For 24 years, Hua Hsu has been carrying round a padded envelope stuffed with memorabilia. Things like “a pack of Export A’s with two cigarettes left,” a funeral program, letters, cassette tapes, receipts, punchlines written on napkins, a paperback copy of Edward Carr’s What Is History? Hsu rapidly gathered all of these items and extra within the aftermath of the homicide of his good friend Ken, who was killed in a carjacking in 1998, the summer time earlier than their senior yr on the University of California, Berkeley.
“I’m an archivist at heart,” Hsu says throughout a name to his dwelling in Brooklyn, New York. When his good friend was killed, Hsu says he “just began writing everything down.” His obsessive cataloging even led his faculty buddies to decide on him to ship the eulogy at Ken’s funeral. Hsu has continued poring over his gathered notes and memorabilia ever since, looking for a manner “to capture certain feelings since those days.” But till lately, he says, “it didn’t seem to have any possibility of becoming a narrative.”
Read our starred evaluate of ‘Stay True’ by Hua Hsu.
As he describes in his richly probing memoir, Stay True, Hsu grew up in Cupertino, California, the one youngster of dad and mom who got here to the U.S. within the Sixties for faculty and to flee a repressive regime in Taiwan. He was an usually solitary youngster who discovered expression via and distinguished himself with his avid love of music, which he wrote about in vibrant private zines. At Berkeley, he curated mixtapes for each event, like journeys in his Volvo with Ken and others to select up buddies from the airport and even only for native meals runs. Outside of curating the aesthetics of his private identification, Hsu spent these years tutoring inmates at San Quentin State Prison, volunteering as a mentor for teenagers in neighboring Richmond, California, and taking part within the rising Asian American-led political actions of the Nineteen Nineties.
Hsu says he hopes Stay True captures the sensation of that second. “I want the book to sound like what life was like then. It’s hard to describe to someone who didn’t experience America Online what boredom felt like at the time, or what the pace of life is like if you’re in college pre-internet, or just what it felt like to be at Berkeley. . . . I didn’t want it to be purely nostalgic. I wanted it to feel like you’re just hanging out in this other time.”
“I didn’t want it to be purely nostalgic. I wanted it to feel like you’re just hanging out in this other time.”
Within these descriptions of pre-Y2K Northern California, Ken usually appears elusive. Hsu quotes his therapist and one other good friend who requested him how shut he actually was to Ken, and foregrounding that query was deliberate, Hsu says. “When you’re young, you’re just living day to day. Then if there’s some kind of fracture or trauma, you’re forced to step out of your context and examine what’s meaningful to you. There’s a way I took this friendship for granted. When I was writing in my journal, I was always returning to how to describe [Ken]: his voice, his laugh, his skin. You’d never have occasion to do something like that if he were still alive. The question of closeness only becomes visible when it’s no longer there.”
Hsu, who arrived at Berkeley with various rock sensibilities and a intentionally oddball fashion of costume, didn’t instantly like Ken, a good-looking, conventionally dressed, confident fraternity member. Ken was a Japanese American whose grandparents had been incarcerated in an internment camp throughout World War II, however in comparison with Hsu, Ken had completely assimilated, right down to the Abercrombie wardrobe. In this fashion, Ken appeared to signify to Hsu a special life path—one he was initially skeptical about. “He was comfortable in his own skin,” Hsu says. “He was confident. . . . It started off as something I would just dismiss, and then it became intriguing.”
One of Stay True‘s many fascinating qualities is its examination of the differing ways Asian Americans embrace and reject American culture. In particular, Hsu writes lovingly of his parents’ experiences as new immigrants. At one level, Hsu’s father was in a position to return to Taiwan to work as a well-paid skilled. This being the pre-internet age, he communicated with his son through fax machine whereas he was in Taiwan, and the fatherly love expressed in these faxes is exceptional. At one other level, Hsu describes his mom, now not among the many latest immigrants to her San Jose suburb, nearly comically deriding the rudeness of newer Chinese immigrants to burgeoning Silicon Valley.
“The question of closeness only becomes visible when it’s no longer there.”
But Stay True‘s focus remains on a friendship: its qualities, its vagaries, its lingering questions and impacts, frozen and spotlighted by its traumatic end. After Berkeley, Hsu went on to Harvard, where he continued to obsess over his late friend while feeling “marooned” on the East Coast. These days, he says he “doesn’t really feel fully at dwelling wherever,” however he’s at the very least acclimated to the East Coast. He is a workers author for The New Yorker, and till lately, he was an affiliate professor of English and director of American Studies at Vassar College. In 2022, he turned a professor of literature at Bard College, educating writing and Asian literature. He and his spouse have a 7-year-old son. Marital strife, he jokes, facilities on alternate road parking and who will fulfill the work quota on the meals co-op.
So a lot has modified within the final 24 years—however creating this e-book after a lot time and deliberation has not introduced Hsu catharsis or closure, he says. “That feels too climactic. But it has given me a lot of peace.”
Headshot of Hua Hsu by Devlin Claro
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