I listened to this 2022 memoir after I saw it listed as one of the ten best books of that year by both the NYT and The Washington Post. Having read a review of it, I knew it focused on a college friendship the author had at Berkeley in the 1990s with a fellow student who was tragically killed by carjackers. After listening to it, I read about the author and learned he is a professor of English at Bard College and a staff writer at The New Yorker.
While both he and Ken were Asian American, Ken’s parents had been born in the US of Japanese ancestry while Hsu’s Taiwanese parents came here as immigrants and his father returned to Taiwan for work. Ken was in a fraternity and was socially adept and outgoing. Hsu defined himself by his thrift store clothing (as he said, wearing an “audible amount of corduroy) and his non-mainstream music, creating a “zine,” which he still does. When music he liked became more popular, he began to lose interest in it, one of his less appealing admissions. He acknowledged that he didn’t go out socially very much and that he wanted to be known for that.
Hsu wrote about his interest in the book What is History, written in 1961 by Edward Hallett Carr, and the discussions he and Ken had about the book. It is a key text for historiography and let you know they were talking about more than the relative merits of Hsu’s preferred music and Ken’s enjoyment of the Dave Matthews Band.
It was interesting to learn that some of Hsu’s parents’ contemporaries were moving back to Taiwan; as Silicon Valley boomed in the 1990s, the semi-conductor industry in Taiwan grew. They maintained two homes, so they could prosper there while their children finished high school and college in the US. Hsu’s father rose to middle management in the US, but a job as an executive awaited him in Taiwan. Hsu and his mother spent summers and other vacations in Taiwan and each household had a fax machine to facilitate communication.
The shocking death of Ken was devastating to the group of friends and they spent their senior year of college coping with it. Hsu moved to Massachusetts for graduate school at Harvard and saw a therapist there who was helpful to him.
Hua Hsu, Stay True, Doubleday, 2022, 196 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available in the public library.