Stay True: A Memoir

Coming of age is a central theme of Chapter 4. Hua matures during his sophomore year at Berkeley, trading his college dorm room for an off-campus bungalow and embarking on a path to independence. Having a self-sufficient roommate who had “lived by himself in downtown Saratoga” (63) and who “knew how to cook” (63) reinforced Hua’s sense that his was growing up, as did Ken’s housewarming gift and the furnishings left behind by previous tenants.

Hua’s intellectual interests expanded in his early college years. He spent his freshman year focusing on poetry and writing. By the beginning of his sophomore year, however, Hua had declared a major in political science, enrolled in philosophy and rhetoric classes, and pursued various forms of artistic expression. Through experimentation and failure, he explored various facets of his identity in hopes of finding his place in the world:

I couldn’t get anything published by The Daily Cal […] I was probably not an artist. I was definitely a terrible painter. I was in search of a narrative engine, some kind of spark that might organize my surplus energies. Maybe, if I was lucky, I could channel my love of research into a job at a think tank (65).

Despite his efforts, however, he struggled to commit to any of his pursuits and longed to start over somewhere else:

I was eager for a future that might take place anywhere else, a new scene where my awkwardness would be mistaken for nonchalance […] I always left myself an out, an escape hatch in case someone offered me a new adventure, the adventure I thought I deserved (66).

Hua’s bond with Ken deepened during their second year at Berkeley. They continued to pursue old interests, such as shopping, smoking, and watching movies, but campus activism opened new, more serious avenues of conversation. Hua and Ken began discussing equality, race, complicity, color-blind racism, the representation of Asians in the media, and victimhood. As American men of Asian descent, Hua and Ken did not fit neatly into the groups of protesters and counter-protesters proliferating on campus. Rather, they were “in the middle of it, neither Black nor white […] hardly seen at all” (78). Hua and Ken’s desire to contribute to campus debates led them to pen an op-ed for the school newspaper advocating change and showcasing their individual strengths:

I wove some sarcastic jokes around his earnest, reform-minded questions. This movement needed barricades and grassroots organizers as much as it needed classrooms, legal challenges, people working for gradual change from within the system (83).

Discussions of race and the overt racism of The Real World’s casting director changed Hua’s perspective of Ken: “I realized how wrong I’d been to assume that his life was a breeze, shot through with invincible golden hues” (74). Having roots in the US did not insulate Ken from hardship. Instead, it made him question his identity. Ken bore an anglicized name and often forgot to take his shoes off at the door (a custom practiced by many Asians), yet outsiders perceived him as a foreigner. The duality of his identity prompted Ken to claim he was “a man without a culture” (80).

Hua augments his discussion of Ken’s identity and his own journey to self-discovery with historical and theoretical perspectives on individual identity. In premodern times, the concept of individual identity did not exist. People were born into well-defined positions organized around hierarchies. The end of feudalism gave rise to the idea that individuals had an innate essence. As the philosopher Charles Taylor argued, however, identity is not innate. Rather, it is a “process of self-discovery, self-creation, and revision” (81). For some, this process entails “endless drifting and searching” (81). By contrast, others feel empowered by the “possibility of claiming one’s own identity […] that quality that made you yourself” (81), which Taylor called authenticity. Like many college students, Hua struggled with authenticity and self-discovery as a young adult. In Taylor’s terms, he became “a kind of artist, creatively wrestling with the parameters of [his] own being” (81). Ken was not just on his own journey to self-discovery, but also a foil for Hua, an image that helped Hua define who he was: “He saw people as innately good and open-minded. I saw a bad CD collection as evidence of moral weakness […] I delighted in being the playful cynic, comfortable in a constant state of not belonging. He was the least cynical person I knew” (71–74).