Friendship memoirs can be a tricky genre to navigate. By definition, the writer is on the outside of the narrative: The focus is defining the importance of the relationship. Ann Patchett’s 2004 memoir Truth and Beauty comes immediately to mind. Its evocation of the writer’s relationship with poet Lucy Grealy worked because the focus rested on the symbiotic connection between writer and her subject. In Hua Hsu’s remarkable 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Stay True, that symbiosis takes on an even more profound meaning. It’s about identity, assimilation, pop culture and philosophical meaning. It’s about the undefinable power of friendship between young deep-thinking college students in their late teens and early twenties, when nothing seems impossible and tragedies during that impressionable time can define the rest of their lives.
Consider this line, very early in the book, as Hsu ruminates on the deceptive nature of how time passes slowly when you’re a young college student. Everything takes on a deeper meaning and “For a while, you were convinced that you would one day write the saddest story ever.” Hsu wants to interpret things, and that’s how he rebels against his Taiwanese father’s predilectiontowardmath and science. His father came to the United States in 1965 and absorbed everything: Dylan, the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin. Assimilation was easy because the options seemed limitless.
Hsu writes:
“Immigrants are often discussed in terms of a push-and-pull dynamic: something pushes you from home; something else pulls you far away.”
That’s one of the major themes in Stay True, not just literally but figuratively. Hsu’s dad was drawn from home and compelled to find that feeling of location in a new land. Hsu, born in the United States in 1977, found comfort as a student radical as defined at Berkeley in the early to mid–1990s, yearning for the romance of the Free Speech movement that flourished at that campus in the 1960s. As Hsu puts it in a line that can speak to the lineage of his family history or generational mindset, “The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories.”
Hsu’s parents had “…chosen the occasional loneliness, the meandering lifestyle, the language barrier. What they hadn’t chosen was identification as Asian Americans…” That seems to be the purview of Hsu’s generation. He reflects on the “…moment for the immigrant’s child when you realize that you and your parents are assimilating at the same time.” Hsu becomes absorbed by the angst of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and the world of abundance into which he’s being born as a man. He writes about friendship, those who hear our serious thoughts and those who complete us.
The youth of Hsu’s generation, like any youth, crave new contexts, and for Hsu it was all about the yin and yang of pop culture and philosophy. For every pop culture moment in his life there were ruminations on Jacques Derrida and the tendency at that age to “deconstruct” things or refer to weirdness as “postmodern.” Hsu seamlessly sprinkles these references into his thoughts about friendship, how it “… rests on the presumption of reciprocity…debts and favors…all I wanted was friends to listen to music with.”
All along, he’s still considering why his parents came here from Taiwan. When he tells his father he was grateful for the sacrifices that had been made on his behalf for a life in the United States (both parents had been spending more time back in Taiwan) his dad responds with a laugh:
“We came here for ourselves. There was nothing in Taiwan when we left.”
Ken exists on the periphery of this narrative for most of the first half, but he’s a big part of every page. He’s a Japanese-American young man whose family had been here in the United States for generations. Ken and Hua define each other by their contrasts skipping over it. Ken loves the Dave Matthews Band, Abercrombie and Fitch, and his fraternity brothers. Hua loves alternative music, creating and disseminating ideas through his homemade ‘zine, and balancing his grand ideas with life in a country of abundance and excess. Everything is there for the asking and nothing is out of bounds. “The present was a drag. We lived for the future.” After Ken and Hua share an intense few years of friendship, Ken is mugged and murdered.
This moment of tragedy is halfway through the book, and Hua responds the best way he seems capable of responding:
“I wanted to impose structure on all that had come before that July night, turning the past into something architectural, a palace of memories to wander at my own leisure.”
Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker, a cultural critic and interviewer adept at examining the lives of others. His pedigree is impressive and past work very thorough. In other hands a writer more proven at reporting on the lives and work of others might not be able to distance himself from his own narrative. Hua Hsu’s measured balance and distance throughout this book, especially its second half, is remarkable. He reflects:
“Writing offered a way to live outside the present, skipping over its textures and slowness, converting the present into language, thinking about language rather than being present at all.”
One of the more resonant final takeaways from Stay True is the salvation harmony offers through music, friendship, and life. Hua had absorbed his father’s record collection but noticed the Beach Boys were conspicuous in their absence. He’d read about the manic perfectionism Brian Wilson had sought while writing and producing the 1966 classic God Only Knows. Hua’s friends sang along to the song while they drove with him, usually off-key but always with earnestness. Hua writes about the song:
“[It]…suggested the possibility of yearnings beyond love…Was it in…these sad lines about drifting apart and rediscovering one’s purpose?…Maybe it wasn’t in the song so much as in the repeated listenings, these memories stacking on top of one another.”
Hua Hsu’s Stay True captures in a tangible form those indescribable sensations of true love and sincere friendship.
