Stay True

Memoirs, I've found, are often rooted in sadness. Either someone lived through a major (probably terrible) world event, or they're writing about death, grief, disease, addiction, mental illness, crime, or something of the like. Death does play a role in writer Hua Hsu's memoir, but not in a way that I would have expected. It is, as much as anything, a coming-of-age story about Hua, the son of comfortably middle-class Taiwanese immigrants, growing up in California and carefully crafting an anti-mainstream persona to compensate for not being cool. He enrolled at Berkeley, where a guy named Ken came into his orbit. Being Asian was really the only thing they had in common: Ken was Japanese, from a family who had been in the United States for generations, a member of a fraternity, wore trendy clothes and listened to trendy music. But they became close all the same, being friends in the way college students are, wasting time and being silly. And then Ken was killed in a carjacking. But the book isn't really about Ken's death, which doesn't happen until about 3/4ths of the way through. It's much more about Hua becoming a full person, which of course includes how the person he became was shaped by Ken's friendship and loss. The prose quality is very good, Hua's sharp intelligence and insight is evident throughout. But although it inspired reminiscences about my own college friendships, I struggled to really connect with it. The deep emotions under the surface are hinted at and alluded to but not really plumbed. Which, it feels emotionally vampiric to imply that someone needs to re-open their deepest wounds in order to feel a connection, but also there was just a lack of real vulnerability or rawness here. There's also not a well-defined narrative arc, which might have helped give it more momentum. It's solid, but wasn't at all spectacular for me.