Stay True: A Memoir

Chapter 3 describes Hua’s desire to fashion an identity for himself as an outsider, the intimacy of adolescent friendships, and the role such friendships play in identity formation. Hua and Ken’s friendship was an unlikely one: “He was a genre of person I actively avoided—mainstream” (40). Indeed, Hua and Ken were opposites in several respects: “I was quiet, and Ken was loud. He projected confidence. I found confident people suspicious. He asked questions out of earnest curiosity, and I asked questions that were skeptical or coolly condescending” (42). Ken serves as a foil for Hua in critical ways, and his portrayal helps establish the theme of The Desire for Individuality Versus the Desire for Community. Hua is drawn to Ken’s poise and contentedness, qualities he associates with white people. He also envies Ken because he believes that Ken’s roots in the US prevent him from feeling like an outsider. Families like Ken’s are “into football and fishing” (44) and speak “with no trace of accent” (44). By contrast, as the child of recent immigrants, Hua feels “discomfort at a molecular level, especially when doing typical things” (44). As Hua observes, he and Ken might have looked similar, but they differed in fundamental ways. Hua associates the Asian part of his identity with a fumbling lack of belonging, and Ken’s ability to assimilate is both a skill that Hua longs for and a point of criticism that affirms Hua’s self-concept as an outsider.

Using his relationship with Ken as a point of departure, Hua muses on the complex and intimate nature of friendship: “Some friends complete us, while others complicate us […] Nobody says a thing, and it is perfect” (44). Hua put on airs during his first year at Berkeley, eschewing the mainstream in part to protect himself against rejection. Although he maintained this persona around Ken, their closeness was such that he occasionally lowered his guard: “I appreciated that he was too kind to put me out of my misery and point out my insecurities. Maybe this is what it meant to be known, this feeling of being exposed and transparent” (52). Hua provides insights not just about the complexity of friendship, but also about the different types of friends:

As a structure, [friendship is] rife with imbalance, invisible tiers, pettiness, and insecurity, stretches when we simply disappear. For some, friendship needs to be steady and rhythmic. For others, it’s the sporadic intimacy of effortlessly resuming conversations or inside jokes left dormant for years (45).

Hua also stresses the transience of friendship, which gestures to his loss of Ken.

Hua’s remarks on friendship oscillate between the personal to the theoretical. He shifts from specific descriptions of his relationship with Ken to a discussion of Derrida’s lectures on friendship, published in 1994 under the title The Politics of Friendship. Hua draws on Derrida’s work to unpack the nature of friendship, focusing on its lasting impact, even after death:

The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another. We continue to know our friend, even after they are no longer present to look back at us. From that very first encounter, we are always preparing for the eventuality that we might outlive them, or they us. We are already imagining how we may someday remember them. This isn’t meant to be sad. To love friendship, he writes, ‘one must love the future’ (57).

As he did in previous chapters, Hua uses vivid imagery and humor to engage readers. For example, when Ken tried to get him to listen to Pearl Jam, Hua recoiled with disgust “as though he were presenting a virus” (50). Hua’s wry humor shines in his description of his first class at Berkeley, a 500-person course filled with other bright students: “You instantly realized the challenge of retaining whatever sense of uniqueness got you here in the first place” (41). Hua’s humor is also on display in his description of Northern and Southern California, whose “only unifying element was that everyone wore Adidas slides” (43). His humor is both dry and self-deprecating, as evidenced by his remarks about dating: “[Ken] often wanted to talk to me about girls, an area of knowledge where my understanding was largely conceptual. All I’d ever learned about romance in high school was that Schindler’s List is a terrible idea for a first date” (51).