Book Ramble: Stay True by Hua Hsu

not-a-book-review

In December, I finished reading Stay True, a wonderful memoir by Hua Hsu. I had some thoughts on it. (If you haven’t read the book and prefer to begin it with a totally blank slate, you might want to wait to read this.)

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Mostly, I became obsessed with the possibility of a sentence that could wend its way backward.

Stay True is two endeavors tightly intertwined: a coming-of-age about Hsu’s time at UC Berkeley in the late 90s, anchored around the story of his close friendship with Ken, who was senselessly killed before their senior year. Hsu masterfully explores friendship, love, grief, and the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are. The book begins with the two boys—who are quite different from each other—becoming friends, and ends with Hsu grappling with grief, lamenting what could have been, and facing what he needs to do to continue moving forward. 

The writing is vivid and emotional and I ate up every single musing Hsu offered, most notably the incredibly moving platonic love that this book so carefully, poetically describes.

“What an embarrassment I will always pine for,” I wrote, imagining what might have happened if we had gone swing dancing. “To make Ken topple over in laughter.”

Much of the book is Hsu constructing his own sense of self in conversation with this friendship that he experienced and the loss he was faced with. Hsu builds up his own character in opposition to Ken, who is described as very different from him — warm, outgoing, and a bit of a normie compared to Hsu’s rather pretentious dedication to counterculture.

Hsu was honestly flawed, like any college student, and I found some of his insecurities strangely relatable. At one point, he wrote about being reluctant toward the idea of watching a specific movie with Ken:

I distinguished myself by the ferociousness of my attachments. There was something unique about my fascination with the film, something Ken couldn’t possibly understand. I was proprietary about liking things.

Ken, on the other hand, seemed almost perfect — and maybe he was close to it. At times, I wanted to know even more about him, but I appreciated seeing exactly what Hsu saw at the time through his college-age lens. Hsu paints a warm and realistic picture of his and Ken’s social circle, and of college life in general, by revolving his book around friendships and cultural interests and eye-opening academic experiences.

After Ken’s death, it was heartbreaking to hear about the guilt that Hsu felt. While most of it emerged in the mess of trying to make sense of Ken’s senseless murder, I felt there were also whispers of regrets about their friendship that came out of the mess of his grief. Their friendship felt very real, and as lovely as it was, at times, I felt like Hsu was writing very realistically about his worries over being an imperfect friend. Parts of this came in descriptions like the above, of how shortcomings about his personality prevented him from embracing Ken’s friendship in the early stages. Other parts came when Hsu painfully doubted the depth of their friendship after Ken’s death.

The book is about more than just friendship, and obviously, as a memoir, there are moments throughout where Hsu describes things about his life that were unrelated to his college friend circle. Sometimes this was a reflection on a class he took or a theory he learned about, which serve to develop Hsu as a narrator/character, but those are the moments where I felt like the book dragged a little. While it isn’t just a story about friendship and loss, I was deeply compelled by his friendship with Ken and impatient to read more and more about the two of them.

Still, Hsu’s asides on other topics weren’t completely lost on me — I found the ‘subplot’ about him going from teaching high schoolers to teaching incarcerated adults to be interesting, and added some dimension to his observations about violence and crime following Ken’s murder. I also very much enjoyed the parts where he talked about his parents — immigrants from Taiwan — particularly when he featured the messages he received from his dad.

Before reading the book, I attended a live show of the podcast Time to Say Goodbye, where the co-hosts interviewed Hsu about his writing process and about some cultural bits and pieces from the book, like music, zines, and photography. It was fascinating to hear about how Hsu sifted through all the writing he did during his college years and assembled and rewrote it into a book twenty years after the fact. I wondered what life moments of my own I would be moved to write a memoir about in two decades’ time. Toward the end, I was brought to tears by the audience question, “what’s one song that came out after Ken’s death that you wish he could hear?”

Stay True made me want to be a better friend, and a better writer.

P.S. The book contains a flood of references to songs I’ve never listened to and cultural moments I’ve barely heard of, likely because I did not grow up in the 80s and 90s. There is nothing wrong with this, I just thought it was kind of funny — and also enthralling!