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A review by jonscott9
Stay True by Hua Hsu
3.0
Truly a testament to "the personal is universal." This is a complicatedly simple memoir of music, friends, loss, creativity, family and more. Hua's college-era friendship with Ken is a sincere, unassuming study in immigrant youths coming of age and in classic acclimate-vs.-assimilate tensions.
It's probably known in advance by those delving into this Pulitzer-winning memoir that Hua will lose Ken. Ken's family will lose him, all their friends and this world will lose him. It's understatedly sad when that comes midway through, and further sad, as Hua notes, for how random and stupid and sloppy Ken's violent murder is. Hua spends the rest of the book disoriented, adrift without his friend. He's in therapy – he thinks it's a one-and-done proposition as of his intake appointment – and he's grieving, he's finding himself, he's engaging with Ken's parents and his own, and he's becoming a man, a professional creator, and a miner of histories.
I relished the musings on how songs, zines and fashion can bind friends together. While like most everything here, it's delivered as understatement, I was torn up over how a female mutual friend of theirs straight-up asks Hua how close he really was to Ken. In early and approaching-midlife losses we've all encountered, whether posed by another or oneself, that's a disheartening yet familiar query.
As a singular example of associating music with memories can be in one's life, Hua's retelling of his Ken-ship with Bone Thugs-n-Harmony's "Tha Crossroads" brought back a flood of remembrance for me of another era in my own life. It transported me to the mid-'90s and listening to that same track on repeat, on a tiny portable speaker while lounging on blankets basketball-courtside at summer church camp. Shew, that was such a different time. I feel a world away from the person I was then. Truly, a song, a lyric, a melody can do so much.
My experience with Stay True marks the first time I've alternately listened to an audiobook and read the tangible thing. That, coupled with a somewhat erratic, vaca-timed read of it, returning now and then to its pages, may have affected my relationship with it. For now, filing this under "Tomes I wanted to like and connect with more than I did." If I revisit in the future, that could change. For now, I'll be checking in on anything that I see Hua write in his New Yorker role and elsewhere.
It's probably known in advance by those delving into this Pulitzer-winning memoir that Hua will lose Ken. Ken's family will lose him, all their friends and this world will lose him. It's understatedly sad when that comes midway through, and further sad, as Hua notes, for how random and stupid and sloppy Ken's violent murder is. Hua spends the rest of the book disoriented, adrift without his friend. He's in therapy – he thinks it's a one-and-done proposition as of his intake appointment – and he's grieving, he's finding himself, he's engaging with Ken's parents and his own, and he's becoming a man, a professional creator, and a miner of histories.
I relished the musings on how songs, zines and fashion can bind friends together. While like most everything here, it's delivered as understatement, I was torn up over how a female mutual friend of theirs straight-up asks Hua how close he really was to Ken. In early and approaching-midlife losses we've all encountered, whether posed by another or oneself, that's a disheartening yet familiar query.
As a singular example of associating music with memories can be in one's life, Hua's retelling of his Ken-ship with Bone Thugs-n-Harmony's "Tha Crossroads" brought back a flood of remembrance for me of another era in my own life. It transported me to the mid-'90s and listening to that same track on repeat, on a tiny portable speaker while lounging on blankets basketball-courtside at summer church camp. Shew, that was such a different time. I feel a world away from the person I was then. Truly, a song, a lyric, a melody can do so much.
My experience with Stay True marks the first time I've alternately listened to an audiobook and read the tangible thing. That, coupled with a somewhat erratic, vaca-timed read of it, returning now and then to its pages, may have affected my relationship with it. For now, filing this under "Tomes I wanted to like and connect with more than I did." If I revisit in the future, that could change. For now, I'll be checking in on anything that I see Hua write in his New Yorker role and elsewhere.