Stay True: A Memoir, by Hua Hsu
Stay True, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is an autobiographical coming of age story by Taiwanese-American Hua Hsu. The author’s parents came to the United States in search of better opportunities, and the author lived almost all of his life in the US. While there is background information about his family and childhood, most of the book focuses on the author’s time at UC Berkley during the 1990’s. We learn a great deal about the author’s taste in music and how it evolved over time, where he shopped for music, the kind of clothing he preferred and where he shopped for it (often in thrift shops), where he lived and how he decorated his apartment, how he didn’t drink much but did enjoy smoking (the latter typically taking place on a balcony), how he got around from apartment to school to work, his romances, his forays into journalism, and how he cultivated interests and preferences that tended to be out of the mainstream in order to be cool. I experienced a certain pleasant nostalgia reading about life during the nineties.
The author is clearly well-educated, well-read, articulate, thoughtful and insightful, with a clear, clean writing style. He seems like a sincerely nice person, even serving as a mentor for younger Asian-Americans during his college years. However, while reading Stay True, I felt as though I was spending way too much time in the head of a college student, learning too many trivial details of his life. I would be interested to hear the sort of things I read about in Stay True from very close friends, spread over a period of months, sitting and relaxing and talking, but not from someone I do not know. I just could not fully engage with the extensive, detailed information he was sharing.
The most compelling part of the book was toward the end, when the author’s friend Ken is brutally murdered. The telling of this tragedy and the author’s feelings about it and responses to it are truly moving, engrossing the reader in this gruesome twist of fate. However, I cannot help but think that, with all respect to the Pulitzer committee, this work would have been more forceful as an essay, beginning with brief background biographical information, and then focusing on Ken’s murder and its life-changing implications for the author. Stay True was a selection from my on-line book club, but I cannot recommend it. There are better choices out there: one of my all-time favorite books is Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. The Secret History is also about university students, but the empathy I felt for that book’s young protagonist and his struggles with college life and with the highly unusual, life-altering events that he experienced was tremendous compared to the connection I felt for Hua Hsu.