Stay True by Hua Hsu
Review of Stay True by Hua Hsu
“At that age, time moves slow. You’re eager for something to happen, passing time in parking lots, hands deep in your pockets, trying to figure out where to go next. Life happened elsewhere, it was simply a matter of finding a map that led there. Or maybe, at that age, time moves fast; you’re so desperate for action that you forget to remember things as they happen. A day felt like forever, a year was a geological era.”
Stay True by Hua Hsu (2022). Published by Doubleday Books.
This memoir has been everywhere for the past couple of months. All the best of 2022 lists were describing this as one of the best books of the year, and I think something about that has to due with the fact Hsu is a well-known writer with The New Yorker.
Of course his memoir is going to appear on the best books of 2022 list there, which is where I finally ended up checking the book out at the library. So I guess the advertising worked? Either way, I was going to read the memoir eventually after reading the synopsis.
Sometimes people call college the best years of their life.
In Stay True, Hsu discusses why that kind of is the case, but also forms a pivotal time where he confronts the scope of grief after a sudden death of one of his closest friends. It was a surprisingly short read, it took me less than an hour to read it, as the memoir is pretty brief compared to some other ones. I will say upfront though that I did not love this one.
We’re going to get into why later in this review, but while I could appreciate Hsu’s method of storytelling in the form of a memoir, I think it’s a piece deeply rooted in the era it’s set in. Because of that, it feels more like an ambiance for a chunk of the book.
Let’s get into the review.
A college friendship completely changes their lives—until it’s cut short.
There is a lot packed into this tiny memoir, but let’s get to the neat details immediately.
Hua Hsu grows up in a Taiwanese family and doesn’t really feel like he belongs at the beginning of the nineties, when he was a high school student, knowing a lot about Kurt Cobain and whatnot at the peak of this time.
Hua discusses how he had a passion for music and making zines, and how he ended up at UC Berkeley despite feeling somewhat lost at the time. It’s at Berkeley, a majority Asian American school, where he meets Ken. Ken is the typical Americanized guy, wearing polo shirts and is an active member of a fraternity on campus.
Ken, who is Japanese American, meets Hua and they become friends rather quickly. We learn a bit about how Ken dreams of going to Boston after graduating, while Hua, who is still kind of lost, ends up pursuing political science. As Hua grows as a person and discovers who and what he likes, Ken become a fixture and wingman to help him out on the road of life.
Until he isn’t.
After Hua loses his virginity, leaving a party early after one last conversation with Ken, Ken is robbed and shot in the head leaving the party.
Hua discusses how none of the friend group ends up going to therapy after that, but Ken’s death marks an abrupt departure to a somewhat serene part of their lives.
And Hua ends up living through Ken’s dreams. He pursues his PhD at Harvard, moving to Boston when Ken could not. Up until this point of the memoir, when Ken was still alive, a lot of the text is very ambient to the nineties.
The events mentioned, what the students are doing, the music and literature of the time—all of these details are woven in to create a very specific and nostalgic picture of the period. When Hua does eventually go to therapy, he learns to let Ken go and the guilt of leaving him behind at that party to get on with a girl.
This memoir really boils down to being a tribute for Ken, and honestly may be one of the ways Hua is letting him go. Writing it very therapeutic, and the written form of memorializing someone who is now dead, especially someone killed in this horrific way, can serve as a form of preservation.
It becomes fitting that he ended up studying history in the PhD program, and goes to therapy in the end, because he confronts his own history and the decisions and people that led him to getting there at that point.
The memoir is brief, very much to the point, but it doesn’t really need to be longer than that. The story is contained in a way that works well for the subject matter and the extent of what the author wants to say.
Overall Thoughts
I think this memoir is worth definitely picking it up once, even if you spot it on your library racks somewhere in suburbia or didn’t live through the time period that the author is recalling.
There’s a lot of wisdom packed into these words, especially when it comes to learning to surpass the grief that comes with a sudden death. Hsu’s writing is good, and that comes as no surprise considering his staff position over at The New Yorker. But I didn’t really love this one for the actually mode of telling the story.
It’s about two Asian American men having a platonic relationship and growing at a tumultuous time of their lives. I think I wanted more from this memoir, though, and think it was missing the factor that could make it incredible.
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