Stay True is a memoir born of trauma. In the summer time of 1998, Hua Hsu’s good friend and classmate Ken Ishida was murdered in a carjacking simply earlier than the beginning of their senior 12 months on the University of California, Berkeley. However, this isn’t an account of that occasion. Instead, Stay True examines the reverberations of a friendship frozen in time by loss of life.
Hua Hsu shares how he tried to seize the aura of the Nineteen Nineties, AOL and all.
In the quick aftermath of Ken’s loss of life, Hsu obsessively collected the detritus of their friendship—a cigarette pack, receipts, paper serviette jottings—and stuffed them in a padded envelope that he’s carried with him for years. Since then, Hsu has gone to Harvard, turn into a professor (first at Vassar College, and now at Bard College), began a household and brought on a parallel profession as a workers author for The New Yorker. In all that point, he’s struggled to search out and categorical the essence of his friendship with Ken. How shut have been they actually? What did their friendship imply? In Stay True, he seeks to recapture the feel and appear of the moments they spent collectively smoking cigarettes on a dorm balcony, speaking about women and sexual inexperience. Moments within the automobile on a meals run in Berkeley. Moments collectively planning tasks impressed by the film The Last Dragon.
Although Hsu was older than Ken, Ken feels just like the older brother right here. Ken was Japanese American, and his household has lived in California for generations, lengthy sufficient that his grandparents have been imprisoned in an internment camp throughout World War II. Hsu, then again, is a first-generation American, the beloved son of latest immigrants from Taiwan. Ken had a standard type, and many of self-confidence. Hsu sought to tell apart himself along with his assertive style in music and his offbeat clothes selections, and he had little of Ken’s social and cultural consolation. In moments like these, Stay True turns into a exceptional examination of the expertise of immigration and assimilation.
But general, Stay True is a questing exploration of the elusive nature of friendship because it shifts and reshapes with the passage of time.
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