Stay True: A Memoir

When Hua goes to university, he is self-conscious and concerned with presenting an image of himself as cool and non-mainstream, an outsider thinker. Much of the memoir describes Hua’s growth away from this adolescent desire to control how others see him—self-fashioning—and toward a more open stance focusing on the other and on accepting the self that is given by the other in friendship.

When Hua and Ken first begin to bond, Hua is surprised that he can be friends with someone who wears Abercrombie and Fitch and listens to Dave Matthews. For his part, Ken challenges Hua’s apparent need to always order “the most unusual item on the menu” (51). Their similarities and differences are fertile ground for their blossoming friendship. Both young men are Asian American, for example, yet they have also had strikingly different experiences. Ken challenges Hua’s desire to be different and non-mainstream, which Hua the narrator recognizes from the vantage-point of time to be a way of hiding or limiting himself, just like his professed “straight edge” ethos was a way of protecting himself from experiences that he wasn’t ready for.

In Chapter 3, which introduces both the friendship with Ken and the analytical material of Derrida’s essay on friendship, Hua also mentions for the first time the importance of Jacques Derrida’s idea of “recognizing oneself in the eyes of another” (57). In Chapter 4, when Ken gives Hua the modernist clock and the set of glasses, Hua writes that he felt more mature for having received this gift, implying that the more-mature Hua was as much the gift that Ken gave him as the clock and the glasses. In Chapter 9, when Hua discovers a manuscript of the screenplay that he and Ken had worked on, he learns that Ken had written Hua into the script. The picture of Hua through Ken’s eyes that Hua finds there both affirms Hua and gives him new insight into the narrative framing that Ken used to understand their friendship.

Bildungsroman is a literary term for a novel of personal growth. Although Stay True is a memoir and not a novel, Hua can be seen to undergo a bildung or development away from interest in how he is seen by others and towards an interest in acknowledging and discovering the other person—namely, Ken. Another way to understand this arc would be to note how Hua takes the genre of the personal memoir and uses it to inscribe an in memoriam to Ken.

Although Hua’s memoir is an account of his friendship with Ken that focuses on their years at Berkeley, the book devotes an entire chapter to Hua’s parents. Their choices and experiences shaped his own. Hua’s parents came to the United States from Taiwan to pursue their studies. Hua’s father attended the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Columbia University before following his advisor to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he met his future wife. Hua’s parents embraced certain aspects of their adopted culture, as evidenced by their fashion choices and their fondness for ice cream. However, they also maintained close ties to their Taiwanese identities, notably, through friends and food. These ties grew stronger after Hua’s father moved back to Taiwan for work. From that point onward, Hua spent his summers in Taiwan and traveled there during school breaks.

Hua discusses his family history within the context of broad trends in immigration, namely, push-pull dynamics: “Something pushes you from home; something else pulls you far away. Opportunities dry up one place and emerge somewhere else, and you follow the promise toward a seemingly better future” (14). Push-pull dynamics drove immigration in different directions for centuries. The dynamics were in play in 1965, when the Immigration Act relaxed restrictions on immigrants from Asia and the US began welcoming students like Hua’s parents. The dynamics remained in play twenty years later, when Hua’s father returned to Taiwan for work after reaching a career plateau in the US.

Hua devotes much of his memoir to his identity as an Asian American. He provides a nuanced description of the category, drawing distinctions between his experiences as the child of Taiwanese immigrants and Ken’s experiences as a Japanese American whose family had been in the US for generations: “The children of recent immigrants feel discomfort at a molecular level, especially when doing typical things, like going to the pizza parlor on a Friday night, playacting as Americans” (44). By contrast, the Japanese Americans around whom Hua grew up had “parents who were into football and fishing, grandparents whose stories of the internment camps were recited with no trace of accent. Some of them had never even been to Japan, and some, too, had family who fought against Japan in World War II” (44). Hua also notes the differences between himself and his mentees at the Richmond Youth Center. Hua’s mentees were Mien, an ethnic minority that fled Southeast Asia by the tens of thousands after the Vietnam war. Unlike his middle-class family, his mentees’ parents worked “as many jobs as they could” to survive. Although Hua recognized that he “didn’t have much perspective on the particulars of their lives” (91), the fact that they were Asian nevertheless bound them together:

To me, Asian American was a messy, arbitrary category, but one that was produced by a collective struggle […] There were similarities that cut across nationality and class: the uncommunicative parents, the cultural significance of food, the fact that we all took our shoes off at home (91).

Hua and Ken bonded over their shared identity, even as their identities shifted on the road from adolescence to adulthood.

Stay True is a coming-of-age memoir centered on Hua’s formative years at Berkeley. Hua describes several important rites of passage to adulthood, including getting his first apartment, turning 21, drinking his first shot of alcohol, and having sex for the first time. Hua also describes less consequential milestones, such as receiving housewarming gifts from Ken that were “practical and grown up” (64), declaring his major during his sophomore year, and mastering the basics of laundry and cooking. Ken seemed closer to adulthood than Hua, even at the start of college: “He wore glasses only on occasion in a manner that made him seem serious, grown-up—never a nerd” (6). It was not just Ken’s appearance that seemed mature, but also his behavior: “He had good manners, which served him well at his after-school job selling children’s shoes […] He was adept at charming both sticker-shocked parents and their impatient children […] He opened the door for others. He knew how to order at restaurants. He seemed eager for adult life” (40).

Of all of Hua’s college experiences, it was the loss of Ken that decisively marked the end of his adolescence. The violent, sudden nature of Ken’s death made it particularly hard to bear. Hua experienced deep sadness after losing Ken. He became withdrawn and fearful, not just for his safety, but for that of his friends. Nowhere are these fears more clearly expressed than in Hua’s description of a group trip to Mexico before the start of senior year:

I feared our plane to Mexico would crash. That the taxi to the resort would collide with oncoming traffic. That I would contract some rare illness from the bedsheets. That my softball scar would require amputation. One afternoon, everyone else went on a deep-sea fishing trip. Because I couldn’t swim, I stayed behind, watching as the boat disappeared beyond the horizon. I walked back and forth on an empty beach, wondering what I would do if something awful happened to them […] The sky was gorgeous and calm, but what if a hurricane struck and my friends were stranded? It suddenly made sense to always assume the worst (140).

Hua coped with his grief in varied ways, establishing new routines, avoiding reminders of Ken, and withdrawing from the world. His main outlet, however, was storytelling. Immediately after Ken’s death, Hua found solace in exchanging stories about Ken with friends. He also wrote letters to Ken detailing everything he would miss about him and all the things he left behind. Hua purchased a journal to record his memories of Ken, including the surreal experience of attending his funeral. Losing Ken also altered the way Hua interacted with his students at the Richmond Youth Center. He not only felt a responsibility to keep them safe, but also strove to teach them important life lessons, launching into “monologues about keeping friends close, holding on to the possibilities of youth” (132). After a semester of therapy in his second year of graduate school, Hua finally understood that it wasn’t grief keeping him in the past, but guilt. “I’m going to write about this one day” (193), he told his therapist. Two decades later, he did.