Stay True: A Memoir

Chapter 8 revisits the themes of loss and grief, focusing on Hua’s varied coping strategies. Hua rejected his old routines and friends, but he was unable to move past his grief in the early months following Ken’s death: “I sought new routines, a way of resetting my context” (146). His “thoughts were always racing back to that night, and it made [him] feel out of place among [his] closest friends, who had worked hard to bring some rhythm back to their lives” (146). Hua also coped by writing to Ken in his journal, focusing on the mundane things he was missing out on, such as movies, the basketball team’s new recruits, and his political theory class. It was the immersive aspect of writing, however, that best helped Hua cope with his loss: “Writing offered a way to live outside the present, skipping over its textures and slowness, converting the present into language, thinking about language rather than being present at all” (149). Beyond writing in his journal, Hua focused on writing his thesis on representations of race in American movies, a topic he chose in honor of Ken:

The thesis was an escape as well as a tribute, a way of extending a series of unfinished conversations. I had done it all for a reason to write out my acknowledgments. I thanked Ken, and I remember feeling as though he were real again as I typed out his full name (165).

Hua was lonely without Ken. He filled this gap by attending his advisor’s weekly office hours, only to be called out for wasting time: “‘You come here every week,’ he said, ‘and you just want to talk […] Come back when you’ve written something’” (148). Instead of leaning on his friends during this difficult time, Hua became reclusive, resisting Mira’s attempts to draw him out: “I bristled whenever she would get tickets to go see a show or suggest a movie […] I brooded when I didn’t get my way, though I didn’t know what that meant, since I never wanted to do anything” (150). Their break-up toward the end of senior year came as no surprise to Hua: “I was a leech; I needed comfort and stability, and I gave nothing back” (163).

Hua dealt with his loss and grief by adopting Ken’s interests. During the World Series, for example, Hua rooted for the San Diego Padres, Ken’s favorite baseball team, and became overly invested in the Padres winning: “It suddenly felt as if my entire faith in higher powers rested on the outcome of this series” (152). Hua endowed the game with preternatural meaning. For him, a win by the Padres felt like justice, while a loss symbolized injustice and randomness. This sense of randomness followed with Hua, who repeatedly wondered what might have happened if he had stayed at the party the night Ken died: “Could I have made a difference, or was all of this fated to happen?” (153). Hua tried to come to terms with Ken’s death by seeking to understand crime and criminals, not only reading local and national crime stories, but also taking a job tutoring prisoners at San Quentin. He began to find his way out of his grief in his final months at Berkeley, a milestone he shared in a letter to Ken: “I was actually happy today […] I really hope you can read this. I don’t care if you can see through me […] Just as long as you can see me” (165).