April 1, 2022
The son of Taiwanese immigrants, New Yorker staff writer Hsu grew up in the Bay Area and as a teenager befriended Ken, whose Japanese American family had been in the United States for generations. Abercrombie & Fitch-loving frat boy Ken was very different from the scrubby, zine-reading Hsu, but they bonded over their outsider status in the United States. Then Ken was killed in a carjacking, and Hsu uses this memoir to explore friendship, identity, and belonging.
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Starred review from June 6, 2022
New Yorker staff writer Hsu braids music, art, and philosophy in his extraordinary debut. As a second-generation Taiwanese American coming of age in 1990s Cupertino, Calif., Hsu traversed an evolving cultural climate with rebellious gusto, finding creative expression in zines and developing, as he writes, a “worldview defined by music.” At UC Berkeley Hsu met Ken, an extroverted, “mainstream” frat-brother whose only similarity to Hsu was that he was Asian American. Yet despite their differences, an unlikely friendship bloomed. In lyrical prose punctuated with photos, Hsu recalls smoke-filled conversations—from the philosophy of Heidegger to the failures of past relationships—trolling chat rooms and writing a movie script with Ken as they navigated a world teeming with politics and art, and basked in the uncertainty of a future both fearsome and enthralling. That future came to a harrowing end when Ken was murdered, leaving Hsu to fend for himself while unraveling the tragedy. As he recounts sinking into songs “of heartbreak and resurrection,” Hsu parses the grief of losing his friend and eloquently captures the power of friendship and unanswerable questions spurred in the wake of senseless violence. The result is at once a lucid snapshot of life in the nineties, an incredible story of reckoning, and a moving elegy to a fallen friend.
Starred review from August 1, 2022
A Taiwanese American writer remembers an intimate but unexpected college friendship cut short by tragedy. Hsu, an English professor and staff writer at the New Yorker, began his undergraduate years at Berkeley with the intention of cultivating an alternative, punk persona consistent with his love of indie bands and his obsession with creating zines. "I saw coolness," he writes, "as a quality primarily expressed through erudite discernment, and I defined who I was by what I rejected, a kitchen sink approach to negation that resulted in essays decrying Beverly Hills, 90210, hippies, private school, George Bush...and, after they became trendy, Pearl Jam." Consequently, when he first met Japanese American fraternity brother Ken, he wrote him off as "a genre of person I actively avoided--mainstream." As they got to know each other, to Hsu's surprise, he and Ken grew very close. The two spent hours "debating the subversive subtext of movies" and penning a screenplay inspired by the cult classic film The Last Dragon, an experience that led them to long conversations about the nature of Black and Asian solidarity. Over time, their relationship grew increasingly personal. For example, Hsu sought out Ken for advice the night Hsu planned to lose his virginity, and, years later, Hsu tentatively referred to Ken as his best friend. Then, one night, Ken was killed in a carjacking, abruptly truncating a relationship that Hsu thought would last forever and sending him into a spiral of grief and self-blame that lasted for years. This memoir is masterfully structured and exquisitely written. Hsu's voice shimmers with tenderness and vulnerability as he meticulously reconstructs his memories of a nurturing, compassionate friendship. The protagonists' Asian American identities are nuanced, never serving as the defining element of the story, and the author creates a cast of gorgeously balanced characters. A stunning, intricate memoir about friendship, grief, and memory.
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Starred review from August 1, 2022
When he was a student at Berkeley in the 1990s, New Yorker writer and Vassar professor Hsu lost his friend Ken to a senseless act of violence. The title of this memoir, Hsu's (A Floating Chinaman, 2016) second book, comes from the way Ken signed his letters back then--a cheeky sign-off the author can no longer remember the cheek of--and, as titles go, it couldn't be more apt. Truer than true, becoming a biography of friendship writ large and in specifics, Stay True brings in history, philosophy, art, and science as Hsu spirals through the story of himself as the Californian son of Taiwanese immigrants, as the zine-making teenager who didn't yet know that he would be a writer, as the college student who defined himself by what he hated--and, before they became best friends, he hated Ken. After Ken's death, Hsu ""became obsessed with the possibility of a sentence that could wend its way backward."" In every luminously rereadable, every-way-wending sentence, that writing astonishes. On the shaky formation of the self, it is unself-conscious; on the incredible youthful desire to make oneself known, it is knowing. Exploring identity, authenticity, and nostalgia as concepts and as feelings, this is an absolute stunner.
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