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 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
Chapter 6 opens with a meditation on gift giving. Hua discusses the “In Memoriam” section of the 1923 issue of L’Année sociologique, written by Mauss and presented in dialogue with his “Essay on the Gift,” which was published in the same volume. Mauss paid tribute to the soldier-scholars who died in World War I, musing about what the future might have looked like if his colleagues had lived: “Mauss projects into a future that never arrived, imagining ‘what this would have become, if there had been no war’ and his colleagues had continued living and working together” (104). The “In Memoriam” was Mauss’s gift to the dead, a way of making them known to future generations of students and scholars.
Hua segues from his thoughts on Mauss to memories of his junior year. Hua’s mother spent more time in Taiwan with her husband during this period. Using prepaid phone cards, Hua probed his parents for information about their early years in the US, particularly about their memories of the Black Panthers and the Yellow Power movement. He told his parents about his activism thinking they would be proud, but instead they urged him to focus on his studies. Beyond attending protests, Hua spent his time studying, hanging out with friends, making zines, and working for the campus newspaper. It was through his work with the paper that Hua met Mira, a Taiwanese American woman from Southern California who became his first serious college girlfriend. Ken approved of the relationship, even though it cut into the time he and Hua spent together. While Hua nurtured his budding romance, Ken focused on his future.
The chapter ends with a description of the summer after junior year. Ken returned to his job selling children’s shoes at Nordstrom, while Hua took a job as a teacher with the Richmond Youth Project. Mira visited Hua in Richmond on his 21st birthday, presenting him with a zine about their relationship. That night, Hua had dinner with friends in San Francisco and drank his first shot, courtesy of Ken. Three weeks later, at Ken’s housewarming party, Hua confided in Ken that he was ready to lose his virginity. The two agreed to pick up the conversation that weekend after being interrupted. The following Monday, Hua still hadn’t heard from Ken, nor had anyone else. One of Ken’s frat brothers called the police to file a missing person report. The responding officer took two of Ken’s friends to the station, while Hua waited for news on the steps of Ken’s apartment. The friends returned and told Hua that Ken had been murdered. Hua leaned on his friends and parents for support. A few days later, he bought a journal with a gold dragon on the cover and began recording his memories of Ken. He also made a mixed tape of songs that reminded him of Ken and offered a copy to Ken’s parents. The police arrested Ken’s killers shortly after the funeral. The three killers confessed to forcing Ken into the trunk of his car, stealing his bank cards, and shooting him in the back of the head.
Chapter 6 Analysis
Chapter 6 explores the theme of Memory and Narrative. The chapter opens a discussion of the “In Memoriam” from the 1923 issue of L’Année sociologique. Mauss memorialized the fallen soldier-scholars of World War I by describing their scholarship and the way they died. In doing so, he not only made the dead known to later generations, but also prompted readers to reflect on alternate realities: “Mauss compels us to know them as thinkers as well as friends—to hold on to the possibilities of what could have been” (104). As Hua observes, Mauss was “salvaging a lost world” (105) by attempting to see through “a set of impossible potentialities” (105). By prefacing his “Essay on the Gift” with “In Memoriam,” moreover, Mauss connected the act of memorializing to gift giving.
Hua engages with Mauss’s ideas of memorializing by making Ken a central figure of his memoir. As one of the first to learn about Ken’s death, Hua took it upon himself to alert their friends, describing the process with idioms and metaphors: “It offered some weird sense of purpose to be the bearer of bad news and then the receptacle for another’s pain. I was a storyteller with a plot twist guaranteed to astound and destroy” (117). Hua dealt with his grief by rejecting anything that reminded him of Ken, including clothes and mutual friends. He relays how he “started spending less time with anyone who could evoke the past. I started wearing Nikes again, and Polo shirts, and backward baseball caps. Mostly, I became obsessed with the possibility of a sentence that could wend its way backward,” and then, “I picked up a pen and tried to write myself back into the past” (119). The sentiment of trying to recapture a lost past echoes a quote by Mauss, which compares the survivors of World War I to old trees trying to “become green again” (105).
Ken’s death marked the end of Hua’s adolescence. The murder occurred three weeks after Hua’s 21st birthday, a milestone in his transition to adulthood. Hua celebrated his birthday at a restaurant, where Ken bought him a shot of Three Wise Men (Jack Daniels, Johnnie Walker, and Jim Bean). New to consuming alcohol, Hua sipped the drink instead of downing it in one shot, much to Ken’s amusement. The months before Ken’s death also marked the start of Hua’s first serious romance. Like his friendship with Ken, Hua’s relationship with Mira centered on the mundane: “We had so much time, and I loved every second of getting to know her, exploring her tape collection, talking about our memories of visiting Taiwan, recalling the many times our paths probably crossed back when she worked the floor at Rasputin Music on Telegraph” (111). During their last encounter, Hua sought Ken’s advice about having sex with Mira. Instead of mocking Hua for being a 21-year-old virgin, Ken responded with admirable maturity: “He smiled and gently punched my shoulder. I laughed, thinking about all the times I nodded along to his stories of dates or hookups, as though I had the faintest sense of what he was talking about” (114). Indeed, Ken matured significantly during junior year, so much that it was unmistakable to Hua: “We still did our silly handshake, the one we’d come up with as freshmen on the Unit 3 balcony. But he was suddenly like a proper adult, more interested in sophistication than coolness, conjuring visions of a productive, postcollege life” (111). Hua and Mira consummated their relationship within hours of Ken’s death, another touchstone of coming of age.
