Days after Ken was murdered, in the summer of 1998, the then-21-year-old Hua Hsu went out into the California sunshine and bought a journal. Everything is wrong, he scrawled in permanent black marker across the first page – because everything was. Laughter distressed him. Pop harmonies were unlistenable. He even shaved off his hair with clippers. For some time after his friend’s savage killing, Hsu’s relationship to most things, including writing itself, changed beyond all recognition.
“I think for a long time I was searching for a language,” the author and journalist says of his evolving grief. In the 25 years since his friend’s senseless killing – Ken’s body was found in an alleyway after he was abducted by three strangers as he left his own housewarming party – its sensory traces are still fresh in Hsu’s mind as he speaks to me from his tidy office in Brooklyn, during the early hours of Monday morning. The past still permeates the present. So much so that that summery day in 1998 still lingers. His college bond with Ken may well be “a three-year period of a life that’s now more than 30 years on”, but it still has much to say about the devotional pull that’s kept the writer revisiting their friendship, again and again, over the past decades.
