Book Review: Stay True by Hua Hsu (2022)
a tender memoir about an endearing friendship and a eulogy of what it would have become.
Stay True is a quietly beautiful and poignant memoir of a college friendship between the author, Hsu, and his friend Ken, who was killed in a brutal carjacking before he turned 21.
Hsu doesn’t think they could become friends at first. Hsu is a second-generation Taiwanese American kid whose parents immigrated to the U.S. in the 1960s. He listens to alternative music, attends underground shows, and judges his classmates based on their music tastes.
Ken, a Japanese American frat boy whose family has been in the U.S. for many generations, on the other hand, frequents Abercrombie & Fitch and is charmingly confident. Despite the fact that they are all Asian American, they couldn’t be more different. Ken is “too mainstream" for Hsu’s taste.
They meet for the first time in their UC Berkeley freshman dorm when Ken asks Hsu to pick out clothes for him for a 70s-themed party. Afterward, Ken invites Hsu to hang out. Every friendship, Hsu writes, has “a moment that brings you together.” And that is the moment that brings Ken and him together. A moment that is so exact and distinct to a location and a point in time in Hsu’s memory. This seemingly mundane and everyday encounter ultimately bloomed into an endearing friendship.
A friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarette breaks, the morning-after breakfasts, visits to the record store, and their similar yet different ways of searching for their places in the world. Over time, Hsu discovers that Ken is a dreamer and that he wants to see himself reflected in the world as an Asian American, something Hsu had never contemplated before. Ken opens up a different way of seeing the world for Hsu, a new way of living and experiencing life. Despite all of his cynicism, Hsu genuinely admires Ken. A friendship that is, Hsu defines, about the willingness to know, rather than be known.
Then Ken gets killed in a senseless carjacking after his housewarming party.
At Ken’s funeral, Hua delivers the collective eulogy from their friend group, a eulogy that Hsu kept on writing since then, and what eventually became this memoir 20 years later.
Hsu continues to mourn his friend’s tragic passing and longs for the many adventures and conversations that they would have had together. When Hsu comes across something funny in a book or learns about something new in his political science class, he wonders what Ken would think about it and imagines how Ken would respond. After Hsu graduates from Berkeley and gets to Boston for graduate school, he wonders if Ken would end up on the East Coast with him. He laments the loss of his friend at such a young age when the whole world waiting for him to discover. Even more so, he aches over the possibility of what their friendship would have become, in whatever form it might be. Now he will never know.
Maybe I would have gone to New York, and not Boston. Maybe I would have gone to boston, and we would have finally lived together. Maybe it was only a matter of time until we grew apart. We would have continued liviing, reminded of each other when a song came on during a movie, or on the radio, or have never had a reason to remember all this.
This book feels extra special to me because it is a local Bay Area story and I live so close to where everything happened. I live in Oakland, a quick 15-min drive away from the UC Berkeley campus. I just walked on Channing street last week after lunch, where Hsu’s moved into his sophomore-year apartment. Richmond, San Pablo, Vallejo, and Amoeba Music. These familiar places and streets brought me closer to the story from an era that is otherwise mostly unfamiliar to me.
No matter which decade you grew up in or what type of music you listened to in college, as long as you have experienced an intense friendship, have ached over the passing of a loved one, or have questioned where you belong in the world, this book will touch you deeply, break your heart into pieces, and put it back together.
Stay True is a memoir about one friend grieving the passing of his best friend and a friendship that ended too soon. It is that and so much more than that. It’s about being young, coming of age, searching for belonging, love for music, grief, and being Asian American.
It is also a calling from Hsu, a calling for all of us to cherish and appreciate all the small, mundane, silly, meaningful, stupid, but fleeting moments in life; a calling to “stay true, stay true to yourself. True to who you might have become.”
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I loved Stay True. It was a wallop of an audiobook.