“What does it mean to truly be yourself?” asks Hua Hsu in his searing memoir of friendship that won a Pulitzer prize and, a year after its US release, is being published in the UK. Slim and unsentimental, the memoir poses other unanswerable questions: what does it mean to represent another person on the page? How do we write about the dead without resorting to eulogy, which is so often “the speaker burnishing his emotional credentials rather than offering a true account of the deceased”? Will the dead person “one day be replaced by the character you invented in tribute?”
On the surface, Stay True is a reckoning with Hsu’s slow-burning grief following the murder of his Berkeley classmate, Ken, in a carjacking. Though they have little in common other than their Asian heritage, they’d spent long nights hanging out, smoking, arguing about music and driving to gas stations. Hsu began writing about their friendship, collecting notes and artifacts, almost as soon as Ken died, a diligence that shows in the vivid detail of mid-90s California life. As a story, Stay True is impossible to put down, a perfect 193 pages – I ate a sandwich over the sink so I could finish it. But it’s much more than a great story; its power lies in the questions we began with, and others: how do you accurately render a person you knew so briefly, at a time when your own identity was in flux and everyone around you was distorted by the cracked lens of your own becoming? What if someone doubts your grief, asking if you and the dead were ever “really that close”? Might you be lying to yourself?
This is a simply written book, but rich with painful subtext. Hsu doesn’t spare himself as a lesser writer might. As a young man he was “a legendarily self-involved person” who saw “a bad CD collection as evidence of moral weakness”. An insecure cultural snob, he defines himself by all the popular things he rejects, refusing to accompany Ken into an Abercrombie & Fitch store, rolling up the car windows when his friend plays Dave Matthews in case someone pulls up next to them. Ken is mainstream, easy-going, kind. He belongs in his communities – his fraternity, his family, America more broadly. But these are the very qualities that give Hsu a chance to be seen. (“Ken’s dashing confidence would verify … that I, too, was dashing and confident in my own, subcultural way.”) Ken is the truer friend, the one who, in the words of Jacques Derrida, would “choose knowing, rather than being known”.
This aching honesty is the heart of Hsu’s memoir. He tells a therapist of his anguish at failing to prevent Ken’s murder, but this masks a deeper, unnameable guilt. In the aftermath of Ken’s death, he calls friends with the news. It gives him “some weird sense of purpose … I was a storyteller with a plot twist guaranteed to astound and destroy.” Years later, a wiser Hsu worries he might be writing a story that flatters its narrator, or that he might be “singing along to an echo” of his friend. Again and again, in a series of subtle, searching gestures, Hsu confesses to the reader all the ways he failed to know Ken, seeing only slivers of him. How much can we really know another person anyway? Had Ken lived, would he have fallen out of Hsu’s life, just an old college buddy whose emails he might forget to answer?
These meditations give the writing grace and depth. It’s not enough to classify Stay True as a friendship memoir, or a coming-of-age story, a tale of immigration and assimilation, or a philosophical reflection. It is all these things and more, wrapped up in a meticulous rendering of a 90s California adolescence, with its CD-burners and fanzines, Fugees and Kurt Cobain, faxes and AOL (sending a letter to your friend to tell him to check his inbox).
Hidden beneath the main narrative is a flawless encapsulation of the subtleties of immigrant parenthood, the older generation trying to love their strange American children in some hybrid way; the cruelty of the children’s gradual orientation towards the host culture. In one therapy session, Hsu struggles to remember if his mother or father ever said “I love you”. Immigrant parents are practical and unsentimental, and their children’s mastery of the new language drives them ever farther away. “The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories,” he says. His father used to fax him letters from Taiwan, trying to hang on to a connection with his son through music and cultural news. He wrote in a familiar broken English (“Don’t feel frustrate climbing climbing, also don’t pick a too high mountain”). And at the end of each letter, he asked: “Do you agree?” or “What do you think?” They might seem like throwaway questions, but Asian parents don’t tend to ask children for their opinions. As a first-generation immigrant, I found it profoundly moving – there is a universe of tenderness inside each “What do you think?”
Ultimately, Stay True is an act of gift-giving and reciprocity. Beneath all that ease, comfort and charm, Ken, too, was seeking answers. He called himself “a man without a culture”. He complained when a scout for The Real World told him Asians “don’t have the personalities” for reality TV. He counted Asian character types on television, from the delivery boy to the guy at the periphery of a friendship group. In doing so, he was “piecing together a theory about the world”. And he continued to reveal himself to Hsu for many years after his death. Here, finally, is an earnest response from his companion, a work of intellect, honesty and love, the kind Hsu was unable to offer as a young man.
• Dina Nayeri is the author of The Ungrateful Refugee and Who Gets Believed? Stay True by Hua Hsu is published by Picador (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
