46 pages • 1 hour read
Hua HsuStay True: A Memoir
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | YA | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary
Chapter 2 focuses on Hua’s family. Hua’s father immigrated to the US from Taiwan in 1965, at the age of 21, to pursue graduate studies in physics. After two years at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a stint at Columbia University in New York, Hua’s father followed his academic advisor to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, where he met his future wife (Hua’s mother). Like her husband, Hua’s mother had an aptitude for science and moved to the US from Taiwan to pursue her studies in 1971. The two married on their university campus and later settled in Cupertino, California. Nearly two decades later, when Hua was nine years old, his father moved back to Taiwan for work. Despite the distance, however, the two maintained a close relationship via fax and during visits.
Hua segues from his discussion of family into an overview of American immigration. The Opium Wars that devastated southeastern China in the 19th century coincided with the growing demand for cheap labor in the American West. However, several decades later, when the American economy no longer needed foreign labor, the US government implemented exclusionary immigration policies that barred Chinese workers from the country (a policy only repealed in 1965). Foreign students were nevertheless welcome in the US during this period, particularly those in scientific fields. A quarter century later, the rapid expansion of Silicon Valley brought new waves of Asian immigrants to the West Coast. Cupertino was among the areas transformed by these newcomers. Chinese restaurants, bookstores, and newspapers proliferated in the area starting in the 1980s, precisely during Hua’s formative years. Hua’s mother complained about the new immigrants, deeming them ill-mannered and entitled, whereas Hua’s father continued embracing aspects of American society, notably, by building an expansive record collection. Having internalized his father’s love for music, Hua began accompanying him to record stores, obsessing over MTV, and immersing himself in alternative music. Hua’s father eventually reached a career plateau in the US, prompting him to seek new opportunities in his birth country.
The move to Taiwan allowed Hua’s mother and father to reconnect with their Taiwanese roots. By contrast, Hua embraced his American identity by listening to English-language radio stations and by further immersing himself in American music, notably, Nirvana. Hua also began making zines in this period. Zines allowed Hua to explore old and new facets of his identity, including music, his Chinese heritage, film, literature, and art. Hua’s father implored Hua to prioritize schoolwork. However, he also faxed his son messages of love and encouragement, expressing pride in Hua’s accomplishments and delight in his “happy personality” (29). Hua turned to his father after Kurt Cobain’s death by suicide in 1994, sending him an article he penned on the topic for his school newspaper. Hua’s father engaged with the issue of generational dysfunction, while also urging his son to think practically and consider going to Berkeley. Hua’s mother and father favored Berkeley, “a good school with a good campus” (34). The appeal for Hua, however, was its leftwing bookstore, giant pizza slices, and activist student body.
Chapter 2 Analysis
Chapter 2 centers on Hua’s Asian American Identity and his family’s immigrant experience. As young, Taiwanese immigrants, Hua’s parents adapted to life in the US in different ways. Hua’s father quickly adjusted to his new country, acquiring traits that “marked him as an American” (12). During his student years in New York, for instance, he grew out his hair, wore fashionable clothing, and participated in student protests. Once a fan of classical music, Hua’s father shifted his attention to rock and roll within a few years of arriving in the US, amassing a vast record collection and naming “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals as his favorite song. Hua’s father subscribed to The New Yorker, the prestigious magazine that would later employ his son, before concluding that he was not its target audience. He also enjoyed uniquely American foods, such as New York pizza and rum raisin ice cream. All of these examples indicate a desire to assimilate into American culture through aggressive adoption of cultural touchstones. In particular, the accumulation of records suggests a keen understanding of America—Hua’s father adopts the American habit of consumption alongside his love of rock and roll.
Despite embracing certain aspects of American culture, however, Hua’s father never fully assimilated into American society. For example, he briefly considered anglicizing his name to Eric before realizing that “assimilation of that order didn’t suit him” (18). Hua’s father also maintained his Taiwanese identity through his friends: “Whenever new grad students were set to arrive from Taiwan, he and his friends piled into the nearest available car to pick them up” (13).
Like his father, Hua’s mother also explored American culture while maintaining close ties to her Taiwanese heritage. She visited American landmarks as a student and ate ice cream for lunch every day while waitressing one summer. On campus, however, she instinctively sought out other Taiwanese students. She and her friends hosted potlucks and served traditional Chinese dishes, such as lion’s head meatballs, and traveled to grocery stores that carried popular Asian ingredients, such as bok choy. In many ways, Hua’s parents have a typical experience of first-generation immigrants—a life that is informed by the past and lived in the present, with a tension in the fact that they exist both within and outside of their context.
Hua was deeply invested in his parents’ American identity, particularly after his father moved back to Taiwan. During summer visits, for example, he insisted on listening to an English-language radio station for Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, a ploy to connect with his father and remind him of “the American splendors to which he might one day return” (23). As a second-generation immigrant, he is at home in the American part of his identity, but he is careful to write about this disconnect without suggesting that his relationship with his father was strained by it: Throughout this chapter, Hua presents his father as an empathetic listener who pushes Hua to embrace his own identity. Even when they are forced to communicate via fax, the recreated messages that Hua includes in the text demonstrate a father’s curiosity about his son.
Hua enlivens his writing with imagery, metaphors, and humor. For example, he characterizes the Americanization of his parents as “an incomplete project” (23), likening his father’s rock and roll records to “relics of an unfollowed path” (23). His account of his parents’ relationship to Taiwan is equally evocative: “In the absence of available connections, they held on to an imaginary Taiwan, more an abstraction—a beacon, a phantom limb—than an actual island” (17). Hua’s penchant for dry humor is apparent in his description of Cupertino in the mid-1980s: “There was a huge factory downtown, farms, and a few Apple buildings that seemed a joke. Nobody used Apple computers” (16). Finally, Hua uses figures of speech to underscore his memoir’s central theme:
My parents’ previous addresses are a history of friendships and acquaintances: a spare room in someone’s attic, visits to family friends whom they’d only heard about but never actually met, a summer job in a small town a few hours away, a work opportunity in an unfamiliar, emerging field (16).
Hua’s parents taught him the value of friendship and community, which informed his relationship with Ken and the content of his memoir.
