Friday, October 13, 2023

Hua Hsu, Stay True *** 1/2

Stay True is a memoir about the college years of a first-generation Taiwanese American. Hua cultivates an indie persona (thrift shop clothing, publishing zines, haunting independent record stores) while becoming close friends with Japanese-American Ken despite Ken's apparently mainstream tastes. Over the summer between their junior and senior years, Ken is killed in a robbery/carjacking.

On my reading, the main subject of Stay True is how and why we choose our personas. The growing friendship between Hua and Ken is largely a matter of negotiating their personas. Ken defers to Hua's musical taste while Hua allows Ken to drag him to social events that he publicly scorns. Their identity as Asian Americans comes into play, but I had no trouble identifying with their efforts at crafting a personality.

One source of my enjoyment is that Hua attends UC Berkeley. Despite the fifteen-year gap between our college experiences, I recognized many of the locales. As a freshman he lives in Ida Sproul Hall; I lived in Spens-Black Hall in the same Unit 3, not far from "the left-wing bookstore tucked inside the parking garage." Cody's, Amoeba, Cafe Roma, apartments on Channing. Hua manages to capture something vital about the group of friends you accumulate in college, a somewhat random collection of roommates and classmates and friends of friends with whom you establish meaningless rituals. In other words, the book brought back memories of my college days.

I thought Hua was less successful at conveying the impact of Ken's death. His prose in the last couple of chapters tends toward the cliché and lacks the specificity of the earlier parts of the book. 

I'm somewhat surprised by the amount of critical attention that Stay True received. It won a Pulitzer Prize and appeared on multiple lists of the 10 best books of 2022. It's good, yes, but it ultimately feels a bit too personal to speak to all of us.



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