From the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art.
In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken--with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity--is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes 'zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them.
But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and …
From the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art.
In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken--with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity--is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes 'zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them.
But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the textbook successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.
Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.
Hua Hsu's touching memoir hits all the right notes for me as a fellow member of Generation X -- early experiments with the Internet, turning up the nose at frat boys who liked Dave Matthews, and so on. But the book is, of course, about friendship, and it all rings true. I don't think it is a spoiler to say that near the end of the book Hsu observes that with his friends from college, they could have stayed together forever or drifted apart -- a sobering reminder of the small events or chance happenings on which friendships sometimes hinge. Hsu's book is moving, tragic, thoughtful, funny, and I couldn't stop reading it. Top notch.
Couldn't put this memoir down. Hsu's observations include touching considerations of his relationship with his Taiwanese parents from his early childhood to the long distance relationship with his father as a teenager. Then he summons great memories of early college friendship. There is music here and early internet exuberance along with a heavy recollection of a traumatic loss in the throes of self discovery.
