Stay True, Hua Hsu
I was looking for another book to read while I was waiting for a particular library book to arrive when I found this. Stay True had been on my Amazon wish list and I received it last Xmas, but hadn’t felt compelled to read it until now.
Stay True is a memoir about Hsu’s experience at UC Berkeley, in particular his relationship with his friend Ken who was murdered the summer after Hsu’s junior year. Undoubtedly, I was initially interested in this book because of a) Hsu’s writing for The New Yorker, and b) all the accolades it was receiving in the press last year. Stay True is festooned with plugs on its back cover from some quite notable writers.
I have to say, I wasn’t especially moved by this book. Maybe it’s because I’m incredibly sleep-deprived right now. Ken seems like he was a pretty cool guy, and he clearly affected Hsu in many ways, more so because of his tragic and early death. But as Hsu seems to point out in the final pages of the book, maybe the reason for Ken’s impact on his life is precisely because of the yawning lacuna that was left behind in his absence. Maybe Hsu and Ken would have grown apart in the years after they had graduated from Berkeley, similarly to how Hsu’s other friendships from that time diminished in importance. Perhaps when it comes to the recesses of memory, it’s “better” (or weightier) to burn out–or be put out–than to fade away.
My favorite part of the book is a discursion on a French academic journal, L’Année sociologique, and its first issue that was published after the First World War. Marcel Mauss, who helmed the journal’s reestablishment, had written and included an essay about the various other sociologists and scholars who might have appeared in its pages, had they not perished on the battlefield. Instead of being able to contribute to humanity’s knowledge of itself, these men had been shot or dismembered in various infantry charges and trench war misfortunes. This part to me tied Ken’s story to the larger story of humanity and capitalism. There are untold billions of humans whose potential has been blunted or wasted, people whose possible gifts to society were stolen from them and us both. Whether drafted into unjust war, murdered by delinquents, or merely sentenced to die in “cotton fields and sweatshops”, we are surrounded by the absence of what they could have given us. We can’t touch these anti-contributions–they are void, or negative space–but we are inexorably shaped by them.