Stay True

I was so moved by Hua Hsu’s memoir, an elegy to a college best friend whose shocking murder forever haunts him, because it spoke to a certain kind of young friendship. One of the things that bound Hsu to Ken was the art they did (and didn’t) like but which they always talked about.

I was reminded of the chance encounters of my most important friendships—the Sunday nights spent watching Mad Men in a dorm room or the hours spent swapping Photoshop edits of anime characters—and transported back to those days of limitless dreaming. How big the world seemed then,… show more.

Hua Hsu’s book also questions linear time. His memoir considers the folded nature of time, the way the past and the future are embedded in the present.

He walks us through the story of his college friendship with Ken, beginning with his own parents, carrying through Ken’s killing, and into the years after. A meticulous portrait of Hsu, Ken, and what they meant to each other, the book’s investigation of grief overturns the notion of narrative sense.

If there is no tidy linear narrative to the story, no rising action, falling action, or denouement, how, then, do we understand loss?

Stay True is a gorgeous tribute to male friendship and even more so, Asian American male friendship.

Hua retells the painful loss of his college friend Ken, who was senselessly killed in a carjacking while at Berkeley. While it’s unafraid of addressing trauma, it becomes a greater exploration of all the reasons why people are compelled to one another, why people care about each other.

The affection and complexity of their relationship is so specifically drawn, it makes you feel a part of their connection. It’s a beautiful buddy book.