Stay True is both a memoir of writer and scholar Hua Hsu's life as a young Asian-American man and a memorial for his friend Ken who was murdered while both he and Hsu were in college. Hsu begins the books by documenting his parents’ experience of immigrating to the United States as students from Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s. While his parents try to assimilate into American culture, they nonetheless come to realize that “assimilation as a whole was a race toward a horizon that was never fixed” (p. 30). After Hsu is born in 1977, the family moves from Illinois to Texas, and finally, to Cupertino, California where Hsu spends his teenage years.
Hsu pays particular attention to describing his passion for music and culture that influenced his development as a teenager. Unlike most of his peers, Hsu spends his time making handmade magazines–or zines–and prides himself on knowing about rock bands before they become famous. In an energetic section of the book, he describes how he discovered the band Nirvana and became “mystified by the way they chose to express themselves, undermining their own, innately catchy songs with layers of menacing noise or mischievous snarls” (p. 30).
Hsu then describes his days as a college student in Berkeley, California. In his first days at school, Hsu is introduced to Ken, a popular and charismatic member of a fraternity. While Hsu writes that Ken “was a genre of person I actively avoided—mainstream," the two slowly become friends (p. 43). While they differ in many ways, they share the experience of being Asian-American. Unexpectedly, they bond over late-night conversations, smoking cigarettes, long road trips, and their successes—and sometimes failures—at college. Soon, they become inseparable.
In July of 1998, Ken is killed in a violent carjacking. Hsu and his friends are devastated and left to grieve the tragic event. In order to cope with the grief, Hsu begins to write journal entires addressed to his deceased friend. Over twenty years after Ken's death, Hsu's process of writing to Ken transformed into the book that is Stay True.
Stay True is a deeply-felt and intimately articulated memoir. In it, Hsu explores the nature of friendship, the fallibility of memory, and the almost unbearable weight of grief. The book is brimming with Hsu's human insights, uplifting humor, and profound respect for his friend. One might consider the title Stay True as an aspiration, a work composed with a prevailing sense of truth and authenticity.
