Stay True: A Memoir

Stay True is a 2022 coming-of-age memoir by Hua Hsu, an American author and academic born to Taiwanese immigrants. Hsu has published extensively on issues of diversity, multiculturalism, immigration, and popular culture in the United States, with pieces appearing in The New Yorker, Slate, The Atlantic, The Wire, and other prestigious magazines. With evocative prose and wry humor, Stay True describes Hua’s unlikely friendship with Ken, a Japanese American college friend whose journey of self-discovery shaped the author’s own, as well as Hua’s grief and guilt in the wake of Ken’s murder the summer after their junior year. Both The New York Times and the Washington Post named Stay True one of the 10 Best Books of 2022. The book was also a finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography and longlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

This guide refers to the 2022 edition published by Doubleday.

Content Warning: The source material contains racial epithets and descriptions of racism.

Summary

Chapter 1 introduces Friendship as Stay True’s central theme. Mundane activities, such as cruising with friends, listening to music, and dropping people off at the airport are as central to Hua’s conception of friendship as intense moments of hilarity and laughter. Shifts from boredom to hyperstimulation were inherent in Hua’s college friendships, with the latter happening so quickly he feared he might forget them.

Chapter 2 addresses the theme of Asian American Identity. Hua describes the circumstances that brought his Taiwanese parents to the United States, their early years at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, their time in Texas, where they experienced racism, and their move to Cupertino, California. Hua’s father moved back to Taiwan for work two decades after immigrating to the US, communicating with his wife and son via fax and during visits. While returning to Taiwan allowed Hua’s father to reconnect with his roots, Hua embraced his American identity, primarily by creating zines about music, films, literature, and art. Hua’s parents were open to hearing about his interests, even when they didn’t share or understand them.

Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s “Politics of Friendship,” Chapter 3 describes Hua’s freshmen year at Berkeley, focusing on the intimacy of his friendship with Ken. Hua describes his attempts at self-fashioning and the role that his friendship with Ken played in the formation of his identity, initiating the memoir’s interest in the theme of The Desire for Individuality Versus the Desire for Connection. Hua cultivated a “straight edge” identity when he first arrived at Berkeley, rejecting drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes more out of fear than moral principle. He sought out other misfits until he and Ken formed their unlikely friendship. Hua was initially wary of Ken’s boisterous, confident personality, but the two bonded over long conversations on their dorm’s smoking balcony. Over the course of the year, Hua and Ken challenged each other in ways that brought them closer and helped them hone their identities.

Chapter 4 spans the end of Hua’s freshman year and the whole of his sophomore year. Hua moved out of his dorm to an off-campus apartment, while Ken moved into his frat house. Despite no longer living under the same roof, the two remained close friends, with Ken giving Hua a set of glasses that made Hua feel like a grown up. Hua declared a major at the start of his sophomore year, while Ken’s interests shifted from architecture to law. Hua also became politically engaged during this period, marching to uphold affirmative action and incorporating overtly political content into his zines. Both Hua and Ken grappled with their Asian American identities, with Ken experiencing direct racism when a casting agent for MTV’s The Real World visited campus. After this incident, Hua and Ken discussed the problematic representation of Asians in the media and coauthored an op-ed highlighting the need for a multipronged approach to ending inequality.

Chapter 5 focuses on Hua’s junior year at Berkeley, further exploring the theme of Friendship through Marcel Mauss’s ideas on gift giving, connection, and reciprocity. Mauss introduced the concept of delayed reciprocity, arguing that giving and receiving gifts occur at intermittent and sometimes random intervals. Connection and reciprocity are at the core of Hua’s notion of friendship. Ken gave Hua a modernist clock as a housewarming gift at the start of their junior year. Like the glasses he received previously, the clock made Hua feel like an adult. In addition to material gifts, however, Hua and Ken exchanged “gifts” every time they introduced each other to a new song, movie, television show, book, or idea, all of which strengthened their friendship.

Chapter 6 focuses on Hua’s junior year at Berkeley. The chapter opens with an extended reflection on anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s essay “In Memoriam,” introducing the theme of Memory and Narrative. Hua continued to make zines and spend time with Ken. In addition, he volunteered with Asian American high school students at a nearby youth center and started working for the campus newspaper, where he met Mira, his first serious girlfriend. The following summer, three weeks after celebrating his 21st birthday, Hua learned that Ken had been murdered during a carjacking. Hua leaned on his friends and parents for support and began memorializing Ken in a journal with a gold dragon on the cover, a tribute to a screenplay they coauthored early that year.

Chapter 7 describes the summer after Ken’s death. The night after learning about Ken’s murder, Hua wrote Ken a letter telling him everything he would miss about him. A few days later, Hua attended Ken’s funeral in Southern California, which made him realize how loved Ken was by different people. Hua avoided reminders of Ken and tried to create new routines after returning to Berkeley. The weekend before the start of his senior year, Hua traveled to Mexico with friends to pay tribute to Ken’s openness to fun, but he was unable to shed his sadness.

Chapter 8 focuses on Hua’s final year at Berkeley. Hua coped with the grief of losing Ken in varied ways, rejecting his old routines, tagging along to bars with members of fraternities, and writing to Ken in his journal. Hua excelled academically and found an adviser for his senior thesis, but his personal relationships suffered as he grew increasingly withdrawn. His sadness even impacted his relationship with Mira, who eventually broke up with him. Hua embraced Ken’s interests as his own, immersed himself in local and national news stories about hate crimes, and started tutoring prisoners at San Quentin. Hua submitted his thesis at the end of the academic year, bringing an end to his time at Berkeley.

Chapter 9 is about Hua’s life after college. Hua moved to Boston to pursue graduate studies at Harvard University, maintaining a long-distance relationship with Joie, a woman he began dating toward the end of his senior year at Berkeley. Hua often thought about the past, which translated into a love of archival work. Hua kept objects related to Ken in a padded envelope, which he took out when he needed a distraction from his studies. He tried writing scenes from his past with Ken, but he struggled to describe even simple things. Only after a semester of therapy in his second year at Harvard did Hua realize that it wasn’t grief that was holding him back, but guilt. Stay True ends with a list of things Hua misses about Ken and extols the benefits of therapy.