Hua Hsu

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • A gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art, by the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu “This book is exquisite and excruciating and I will be thinking about it for years and years to come.” —Rachel Kushner, New York Times bestselling author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes ’zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends—his memories—Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he’s been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

A Memoir

Stay True

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

I was an American child, and I was bored, and I was searching for my people. 

We all look alike, until you realize we don’t, and then you begin feeling that nobody could possibly seem more different. 

kamille

Maybe he just wanted to keep him around until he understood how to properly mourn him. To keep him around, a living memory, until he was ready to move forward, alone. Not raising the dead so much as singing along to an echo.

When you're young, you are certain of your capacity to imagine a way out of the previous generation's problems. There is a different way to grow old, paths that don't involve conforming and selling out. We would figure it out together, and we would be different together. I just had to find people to be different with, a critical mass of others to flesh out the possibilities of a collective pronoun.

I thought college was where i would find my people, which i assumed meant people who dressed like me, and listened to the same music as me, and wanted to see the same movies as me. Variations on the theme of me. But i realized, maybe too late, that all i wanted was friends to listen to music with.

Stay True quotes

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