Introducing author Hua Hsu’s memoir, Stay True, the July California Book Club selection, host John Freeman noted that there are so many books within this book, and “yet it feels so loose and elegant and comfortable in its clothing.” He asked how Hsu, a cultural critic, found the voice for the project, which feels natural.
Hsu commented that cultural criticism and journalism were always the main vocation he saw, but he also knew he wanted to return to stories of himself and his friend Ken and the cohort of people they grew up with. “Throughout that period of time when I was profiling folks…in the back of my mind, I knew that it was a problem of language that I had to acquire,” Hsu said. “I saw a lot of the journalism as practice. I wasn’t sure how to implement it. I understood, if I can’t describe how this guitar sounds or if I can’t describe how this book makes me feel, that it would be very difficult to write about friendship or relationships.”
Freeman commented on how much of Stay True is about intimacy, including the intimacy Hsu had with his parents. Hsu’s father managed to conduct a close relationship by fax, and quotations from that correspondence appear in the book. Hsu responded that he’d gained a sense of awareness or empathy through the process of writing and explained, “When you’re actually a teenager, you’re not thinking about meaning or legacy or empathy. You’re very just focused on your own world. So in the moment, faxing with my dad was just kind of a chore.… I remember thinking, it’s weird that I can’t see the indentation of the pen because it’s a washed-out Xerox on the other side of the fax machine.”
Freeman said that the book beautifully and consistently describes “what it feels like to experience something, rather than describe what it feels like to analyze and find the pattern in the experience.” Hsu remarked, “What you just described is one of the difficulties that I had to figure out for myself.” He’d worked as a music critic for so long, he said, that he had been approaching things analytically, but he’d always been “more enchanted with the effect that something has on me, or what it makes us imagine, or what it makes us desire.” Throughout the book, Hsu didn’t specifically name as many things, stores and the like, as he could have. “I wanted the reader to be able to share in that experience of discovery or share in that experience of awe, rather than feeling like I was forcing my own awe on them.… Finding out that distinction between analysis and experience that you just touched on was really important for me,” he said.
“The assemblage of a personality, a persona, an aesthetic is a deep part of the book,” Freeman observed and continued, “yet, as you just mentioned, you’re not shoving your references at us. It’s more the activity of that assemblage that comes through.” Hsu agreed and said, “Every microgeneration has a version of that experience, even if the infrastructure is completely different.… Having taught college students for the past 15 to 20 years, I didn’t want to force my sense of nostalgic yearning onto a reader. But I wanted to alert them to their own relationship with the past.”
Author José Vadi joined the program. He brought up Hsu’s events in connection with launching the book, including an event in New York with writer and critic Lucy Sante, a pickup basketball event in China, and an appearance with a band called Earth Dad that covered Pearl Jam in an ambient fashion. Hsu also made a zine. Vadi asked whether these activities extended the community depicted in Stay True. In his response, Hsu referred to how writers didn’t get an opportunity to go to live events during the pandemic, and so it was special to have the events, each a bit different, for his book. He mentioned that he had a dissociative relationship with the people in the book, even though it’s intimate. He said that he looks back and thinks he should have been more open. He said, “I feel a fondness for all the people in the book because the book was a chance to, like, hang out a bit longer.”
Freeman asked how Hsu and Vadi structure a book so that it feels like experience. Referring to his forthcoming memoir in essays, Chipped, Vadi said that he felt it was important to stay “present in the moment.… You have to remember the impetus to write the piece to begin with, whether it was ephemera or a moment or a certain trigger in the world that made you think about something.” He would try to remember not only what happened but “the energy of it, what was the inertia, what was the tension.”
Hsu agreed and called it “the aura of the moment—trying to describe it.” He explained the serendipitous process of editing the structure of Stay True and that he’d wanted to make sure that he stayed in the moment but also that the reader understood that there was a retrospective perspective here. “What I’m saying back then is clearly from someone who’s, like, much older looking back, but not necessarily revealing who that person is, but allowing that, so that the reader understands that there’s a haziness to these memories or that there’s something about these memories that aren’t necessarily—it’s not history. It’s memory.”•
Join us on August 17 at 5 p.m., when Naomi Hirahara will appear in conversation with Freeman and a special guest to discuss Clark and Division. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
