David L. Ulin: Good evening, everyone. I'm David L. Ulin, the books' editor of Alta Journal, and I want to welcome you to tonight's edition of the California Book Club. We will be hearing Hua Hsu discuss his Pulitzer Prize winning memoir, Stay True, in Conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and our special guest for this evening, Jose Vadi.
Before we get started, I want to tell you a little bit about Alta's California Book Club and our partners. Alta is a quarterly print publication with an active website. We cover California history, California culture, California life, or the life of the West with a big focus on Western literature, which as you all know, if you've been here before, we think of as the centerpiece of contemporary American literature. And the California Book Club is an expression of this. It grew out of an essay by John Freeman that ran in Alta a couple years ago. And every month, we have a conversation with a different California writer about their work.
Our partners include Book Passage, Book Soup, Book Inc., Bookshop, Bookshop West Portal, Diesel: A Bookstore, Green Apple Books, the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, the Los Angeles Public Library, the San Francisco Public Library, Narrative Magazine, Vroman's Bookstore, and Zyzzyva magazine.
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I'm very excited about tonight's events. Fantastic book. So without any further ado, please let me introduce John Freeman who will introduce Hua Hsu and begin the conversation. John, take it away.
John Freeman: Thanks, David. Good to see everybody and to have all of you here on this Zoom call to talk about this glorious new work, Stay True, winner of the Pulitzer Prize by Hua Hsu.
In 2017, Hua Hsu wrote a piece for The Believer which began, I used to live by a simple philosophy, keep everything. It's a funny piece about how to get rid of your CDs, but in many ways, the piece is a gateway to some of the big issues at heart in his memoir, Stay True. For the early parts of the 2000s, Hua Hsu was an indispensable voice of critical culture when it came to listening to music, to reading books, to watching films. If you cared about the crack cocaine nostalgia that was creeping into modern day hip hop, if you wanted to read a great profile of Maxine Hong Kingston, Hua Hsu was your guy.
But obviously, over those many years, he was thinking about something that that happened to him in college, which he writes about in Stay True, which is one of the most glorious books about friendship. It's an elegy to a friend. It's a anthem to lo-fi music collecting and fandom. It's a story about being Asian American in California and in America in a certain time. It's a kind of immigrant love story to growing up. It is a glorious book full of so many quotable sentences. I could just sit here for the next 52 minutes and quote them to you, but just a few of them are worth saying because they land in this book, which proceeds in loops as we follow Hua Hsu into University of California at Berkeley where he is going to school and makes some friends.
Back then he writes, "There was no such thing as spending too much time in the car," or when he was talking about growing up in California, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, his father, an engineer, he writes, "The first generation thinks about survival. The ones that follow, tell the stories." He also writes about becoming friends with people who are beginning to realize that their lives are not represented in culture. And so he says, "We sought a modest kind of infamy." Sentence after sentence of this book, pour out in the most elegant and controlled fashion. I can't describe to you how many realizations I had reading it about what it was like to grow up in California in around the same time. And I suspect everyone else who has read this book feels the same way. It's a huge pleasure to have him here. Hua Hsu, join us on the California Book Club.
Hua Hsu: Hey, everyone. Wow, John, thanks for that just spectacular introduction. And thanks to the other John, David, Blaze, Beth and everyone at Alta the California Book Club for making this happen. Thanks to all the indie bookstores who've been a part of this as well. It's a real honor and treat to be here. Although I feel very weird because I'm on the East Coast right now and I know it's around 5:00 PM there, so I wish it was 5:00 PM in California here, but unfortunately it's 8:00 PM and gross in New York City.
Freeman: Yeah, one of my favorite small moments of which there are dozens and dozens in this book is when you describe someone going back east, and I thought, "This is a California book."
Hsu: Yeah, I just never understood what that could possibly mean. It just seemed like not a place that I was returning to, but no, it's just so awesome to be here.
Freeman: So let's dive right in. I mean, there's so many books within this book, and yet it feels so loose and elegant and comfortable in its clothing. You've spent a lot of time, as I mentioned, working as a cultural critic. How did you find the voice for this particular project? Because it feels so natural and yet I can't imagine it came easy.
Hsu: Yeah, I don't... Yeah, as you noted before, I've written a lot of cultural criticism, a lot of journalism over the years, and that's just the main vocation I saw. I always knew in the back of my head that I wanted to return to these stories of myself and my friend Ken, and just our little cohort of people we grew up with. But I was never really... I guess, generationally, I just wasn't as comfortable writing about myself. I think that I'm 46. I think when I was in my 20s, there just weren't really models for people who wanted to write their own stories in ways that I think there are more models available to young readers and writers now. So throughout that period of time when I was writing about profiling folks, or you mentioned how to guide for how to get rid of your old CDs, in the back of my mind, I knew that it was a problem of language that I had to acquire, and I saw a lot of the journalism as practice. I wasn't sure how to implement it, but I understood that 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 and things like that. So yeah, it took me a lot of trial and error to figure out how to actually approach it.
Freeman: You're describing these years, the very early parts of the book. You described growing up, your parents, how they met in Illinois, and you say they're both grad students. And you say, in the 1960s, students throughout the Chinese-speaking world found each other in one of these small Midwestern towns, and it was like a little microcosm to your own story because this story is about you and some friends, some of whom are Asian American, finding yourself in a slightly bigger college town in the 1980s and '90s, in 1990s. Were those parallels something that you were thinking about as you began to tell this story?
Hsu: It sounds weird because your previous question about the writing I had done before leading to this, it felt like there were these very discreet differences, how I approached writing as a journalist or as someone under with an assignment. When I'm writing a book review or a profile, I always know how it's going to begin and end. I'm very rigorous about structure, but with this, I didn't really know what I was doing. I just starting writing pages and pages. And as a result, I didn't make a lot of connections until I wrote them down. It's not as though I recognized anything profound about my parents until I actually sat down to write these sections or to go through this old ephemera that we still had. So it was a very different approach to writing and one that I think other writers are more comfortable doing, just using writing as this exploration. That's just not how I usually work. And so, no, I didn't really make a lot of those connections until I actually sat down to think about them and to write about the past and to find my own structure in this story.
Freeman: So much of it is about intimacy on many different levels. We'll get very shortly to you going to Berkeley and meeting your friend Ken and some of your other roommates. But I was immediately touched by your descriptions of your relationship with your parents, spending a lot of time alone with your mother while your father was in Taiwan, conducting your relationship with your father while he went back to Taiwan to work by facts, which sounds like the opposite of an intimate relationship, and yet he managed, it sounds like, through your quotations, to conduct one. And I wonder if you can just tell us a little more about that and what that prepared you for as a young man growing up when your model of intimacy was conducted interrogatorily through a vaccine.
Hsu: Yeah, I mean, again, it's really a sense of awareness or an empathy that I gained throughout this process. I write in the book, and I think as anyone would imagine, 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. And so in the moment, faxing with my dad was just a chore. And not only is it not intimate to exchange these letters that aren't really letters, I mean, it was weird to not even be... I remember thinking it's weird that I can't even see the indentation of the pen because it's a washed out Xerox that you get on the other side of a fax machine. So I never saw it as... I saw it as this kind of strange attempt at intimacy, but I was a teenager, so I didn't actually want it, and I didn't actually think about it very deeply.
I was very just perfunctory like, this is the math homework I need you to help me with. These are the bands I'm into. I'll write you again next time there's an earthquake or some big news on the side of things. And a lot of the insights in the latter half of the book around friendship and around, I think, the impact that my friends had on me, I could never articulate them until I actually just sat down to write them. And so it was a very strange process for me to actually just sit there and try and work out and piece together what these patterns actually meant in retrospect.
Freeman: It was remarkable to see your father giving you advice about Kurt Cobain's suicide in a fax machine. And I think there's some listeners who probably can place themselves exactly where they were when they learned that Kurt Cobain had died, but they can also, like you, place themselves exactly where they were when they first heard a song by Nirvana, especially It Smells Like Teen Spirit. I wonder, before we talk, get you to read a little bit from the book and bring us into the period when you were at Berkeley maybe, what happened to you when you heard that song? I mean, what was different from it than the music that your father had been collecting and listening to on his hi-fi?
Hsu: My dad, my dad was really into music. I mean, he's still into music, just not with any of the energy that he had back then. And I think the idea of finding something that I liked that he had no... I mean, it's weird because I guess people learn about new music through the radio or through their friends or through magazines, but I feel like I learned a lot just from watching my parents listen to music. So the idea of finding something that they weren't aware of, but also people at school weren't aware of, it just felt like this secret.
Obviously, literally billions of people like Nirvana. So it's not as though I was so far ahead of the curve, but I think the cohort of people who had that moment, we all took it with us into our lives and were influenced it in different ways. Some people started bands, some people got into even more obscure music, some people got into Pearl Jam, some people took that ethos into their lives as writers or filmmakers or other things. And so I think there was something about the spirit of seeing something that I felt was new and unprecedented. Of course, I was 13, so I didn't really have a full grasp of history, but every 13 year old has that relationship with something, I would think. And for me, it just happened to be something that hundreds of millions of 13 year olds soon fell under the spell of as well.
I mean, I'm not even sure I listened to Nirvana that much anymore, but I still think a lot about being this wide-eyed teenager and thinking like, "Oh, I didn't know you could do that, or that's really cool that this happened." And living through that moment is something that I hold onto possibly more than the music itself, if that makes sense.
Freeman: Yeah, I mean, there's many different reasons for the title Stay True, which we'll get to in a second. But the thing the book does so beautifully, consistently is describe what it feels like to experience something rather than describe what it feels like to analyze and find the pattern and the experience. And perhaps that, and one of the listeners, Alicia Yi says, "Things gain a meaning when we try to assign meaning, but only in hindsight."
Hsu: Yeah, totally
Freeman: As a writing philosophy stay true, it goes deep, but there's obviously some very more personal reasons for that title. I wonder how you want to introduce that.
Hsu: Can I just say something really quick about what you just said?
Freeman: Yeah.
Hsu: I think what you just described is one of the difficulties that I had to figure out for myself because I have been working as a music critic for so long. So I think I was approaching things very analytically, but I've never thought of myself as a very polemical or a critic with really strong opinions. I've always just been more enchanted with the effect that something has on me or what it makes us imagine or what it makes us desire.
And so the idea of writing about a band that's as ubiquitous as Nirvana, it was very daunting because it's millions of words have been written about this band. But I think what I wanted to share with a reader was just... And throughout the book, I don't name as many things as I could have named. There are a lot of stores that I describe, but I don't name them. There are a lot of pieces of music that I described, but I don't name because I wanted the reader to be able to then sharing that experience of discovery or sharing that experience of awe rather than feeling like I was forcing my own awe on them, if that makes sense. And so figuring out that distinction between analysis and experience that you just touched on, that was really important for me.
Freeman: Well, you've done it beautifully because the book has references to Bismarck and Pavement among many other bands, but it is very restrained for a book written by someone who at the time would say things like, "In those days I fixated on the lamest things people did." And it feels like... Or you build a world by the things that you buy. The assemblage of a personality, a persona and aesthetic is a deep part of the book. And 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: Yeah. And I think every generation, every microgeneration has a version of that experience, even if the infrastructure is completely different. And I just wanted to... Having taught college students for the past 15, 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 too.
Freeman: That's right. Well, do you think you could maybe read a short section of the book for us?
Hsu: Sure. Sorry about that. So as John mentioned, I went to Berkeley, as I'm sure a few dozen people in the chat did as well. And this is a part in the book where a bunch of friends and I have decided to try and get to the roof of our dormitory.
We're on the roof of our dorm just after dinner, waiting for the sunset. It was late May, the beginnings of t-shirt and shorts weather, though I opted for a striped wool sweater I'd recently thrifted. Finding our way to the summit of Ida Sproul Hall was a final curiosity satisfied before moving out. Soon we'd be sophomores living off campus, dispersed throughout Berkeley, maybe Oakland. There are rumors of some juniors who lived all the way in San Francisco. We might need bikes, maybe even a car to see one another. Does the bus stop there? We looped our cameras around our necks and took turns climbing up the service ladder.
The light felt rich with possibility. You wanted to believe there was no better time or place on earth than this right now. It was a bunch of us in the third and fourth floors, as well as Anthony, who lived in a different dorm but never passed the chance for adventure. We took pictures of one another, all these random group shots of not-quite-friends. We were now joined by this moment since we would all be in trouble if anyone found us up here. From 10 floors up, the clock tower looked close enough to reach out and touch, and the campus, which seemed vast and unknowable, came into view as a unified hole. The sun was setting. You realize how haphazard this place was, these lecture halls, offices, laboratories, meadows, dormitories, climbing a hill until they could go no further.
I have a picture of Ken, his elbows rest on the ledge. He's looking up from his camera toward the San Francisco Bay. Maybe he looks past it and maybe he's wondering where in this wide open space he will land. I have a photo only of him looking, not what he is looking at.
Thanks.
Freeman: That's a beautiful passage for so many reasons, the way that you describe the almost floating suspended state that you're in up above the campus, and it highlights something that this book has, which are pictures throughout, that a picture from that dangerous climb is on the cover of the book. And then there are pictures in between chapters that are not captioned. And I wonder if you can talk about that because, is the style of the picture a throwback to zines? Is it just a way that you wanted the readers to be strobed?
Hsu: Yeah, it does try and call back to the culture of making zines or these just reappropriated images, allowing the reader some sense of putting stuff back together. And I liked the idea that the images are also the only actual dividers, like the chapters aren't numbered or named. I began to think of it like you're walking down a hallway peeking into different people's dorm rooms and you just get a glimpse of their life, but you might see the posters on their walls or what they're doing, but you don't really know these people, but you understand the scene based on this quick passage. And so I wanted the images to feel that way. They attest to the existence of memory without fleshing out what those memories were, because so much of the book is about memory and the faultiness of memory and things that we may misremember even if there's photographic evidence of these things.
Freeman: Yeah. You introduced Ken and then reintroduced him almost immediately saying, "Well, actually the first time I met him," which is a stutter step in the remembrance reel. For those who haven't read the book, what would you say was immediately striking about him now having read the book? I mean, now having written the book, do you think that changed versus before you wrote it?
Hsu: Yeah. If it isn't already obvious, for those who haven't read the book, I was very much the type of person... I mean, John read the quote about how I would always judge people on the quote lamest thing they ever did. So I was very much enamored with my own sense of singularity and taste. And I was definitely the college kid who, when we all went to the video store to rent a video, would want to get some obscure foreign film. So I think, when I went to college, as many people do, I think I was just looking for people who were exactly like me, who had the same sense of very refined alternative taste.
And the first time I met Ken, I just didn't think he was alternative enough for me, which is a judgment I levied on tons of people I met. But there was just something about his sense of confidence, which I later understood more, that I thought, "This is so not my person. We are not people. We are not each other's people." And over time I just realized that he actually was an open-minded person and I was not. And I think the revelation or the sense of revisiting my initial understanding of him versus actually spending time with him, I think I always understood that I had completely misread him and that I tend to be overly... Or at the time, it was way more judgmental than I needed to be about very kind, open-hearted people.
And writing the book, I think what ends up happening is there's probably a bit more of a sense of I am the caricature, I am the joke, I am the person getting dunked on throughout the book because I look back and I just think about how... I was thinking earlier today about how one of my affectations was that I claim professed to be a love... I loved eggplant because eggplant seemed such an unloved alternative thing to be into, but I had no idea how to cook it or eat it or anything. But it was just like, in the assemblage of my own personality, I was just into things that other people weren't into. This sounds so ridiculous now.
And he was just this confident person who did not need to put up those sorts of errors. And he immediately recognized that about me, but would also take seriously my passions for the music I was into or my clothes. And that was... I learned so much just by his desire to ask me questions about why I was the way I was. It's kind of a rambling answer, but...
Freeman: No, that's a really lovely one. A question came in before the event by Derek Lu and he said, "It's been a long time since I was so moved by work of literature. And I'm really fascinated by this dichotomy in Asian American masculinity that you draw between your yourself and Ken, the pessimistic, hipster kill killjoy, a la Sarah Ahmed, and the well-adjusted [inaudible] optimistic guy." And he says, "To what extent do you feel like these roles are still available to Asian American men today?"
Hsu: That's a really good question. I think where I was going before was that, in the writing, the division probably feels much darker than it did in youth because when you're young, things matter, but you're spending so much time with each other, you take for granted that you're going to merge into these... That you're going to find these moments of synchronicity as well. And so, in the book, I think I am the caricature of that incredibly negative intellectual hipster type, and he certainly was a more optimistic and hopeful person than I was.
I think these archetypes are still available to Asian Americans, are still available to all of us. They probably just look a bit different because the outcomes and the futures we can imagine are just so different than they were in 1996 or 1997. I mean, I went to college at the dawn of what... I mean, the idea of multiculturalism was still quite exciting. There was still some sense of... It was still a very progressive vision, I would, say in the mid-1990s, there were a lot of aspects of culture or politics that just probably feel more closed off to a college student than they did in 1996. And so I think that this swing between being hopeful and optimistic or being a killjoy, I'm sure this dynamic plays out in dorm rooms all over the world all the time. It's just that they're tracked to different rhythms now or different possibilities.
Freeman: I want to bring in our guest, José Vadi, who's the author of Inter State: Essays from California, which is forthcoming from Soft Skull, who will have some further questions for you. And I feel like it's also a good opportunity to talk about certain aspects of the Californianess of this book. José has been lurking in the audience patiently. Jose, could you join us now from Sacramento, or Sacramento as we say?
José Vadi: Yes, yes. Hey, how's it going, everyone? Thank you, John. Thank you, Hua.
Hsu: Good to see you.
Vadi: Good to see you. Last time we saw each other was at Green Apple Books a proud flagship of the California Book Club, which is my lovely segue into my first question, which is about community. Putting out this book, you got to be an event producer for a little bit there. You had events in New York with Lucy Sante, you had a pickup basketball game in China. You had a Pearl Jam cover band called Earth Dad involved in all this. You had someone commissioning rave flyers for your website as well as... And you also made a zine. That was almost the original idea for Stay True.
I feel like all that stuff created or extended the community that was originally depicted and Stay True. Was that a goal? Am I crazy in believing that? And also, how did it feel just putting on all these events?
Hsu: It was very special to be able to... During COVID, a lot of people who wrote books just didn't have the opportunity to do live events. So the idea that being able to do it, anything, was a privilege. The fact that people came to these events was really special, which is why I tried to make each one a little bit different, whether it was getting completely different types of interlocutors. Yeah, I had this great cover band, this band Earth Dad. It's actually up on Bandcamp now. If anyone wants to listen to it, I'll drop the link in the chat. But they covered '90s alt-rock in a ambient fashion at my book launch. I made these zines.
I think the impetus was, as I was editing my book, I had this dissociative relationship to the people in the book. Even though it's very intimate, like I was just saying with John, I see myself as an 18-year-old as a bit of a caricature. I look back and I think, "Oh, I should've just been more open or more earnest or whatnot." And so I don't feel like an intimate connection, but I feel like a fondness for all the people in the book because the book was a chance to hang out a bit longer. It was a chance to just observe and create this world and see the people in this world move around without my public streams.
And as I was rereading and editing those sections of the book, I was just reminded of how much time I used to spend just making stuff, making zines, making posters, making flyers, and just how it made the world seem so big and also so small. And so I think it was just me wanting to feel that again. And that's why the book launch last year, if any of you came to events or read about any events, I liked doing those things, making t-shirts or making zines because it just expanded the community of people who I think could feel part of the world of the book, if that makes sense, beyond the people who are actually in the book. And so, yeah, it just was, I was reading about making my old zines like, man, I used to have so much fun doing this, I could just do it again now. And yeah, that's where that all came about.
One thing I did not do, and this is a clumsy way to plug your forthcoming book, Chip, is that Jose has this really excellent book of essays about skateboarding coming out. Is it coming out later this year?
Vadi: Early next year, yeah.
Hsu: Okay. Everyone, check it out. It's awesome. But I write a lot about skating and more athletic endeavors, and as I was reading those, I was like, oh yeah. Oh, to be young, oh, to have once been young. There's certain things that I read about and I'm like, I do not stay out all night and skate and do all these things anymore.
Vadi: Oh man, I don't want to be a bad encouragement, but the streets are out there. Well, do you still write like the rapper Ludacris? In the Lucy Sante interview, you were talking about how Ludacris writes on his dashboard during car commutes. And given your inaugural semester at Ballpark... I feel like inaugural right now. Given your inaugural semester at bar and stuff, I assume the commutes are getting longer. Are you and Ludacris still on the same prose workshop level?
Hsu: I don't know the status of Luda's pen game right now. I'm not sure if he's actually... The story is that he used to be a radio promo guy and he'd be driving around and he would just write his verses on a notebook that was attached to his steering wheel. I do not do that, but I do think that the idea was just that I have no designated time of writing. I'm just constantly thinking about stuff. And so I think that that is how a lot of people work. Do you designate time to write or are you just constantly trying to figure things out?
Definitely the latter, always on, but I know the amount of time it takes to get out, the amount of writing I want to get. I know within 60 to 90 minutes, I can generate this amount or this section, and that's very comfortable. But it's usually still either the AM early in the morning or late at night thing.
Yeah, I mean, that was one of the challenges with this book was just that I'd lived with the material... I mean, I lived with the events in the book and the relationships for so long, and nothing worked for 20 years. There's no optimal way to write the stuff in the book until I just started treating it as a nine to five, and I would just start writing super early in the morning and then just stop writing at 4:00 PM, and that was the only way I was able to approach it actually.
Vadi: Well, that kind of leads to another question inspired by your conversation with Lucy Sante at the Pioneer Works book launch last year. You talked about representing yourself as a character as you did with John earlier, and the kind of challenges in doing that, and obviously the challenge of time as well as just constructing that. Moving ahead, I know that there's another project that you're working on where that's due with your editor and stuff like that, just moving forward, in addition to your work recently with the New Yorker, your piece about Randall Park, just how is you, the character, evolving through your writing? Are you able to compartmentalize it with your ongoing work with the New Yorker and other journalism, or is it informing it in a different way?
Hsu: That's a really interesting question. It's been really meaningful because I feel like turning oneself into a character, it's just fine, but turning your friends or people you care about into characters is a bit thornier. And so, I don't know, I found that whole aspect of it to be very, I don't know, unnerving, weird. I don't really want to do it again. I feel like I am... We are all always characters in some way, not just people who are writers, but when we're external facing, we're always performing to some extent. And so to that extent, when I'm writing for the New Yorker, I'm performing a character who is an expert at something or who has a lot of authority. I don't necessarily... I mean, this could change, but I don't really want to write about myself anymore. This was just the thing I needed to do and wanted to do, felt compelled to do for quite a while. And I don't necessarily think I have....
Yeah, I don't know. It's been interesting to think about this question you're posing of, what next? Because I don't necessarily feel comfortable doing it again, even though we are always characters in some extent.
Vadi: It's a matter of degrees as well, the investment they're in.
Hsu: And I think all writing... I mean, think just writing, the conventions of writing gradually shift as well. And so I think as readers and as writers now, everyone is more aware that every author is present in a piece in a way that may not have seemed intuitive to people in the '50s or the '80s or even the early 2000s. And so, even at the New Yorker, I feel like I can write myself into a piece, not to disclose something about myself, but just as this perspective to say, this is how I see things. And to make that more discreet is... I'm happy that we're now allowed to make that viewpoint more discreet because when I started writing in the early 2000s, if you had anything that felt first person, it would just get cut. So I think now it's clearly always going to inform my perspective on things because it is my perspective, but I don't... I mean, I can't imagine writing another memoir basically.
Vadi: And my last question before I dip out into the curtain again.
Hsu: Thanks for doing this, by the way. I really appreciate it.
Vadi: No, thanks for having me. This is amazing. Thanks for having me. And this is a great conversation to be a part of.
Hsu: It's just so much more brighter and optimistic where you are now. The sun descends here.
Vadi: Yeah, we're crusting downward from 103 today in Sacramento. But do you want to talk about any ideas for your next project? I know we should very much celebrate this work that deserves celebration, but do you have any ideas of what that... No? No, that's fine.
Hsu: No ideas.
Vadi: That's cool. Thought I'd ask. Well, I'm going to dip out for a bit. John's going to come back on, but I'll see you guys in a little bit.
Freeman: Thank you, Jose. And speaking of next projects, thank you, well, for that live fact checked. Inter State is out. It was published in 2021. And Chipped, Jose's memoir about skateboarding and space among other things is coming out in '24 in April.
I want to circle back to some issues that just came up while in your conversation, which are being brought up in the audience. I'm going to try to collapse a few questions together because there are a lot of questions, several of them to do with how you think generationally, did you always want to write a Gen X memoir as being the forgotten generation at all part of this book? And I'll lump on there one more thing, which is there's so much obsolete technology in this book. It is like a celebration of all these different ways that we used to listen, record and how, without our digital things, experience was different. It just was. And I wonder if you can talk about perhaps those two things together. How different the experience of experience was for Gen X people and how that relates to, I don't know, how young people are today? You've taught at Vassar. You're now at Bard. Do you ever have a long gap in presenting to students what experience is like?
Hsu: Again, I think this was a question that I found really meaningful to try and puzzle with as I was writing because I think when I revisited college or just this period of time, I mean, obviously, very, very traumatic things happen in the book, but a lot of, there's a lot boredom too. There's a lot of just looking for the next parking lot to hang out in, looking for the next place to walk to get something to eat. And I think what I needed to figure out how to do in order to write the book, because in some ways, I began writing portions that end up in the book in 1998 when I'm 21.
But what happens in the interim is the whole concept of boredom or free time changes all of a sudden, 10 years after the events in the book, the iPhone comes out. The internet was not really a thing the way it is now when I was in college. And so it was this question of how to communicate this different experience of time and different experience of boredom, different contours of the day without valorizing it or without saying, yeah, it was so much better when we only had 10 CDs per person. You could argue that it was better back then, but I was uninterested in making that argument. But I wanted people to understand why as a 20-year-old, I thought, wow, life couldn't get any better. I could go buy this imported CD for $25.
So that was a challenge, was just to figure out how to build that world. And again, I mean, I'm sure novelists, short story writers are constantly doing this. And I think one thing, after having written this, I just am even more in awe of poets, short story writers, novelists, people who are able to actually create these fictional worlds that feel very lived in because it took me so long to figure out how to do that for my own life and for this experience of, I don't know if... I guess technically I'm gen X.
It's weird though because I remember when Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix and people who are much older than me at the time all passed away. There was, they were also gen X. So I feel like generational categories were just much broader then. But yeah, I mean, I guess my perspective generationally is as someone who didn't grow up with technology, but also is now fully immersed in technology and comfortable in it. So I just wanted to be able to explain what the hours of 4:00 to 6:00 PM were during this period of time when there's nothing else to do.
Freeman: Yeah, you have that great line. "Soon people would lose their relationships to something called free time."
Hsu: I mean, it's very weird. I was just talking to someone about how I flew a lot as a kid because my father lived in Taiwan and it's a 12-hour flight, however long, and I would just be in fear of not having anything to do. So I would bring four Tom Clancy novels or just an entire grocery bag full of AA batteries because there are only so many things you could do, or there are only so many devices you could use at that time. And so it is very foreign to think about now, but this is how stress was calibrated for a 13-year-old in 1990.
Freeman: Kimiko Guthrie has a question about, since we've been talking about frames, timeframe, friendship as a frame, technology as a frame within a frame, generations as a frame. There's also philosophies of friendship and exchange and what binds us together throughout the book. And she says, "You include philosophies about relationship and gift exchange, Derrida and others, which gave the deeply personal aspects of the memoir satisfying frame and organizing lens. Did you organize your writing around this philosophy at all or did you just emerge as you wrote? Or was it something you included later as a way to organize and focus?
Hsu: That's a great question, and I guess there's two answers to that. One is, I think when one is experiencing, it's so much about music or culture or film. It's like we're learning how to feel. Before we experience love, we hear love songs and you realize, oh, this is an ecstatic high that I hope to some someday feel. I think when one's really sad or just going through... I mean, they're just these certain emotions that aren't necessarily as present in music or songs or movies. So I think I was just really obsessed with thinking about friendship or thinking about grief and seeing how it had been modeled in the culture artistically. And so anything involving friendship, I would just read for a few years because I just wanted to get some insight into these dynamics that we take for granted because we all experience it positively or negatively.
And so on one hand, it was like there's this archive of things about friendship that I've been reading. And it struck me as weird that there aren't that many songs just about friendship. There's so many songs about love. But then, when you think about it, most songs are enactments of friendship because it's people who start a band together or people who are working together. The second part of the answer is that a lot of those references to Derrida or Aristotle, they occur at points in the book where the character of me or actually me is very infatuated with the idea of being this erudite intellectual name-dropper. And so there is an aspect of it where it's serious because I think some of what Derrida wrote about friendship is very penetrating and very so perceptive and so moving, but it gets... A lot of that is occurring in the first half of the book where the character is like, yeah, of course this guy wouldn't talk about friendship directly. He would cite Derrida. Or of course this person would try and always bring in these other references in order to explain something that an elemental is quite elemental. So that's how some of those references were meant to work.
Freeman: You mentioned before, and I quoted from the book, that you were and againster. You love to explain things by what was bad or what wasn't up to snuff. And obviously, then you develop a really close relationship with a guy who loves Dave Matthews and you have to reassess that format of living. But I feel like the book is also a story of migrating that to different forms of engagement. And so in the book you also talk about volunteering for a Black Panther. You teach underserved kids in Richmond, and it's like your cultural assessment of being against things, that energy is redirected towards forms of being against other injustices. And I wonder if that evolution was something that you discovered in the course of writing this book or if it's something that you knew even then that it was happening.
Hsu: I think even then, I was just looking for community and it just so happened that the communities, this ready-made communities of moving into a dorm, everyone who's into this team hangs out here, everyone who majors in this is over here. Those forms of community seemed really rickety to me. The fact that we all went to high school in the same city, that's not really a form of community, but then I thought the community was people who were into the same seven bands that I loved. And then I think, as I went through college, and happens to a lot of people, I think I just thought about community maybe in a more political way or in a pursuit of solidarity way. And so I think that impulse was always there. I wasn't against her, but I was also a desperate joiner. I just never found the communities I want to join until a little bit later.
And I think that's actually why Ken tolerated me to an extent because he saw through a lot of my cynicism as actually an expression of very sincere yearning that I was just like... And again, I mean, I don't think this is unique to me by any stretch, but I think a lot of the ways in which I projected myself was actually like, hey, notice me, but notice me for the reasons I want to be noticed. And he immediately saw that and then saw past it, and then tried to understand me and then later I him.
Freeman: And is a lovely moment when you become friends simply by giving him dressing advice, which I think for those who haven't read the book at this point, I would say you thrifted most of your clothes. You wore a lot of not natural fibers and cardigans in inappropriately hot weather clothes, hot weather. And I wonder if you could say anything about... I mean, I'm trying not to give away one of the core parts of the book, but there is a before and after in the book, the book is about grief, and there's a lot of things that you're kind of saying goodbye to in the course of the book, but you're also holding on to certain things. And the second half of the book you describe leaving Berkeley and going to Harvard and becoming the public intellectual in a way that you are, but you're still carrying all these fragments with you. You see a mental health counselor. And is there anything that you think is worth saying about the difference between how you grieved with your friends on campus and then how you grieved alone that was necessary to write or was difficult to write or unexpected?
Hsu: Yeah, it was very difficult to write because I think it forced me to... And again, I don't really know what level of spoilers this book operates at, but yeah, I mean, there's a way in which when something traumatic happens to a group of people. That's a community that you'll never forget. And I still have incredibly intense relationships with, I don't know, 85% of the people in the book, but eventually, you all have to figure out your own paths forward after the initial shock of trauma subsides. And I think I really walled myself off, or I just didn't know how to grieve with other people because, again, there's probably a sense of singularity that I felt I was giving up. And so it was very odd and difficult to revisit that because I felt so much, I don't want to say shame, but I felt like, man, you really should have just not taken... You really should have just sought out community or leaned on your friends or not taken yourself so seriously in these moments when I just felt very upset and haunted and just not functional.
So yeah, it was very strange to revisit that and to understand why, for a period of time, my friends and I just drifted apart and then how... In the process of writing, I think I understood a bit more about what it was I was avoiding and what it was I needed, if that makes sense.
Freeman: Oh, absolutely. It's a beautiful description of... I mean, there's a lot of comments floating in about the mess of grief and how it lies dormant and then comes back and you're grieving alone, and sometimes you're with others. And I think one of the reasons this book strikes such a chord is you manage it to portray a very singular experience to you in all of its varieties, also with an incredibly beautiful description of male friendship, which is so uncommon, sadly, to some degree in literature. Derrick Lewis jumped back in and say, "It's rare to read about a male friendship in such a transparent manner."
I would love to bring Jose back in for just one or two more questions before we run out of time here. Since Jose has also just recently completed a memoir and essays, skateboarding can seem like a very singular activity. Is there any part of your work, Jose, that's coming that you can talk about in relation to Hua's book and how it describes the kind of fractal nature of groups and friends, how you join and peel off into different groups and experience different things collectively and then suddenly singularly as a skateboarder? Because it seems like if you're going to be writing about space, emotional space is a form of space.
Vadi: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think in Inter State, there's not so much skateboarders but skater-aligned people, like folks that go to the same dive bar, so to speak, I lived with. And 14th and Jackson is an intersection in downtown Oakland and the essay's named after it. And it's about finding this community and this post-collegiate on we time. But actually, the latest Alta, which is a massive plug, is there's an article about a skate convention that happened this year in Arizona called Slow Impact, a nice pun for the old skater heads of the world. But it was basically, this dropped the pin moment where one pro skater from Tempe, Arizona, Ryan Lay, invited skaters from basically on Twitter and Instagram to come to this new skate park that they helped build through this nonprofit skate after school. And there was some light programming through the day. There was panels, skaters talking about gender equity and everything from pay parody for women in the Olympics. I actually read at Ryan's house with some other skaters who write.
So that community is ever present amidst this isolated act. So yeah, I think it's interesting finding kinship through these acts as well as music and things like that that Hua describes as well.
Freeman: Yeah, no, I'm curious why, if you're... Sorry, I'm going to get this wrong, but what was it, straight edge, hardcore punk aesthetic? Have you received love letters from people from that subculture?
Hsu: No, not really, because I think a lot of my teen years were just trying on different identities and then just moving on. And so I don't think I was ever very committed, in any principled way, to being straight edge. Even though it was just much being into eggplant, it was just this affectation that I adopted for a little bit of time.
But yeah, I mean, I think one thing that I really love about Jose's essays, and relates to what we're talking about, is that I think when you're in a scene or in a subculture, you just randomly cross paths with people. And it's not really friendship. It's not like you're just acquaintances, but you just experience these things together, whether you just meet up with some people when you're skating, whether you're just walking around campus, going from party to party, and you just merge with some group. And I think that that's just a form of... It's a type of relationship that's hard to describe, but it's something that I think it's much harder to find that sometimes, especially nowadays when we don't really have as many opportunities just be in space and not know where we are or just be searching for something with a group of people.
And that's something that Jose writes about really well in some of his essays. And it's also something that I think about a lot because so much of writing is this completely asymmetrical relationship, where I remember so much about random people and they've become characters in the fictions of my life, but then people remember me, or where they don't, and it just an interesting relationship that you have the opportunity to explore when you're writing these sorts of personal essays. But yeah, that's...
Freeman: God, 25 years of work putting this together. You described in the second half of the book that fragments are coming to you. I hope, Jose, it would be impossible looking at you, but it's possible that either of your books took you that long. I hope your third book doesn't take you that long. One of the things, the question that came up, and it's probably the last one we'll be able to address, which is about, and this is a wonky one, but I'll try to bring it back to experience, which is, how do you structure a book like this so that it feels like experience and yet it works dramatically? And Jose, you've just recently completed that, so have a crack at it yourself. I think that's one of the things that is so admired about Stay True, is just that you've managed to pull that off. And there have been a lot of questions in the audience about how you did that. And Jose, is there a thing that you do to keep experience feeling as disruptive and circular and ongoing when you are writing that you try to do?
Vadi: Yeah, sure. I'll take a crack first. And I feel like staying present in the moment to speak broadly about that. I think 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. For instance, a lot of this book, Chipped, is about a friend, not directly, but seeing versions of himself out as an adult is very weird. So yeah, I think staying present in the moment of a certain song. I know sometimes I would write with music that inspired certain essays, and sometimes I would write in total silence to just be present with my thoughts and try and be in that memory as much as possible. But I think a big thing for me was not only recognizing what happened, the five Ws of that moment, but the energy of it. What was the inertia of that moment? What was the tension? And I think trying to stay true to that emotional core of the memory or the moment is key for me.
Hsu: Yeah, I think I agree with that idea of the... It's aura of the moment trying to describe it. I have no idea how... I mean my book is circular in structure in that certain things, it can be read straight through, but then, when you get to the last... This isn't a spoiler or anything, but as you approach the end, I think there's context as to why it was structured that way leading up, if that makes sense. And I didn't intend for it to be that way. I really have to credit my editor, Thomas Gebremedhin at Doubleday and my agent, Chris Parris-Lamb, they had a lot of really great suggestions about taking stuff out or moving stuff around, but a lot of it just happened in this weird, serendipitous way where I would be writing something later in the book and I would realize, oh, if for this to really work, this has to be over here. And then just figuring out the spacing for different things was really new for me.
And for me, I think staying present in the moment, but also kind of toggling back and forth in perspective so that the reader understands that there's a retrospective perspective here, that what I'm saying back then is clearly from someone who's much older, looking back, but not necessarily revealing who that person is, but just 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, and just seeding these ideas along the way. So yeah, a lot of it was just about figuring out where something would go, and then oftentimes realizing that I had planted something earlier, but then making sure that those connections would work out. But for the reader to be able to read along, but then also to have their own me moments of, huh, is this this correct? I don't know how to feel about this memory or things like that. I don't know if that makes any sense.
Freeman: That makes so much sense. And the way that certain notes come back, like the Beach Boys song, it creates a mysterious soundscape that is operating on the reader in the way that experience operates on us because it's not planned and we don't design it. And so we're always trying to figure out what it means.
We've run 10 minutes over and I could keep talking to both of you for quite a while. It's been such a pleasure. And congratulations on the Pulitzer. Annie Tan says that as do I think quite a few people in the chat. Stay True is just a beautiful book. It's such a welcome update to the story of male friendship from Dharma Bums. I know there have been other books in between, but as an East Bay friendship text, I think it's going to be around for a long time for many other reasons too.
And Jose, congrats on your upcoming book. This has been a wonderful night. David, I think you're looking there to take us out.
Ulin: I am. I am. That was a fantastic conversation. To thank you to all three of you. I just need to find my text. So thank you to all three of you. Thank you to Hua and Jose and John for those interested. This interview was recorded and will be available at californiabookclub.com.
Don't forget, next month's book is Clark and Division by Naomi Hirahara. And also don't forget about the Alta membership. It altaonline.com/join, or again, the $3 digital membership. And please participate in a two-minute survey that will pop up as soon as the event ends. Take care, everybody. Stay safe and we'll see you all next month. Have a good night.•
