Bestselling author Hua Hsu talks about friendship, healing and AAPI identity in Q&A
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Editor’s note: This Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity.
When Hua Hsu started to jot down the first lines of his memoir “Stay True” 20 years ago, he was a college student at UC Berkeley, trying to immerse himself into a lost friendship. Years later, lines turned into pages, and became a bestseller in 2022.
“When I started off writing this, it felt good to be able to return to that past and to do something more constructive with it,” Hsu said. “Not just to feel grief, but to feel happy and joy recalling these things that we did.”
Hsu, now a professor of literature at Bard College and staff writer at The New Yorker, brought his memoir, “Stay True,” to Syracuse University campus on Thursday night. During an AAPI Heritage Month celebration event held at Huntington Beard Crouse Hall, Hsu gave a commemorative lecture on the history and present of the Asian American community.
The following morning, the national bestseller author sat down to discuss his book, his experiences on grief and healing as well as the seemingly eternal destiny for every generation of Asian Americans — to discover their identities on an ever-shifting horizon.
Could you please tell our readers a little bit about your background; how have you become who you are today; and what your book, “Stay True,” is about?
Sure. I’m 45, I grew up in California, mostly in the ‘80s and ‘90s. And I’d say it was pretty typical of people who came of age in the 1990s. I was really interested in pop culture, especially more alternative things. I was 13 when Nirvana’s “Nevermind” came out, which was a really big deal for people of my generation. And I write about it a lot in the book — just how important it was to discover things a little bit earlier than other people, or just to pursue my identity through the things I was reading and listening to.
I went to college, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, and the book sort of revolves around this friendship I made in college with someone who was really unlike me. He also was in search of his identity, sense of belonging and things like that. But we’re just into very different things. At some point, between our junior and senior years, he was, in this freak moment, killed. And that was this moment where I suddenly became invested in writing in a way that I hadn’t been before. Like before, I would make zines, or write for the school paper, do all these things. But it was a very private act, I would just write my journal, and I did it for many, many years. And it eventually became this book I wrote, “Stay True.”
In the book, you talked in detail about how you became close friends with Ken (the friend previously mentioned) despite differences you had — backgrounds, personality, views on different things and sense of fashion. Do you believe this kind of friendship you two had was something that only belongs to the good old days?
(Laughter) No, not at all. I wrote it for myself, and it was very much just my perception of things. And in my own mind, I thought my experience was so unique, but in reality, my experiences were pretty generic. I wasn’t actually into things that were all that obscure, even though they were to me. I found that people really vibe with that part of the book in ways I didn’t think they would. It’s because everyone has a version of that discovery.
Maybe the only thing about our experience that I think is like, “good old days,” or is different from now, is just how much time my friends and I would spend together doing nothing in each other’s presence. So maybe that belongs to the past, but versions of that exist for young people now. They just have different mediums for their friendship, but I think that story of an unlikely friendship is pretty universal.
Ken’s sudden death is a major turning point of the story. And you spent a lot of time discussing how you dealt with grief, healing, and at some point, the escape from reality. So now, after finishing this book, would you say that you have finally gotten over those feelings?
It’s a good question. I guess I did, but I’m not sure in a way that I thought. I’ve been writing for a long time just trying to jot down memories and be able to recall things, but I didn’t realize that in writing this, I would be turning him and turning me into these characters that I feel alienated from.
When I started off writing this, it felt good to be able to return to that past and to do something more constructive with it — not just to feel grief, but to feel happy and joy recalling these things that we did. But it’s also strange now that it’s a book. People have read it and talked to me about it, that he and I are these characters that other people can interpret or have relationships with. I wrote it so that I would have these characters that I could relate to, but I sort of forgot that other people would relate to them too. That’s an odd feeling.
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Also in the book, you talked about the experience of your parents’ generation, who flew to the U.S. in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and had little in common with the American-born Asians at the time. In your words, they simply didn’t know the identity of an Asian American was available to them. Does every generation of Asian Americans have to find their own way to discover their own identity?
That’s a deep question. I think that’s what ends up happening. I don’t know if it has to happen that way, but I think it does. And I think that’s something very unique about being Asian American.
The Asian American identity grew very self-consciously in the 1960s out of African American self-determination, Latinx movements and the American Indian movement. In some ways, the historical trajectories that produce the African American are so much clearer. It’s encoded in law, it is American history. It’s so much more complicated with Asian Americans because it’s immigration patterns from different countries, different classes and different reasons for immigration. It’s what binds someone who comes here to work as a software engineer to someone who ends up here as a refugee from war in Southeast Asia. So, that history is not as evident.
There is a common history, and it’s the history of the activist thinkers, the students, the elderly — all the people who came together in the 1960s, wanting us to recognize commonality and pursue it. Not everyone knows or appreciates that history, maybe people don’t even have to appreciate that history. But we’ve inherited this category, and it does feel like every generation pushes it in a direction that they see as necessary.
You talked about the idea of reconciliation between the past and the future. How do you interpret that? And how much has that meant to you?
As I was writing it, I realized that I was sort of stuck in the past, and that if I was really honest about friendship in general, or just even my friendship with Ken, as a 44-, 43-year-old person, would we still be friends if he had lived? I don’t know. I have no idea because people drift apart. It’s not out of malice that people grow apart, but people just kind of grow apart.
It was strangely liberating to think about it that way because I realized that I had made a monument of our past without honoring what a future would have looked like. I was living in the future, but I was completely stuck in this moment in the past. That was not just a little unhealthy. I think the difficulties we have in life sometimes are because we can’t imagine a future. We can’t move forward.
It wasn’t about just creating this world in the past that I could enter into when writing this book, and being able to hang out a little bit longer with my friends. It was also about looking into the future, realizing that he’ll always be a part of me and that he should be here. If he was here, maybe none of this would have been necessary. Maybe I wouldn’t be a writer, and that would be okay.
When you’re grieving, when you’re mourning, it feels weird to think about the future because you know that in the future, you may not feel that grief so intensely. The grief is what connects you to the person you’ve lost. But I realized that there were other ways to stay connected to that person other than purely through the grief. Part of it was writing and thinking about all the positive things he had left in my life, things that define my present.
