or policy—like Proposition 209, which ended affirmative action in California in 1996. In the wake of this body blow to campus life, Hsu becomes politically involved, volunteering for a Black Panther, mentoring underserved kids in the East Bay, spending time at a prison writing workshop, and editing an Asian American literary journal called Slant. He still loves music, but he also has a new way of defining what he is against.
When Hsu is with Ken, though, most of what they talk about are passions. Music, food, friends, ways of being. What rise through the waves of this book are these passions, gorgeously rendered, from songs and albums to books and works of sociology. The songs, through their repetition, take on the power of a soundscape. Of all these, the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” is the most lasting, with its repeated phrase “God only knows what I’d be without you.” Moving liquidly through Hsu’s own harmonic narrative movements—as an Asian American, as a college student, as a friend, as a political activist, as one of those left behind—the song appears and reappears, beveling the events and people he describes with the uncanny, brightly lit finality of lived experience.
The song also lends an eerie note of foreshadowing to the murder to come. How do we live in a world we don’t fully comprehend? Early on in Stay True, Hsu recalls trying, in his nerdy late-teen way, to approach this problem by itemizing reality. By becoming an expert in his corner. But once Ken is killed, he resists the urge to deal with this question about how to fathom the world by imagining that life had gone a different way. The other questions he faces are too grave to do that. What if he had stayed at the party where Ken spent his last minutes with friends? What if? Words Hsu’s father once sent to him by fax echo down the line of years, giving if not comfort then a certain degree of pathos for the difficulty of living. “That’s the dilemma of life,” he told his young son. “You have to find meaning, but by the same time, you have to accept the reality.” The genius of this sweet, sad, and also joyous song of a book is how it does both.•
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.
