Stay True: A Memoir

“I preferred to spend my time interpreting things.”

The quote relates to Hua’s profession as an English professor and to the value of the humanities. Throughout the book, Hua interprets his experiences in dialogue with philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Charles Taylor, as well as the great anthropologist Marcel Mauss, etc.

“Even then, they understood that American life is unbounded promise and hypocrisy, faith and greed, new spectrums of joy and self-doubt, freedom enabled by enslavement. All of these things at once.”

Hua devotes Chapter 2 to his parents, whose choices and worldviews shaped his. As immigrants to the US, Hua’s parents viewed their country from the perspective of outsiders and recognized the contradictions pervading American society.

“The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories.”

This passage describes Hsu’s overarching aim with Stay True, that is, to tell the story of his college years, friendship with Ken, and grief in the aftermath of Ken’s death. Like many immigrants, Hua’s parents worked hard to survive in the US. Their efforts freed Hua to pursue his dreams and to tell the family’s story.

“It was exciting to meander and choose who you wanted to be, what aspects of yourself to accent and adorn.”

Stay True is a coming-of-age memoir. Hua describes the ways in which he experimented with different facets of his identity in college and elucidates how Ken’s journey of self-discovery shaped his own.

“I bought a too-big Björk poster that I had to tape to the ceiling, just inches above my bed. Her head was the size of my entire mattress; I slept under the poster for a few days before it started to scare me and I took it down.”

Hua engages readers with descriptive and, at times, humorous prose. This quote is not only illustrative of Hua’s writing style, but also highlights his interest in music.

“The first time I met Ken, I hated him.”

Stay True revolves around Hua’s unlikely friendship with Ken. Hua initially befriended misfits at Berkeley. Confident, popular Ken was too mainstream for Hua, yet the two bonded despite their differences.

“Now that I was a college student, I tried to rebrand myself as someone who was outspoken.”

Identity formation is a central theme in Hua’s memoir and a key part of coming of age. A quiet high school student, Hua experimented with being outspoken when he got to Berkeley. This experiment ended abruptly when a classmate challenged an observation he made in class and the graduate instructor nodded in agreement.

“You wanted to believe there was no better time or place on earth than this, right now.”

This quote captures the exhilaration of the college years. Hua formed intense bonds with his dormmates during freshman year. Before moving out, he and his friends went out to the dorm’s roof to watch the sunset. This transgressive act, combined with Hua’s elation at having completed his first year of university, made Hua feel like he had reached an apogee.

“It was a sign of personal growth, I thought to myself, that I could be friends with someone who liked Pearl Jam this much.”

Hua infuses his memoir with wry humor, which keeps readers engaged. This quote not only exemplifies Hua’s writing style, but also touches on two salient aspects of his personality: his love of music and his disdain for anything mainstream, including Pearl Jam.

“Friendship is about the willingness to know, rather than be known.”

The theme of Friendship is central to Hua’s memoir. This passage describes Ken’s attempts to understand Hua by trying on his clothes, an important indicator of identity and vehicle of self-expression.

“I am a man without a culture.”

This quote is about identity, an important theme in Hua’s memoir. Ken’s ties to Japan were distant because his family had been in the US for several generations. However, he did not fit in with the dominant culture, which cast him as an outsider.

“The Last Dragon was a commentary on authenticity, the porousness of identity, the joyful, postmodern possibilities of mixing and matching Asian and Black cultures!”

Hua and Ken’s friendship rested in part on their Asian American identities. The Last Dragon, which they watched one night at Ken’s parents’ house, is populated by non-stereotypical Asian and Black characters. The discovery was so exciting to Hua and Ken that they wrote a screenplay grappling with similar issues.

“Friendship rests on the presumption of reciprocity, of drifting in and out of one another’s lives, with occasional moments of wild intensity.”

Hua approaches the theme of Friendship from the perspective of Mauss’s notion of gift giving, connection, and delayed reciprocity. Stay True might be understood as a long-delayed gift to Ken, who drifted in and out of Hua’s life through memories and objects long after his death.

“I looked at Mira and felt as if we were part of something. We could build a new world together.”

Activism was an important part of Hua’s college identity. He attended protests and lectures by political leaders alongside Mira and other friends. These activities made Hua feel like he could change the world for the better and help bring an end to inequality.

“I was glad to be able to hang out with Ken before the party picked up, but I felt guilty knowing we would bail early.”

This quote describes a critical moment in Hua’s life: his last encounter with Ken. Hua and Mira planned to leave Ken’s housewarming party early to attend a rave. Hua felt guilty about abandoning Ken, a feeling that would haunt him for years after Ken’s murder. Only with therapy did Hua realize that Ken’s death was not his fault, and that staying at the party may not have saved him.

“We smoked with our normal sense of ritualistic purpose.”

Cigarette smoking is an important motif in Hua’s memoir. Hua and Ken initially bonded on the smoking balcony of their dorm, which afforded them privacy to get to know each other. The two began smoking in earnest in their sophomore year, when smoke breaks became occasions for talking, taking a break from homework, and escaping strangers.

“He’s gone, Hua.”

This quote, spoken by one of Ken’s frat brothers, describes the moment Hua learned about Ken’s death. In addition to fueling years of grief and guilt, losing Ken marked the decisive end of Hua’s adolescence.

“I understood part of teaching is being a vampire. You draw on your students’ energies, and you learn just as much as you teach.”

Hua returned to teaching immediately after Ken’s funeral. With vivid imagery, this quote describes how Hua’s students distracted him from his grief, arguably giving him more than they got in return.

“Sometimes, things are fucked up.”

Ken’s death brought Hua’s cynicism into sharper focus. It made Hua want to teach his students about life’s hardships, including unfairness. To that end, he aggressively crashed into a female student during a student-teacher softball game, which shocked his colleagues but delighted his students.

“I felt left behind.”

Ken’s friends dealt with his death in different ways. Most went back to their routines soon after the funeral, but Hua found returning to normal life impossible. Unlike his friends, he was visibly sad after Ken’s death. Over time, he grew increasingly withdrawn because he feared their judgment.

“I wanted to impose structure on all that had come before that July night, turning the past into something architectural, a palace of memories to wander at my own leisure.”

Hua relies on figures of speech to enliven his memoir. This metaphor conveys Hua’s efforts to keep his memories of Ken alive. He also kept an envelope of Ken-related things and wrote about Ken in his journal.

“What if I had stayed at the party?”

Hua grappled with guilt for years after Ken’s death. Not until meeting with a therapist did it occur to Hua that Ken’s death wasn’t his fault. Therapy made Hua realize that it was guilt, not grief, that kept him tethered to the past.

“The story we assemble from those facts is unsettled. The animating forces of history, the intentions and motives, the chicanery and deceit—much of it results from interpretation.”

Drawing on ideas from Hallett Carr’s What Is History? (1961), Hua stresses the subjectivity of history and the fallibility of memory. In doing so, he alerts readers to the skewed nature of his memoir, which is based on varied memories and texts, some of which are over two-decades old.