Earlier this year I lost one of my closest friends. It was not violent or even unexpected, although it was and is still shocking. Grief has impacted and influenced much of my life since then, including what I read and how I feel about what I read. This book, while about so much more than grief, is able to describe and evoke grief with such a visceral real-ness, the messy, confusing, untethered, weirdness of it, like taking an almost healed wound and sticking a pencil in it. I both leaked tears and ugly sobbed but also felt seen.
Besides the grief, the nostalgia of this book was also profound, another gut punch. The first few pages immediately immersed me in my own college years, some of the happiest and craziest times, it was so relatable I thought maybe I was there, maybe I knew Hsu and his friends, even though I was in school in another state and a few years before him. Because he had documentation from that time, the author was able to recreate the era, the feelings, the thoughts, as if no time had passed, unselfconsciously drawing out the self-consciousness of being that age in a new place, establishing a new identity. It had all the cringey moments of coming-of-age, perfectly captured from old notebooks, zines, and more, presented without commentary influenced by today’s adult perspective.
Interwoven throughout are philosophical questions, pop culture (especially music), politics, immigrant families and familial bonds and expectations, all packed densely into this short but magical book. I don’t feel nearly smart enough to grasp all of it, especially on one reading, but the pull on my heart won’t leave me quickly, I’m sure.

Hsu's memoir remembers his friend Ken, who was tragically killed during college. He reflects on friendship and on their connection, challenges, and revelations.

Friendship is about the willingness to know, rather than be known.

Eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu reveled in his uniqueness. The son of Taiwanese immigrants, he enjoyed making 'zines, searching for vintage records, and making sure he felt different from mainstream teens.

Ken, Japanese American in a family that had lived the United States for generations, favored Dave Matthews Band and Abercrombie and Fitch and was in a fraternity. In Hua's view, Ken was as mainstream as they came.

Yet the two bonded and became close in the way that college friends do--through making mix tapes, taking road trips, hanging out, taking up smoking and having deep conversations on the balcony, developing inside jokes, plotting out a film starring the two of them, and developing a shared passion for a movie (in this case, The Last Dragon).

Friendship rests on the presumption of reciprocity, or drifting in and out of one another's lives, with occasional moments of wild intensity. When you're nineteen or twenty, your life is governed by debts and favors, promises to pick up the check or drive next time around. We built our lives into a set of mutual agreements, a string of small gifts lobbed back and forth. Life happened within that delay.

But several years later, just a few hours after Hua was at his party, Ken was killed in a carjacking. Hua was left reeling. He wrote Hua's eulogy, then began writing what became Stay True in order to cope with his loss, explore the concept of belonging, face his own grief, and memorialize his friend.

Over the course of many years, the author sorted through his feelings and memories, cherishing a folder filled with touchstones of their friendship, and he wrote. He wondered what would have become of their friendship if Ken hadn't died. He accepted the illogical nature of the horrifying crime. He went to grad school, he went to therapy, and he began to let go of the guilt surrounding the idea that he might have somehow saved his friend.

I received an electronic prepublication edition of this book courtesy of Doubleday Books and NetGalley.

Gorgeous writing describing the author’s friendship with someone he meets in college - the writing brought me into the room with each page in a way where I felt the air and smelled the smoke being described. Choices - making them - is a central tenet in this memoir. What if I would have gone? What if I would have answered the call or accepted the invite? Throughout the book I thought about my own life and decisions I’ve made which bring regrets of what was decided against. Read this one. Have I mentioned the writing? Thanks to Doubleday for sending me this one. What a gift.

This memoir focuses mainly on the college years of the author, and his relationship to his friend Ken who dies suddenly. For anyone who came of age in nineties alternative culture, Stay True will bathe you in memory and perhaps make you nostalgic for the friendships of your youth. If you are someone who has experienced the sudden loss of a friend, it may feel slightly more difficult to connect. Hsu spends only a couple of chapters on the aftermath of Ken's death and seems to want to gloss over how his relationship to the event has changed over time. That said, where this memoir shines is definitely as a portrait of a friendship- the kind of close bond you only forge in your teens and early twenties. It made me want to call up an old friend, and feel grateful that he is still around to call.

Despite Hua Hsu's style of distancing himself from his content (it seems almost informational at times), this is a poignant, devastating memoir. It touches on feeling different from one's peers, generational trauma, the unmooring of senseless violence, and the meaning of friendship. Hsu touches on all of those aspects without bogging down the narrative; the book is a tight 206 pages, and he uses all of those pages effectively.

Stay True is a great account of growing up as an Asian American and cultivating friendships as we grow. This book is also a story of a tragic event and how that event changes a person as they come to understand life after death.

I enjoyed Stay True. Parts of the book lagged for me as it got incredibly detailed but it also fleshed out the narrative even more. This was a quick read but also a book that makes you think on your own life.

Hua Hsu has written a phenomenal memoir about friendship, what it means to be an immigrant and how to grieve.

There's a power in words that can be captured by certain writers that cut directly to the guts. It bypasses the brain and heart and just sticks in the gut, where it will be for the rest of your life. Alice Munro is one of those...and now Hua Hsu is another.

This should be required reading and taught in every college writing class. This is the way that modern memoirs should be written. No more vapid stories about beach trips with families and trips to Paris. More stories from immigrants and friendships that have a before and after.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publishers and Hua Hsu for the opportunity to read and review this book.

biography, memories, nonfiction, Asian Americans, Asian-experiences, Asian-cultures, cultural-assimilation, cultural-differences, cultural-diversity, family-dynamics, friendship, narrative, grief*****

Stay true to yourself, your heritage, what you once had with an irreplaceable friend in spite of life and other changes as time irrevocably moves on. This is the message I got from this moving expression of a life.
I requested and received an e-book copy from Doubleday Books via NetGalley. Thank you!

An interesting memoir that looks at how our pst affects our futures. Hey pays wonderful tribute to his fallen friend and how this relationship impacted his life. I enjoyed getting to see the relationship through his eyes, however I did feel that the book dragged in places.

Stay True was a memoir, eulogy (of sorts), and coming of age story all wrapped into one book. I found it to be really well-written and well-rounded. It never felt like the author spent too much time of focus on one area/part of his life, while at the same time writing a really beautiful story about his friendship with Ken.

As someone who is just a few years younger than the author, I felt a certain nostalgia for that time and felt immersed in his story. He did a great job describing college life at Berkeley, his obsession with music (which I could relate to), and what it was like to grow up as an Asian-American during that time.

Most importantly, this book is a beautiful tribute to Hsu's friend Ken. I loved reading about their friendship - the way two people who were seemingly opposites became great friends. Thanks to the meticulous records/journals that Hsu kept, the story weaves through various conversations and experiences the two shared. We learn about a life that was senselessly cut way too short. Hsu shares not only the details of the night he lost Ken, but of all the emotions and struggles he encountered as a result of Ken's death.

Hsu did an excellent job of describing and explaining the self-blame and grief that so many can suffer with after the loss of a loved one. I think it'll be a book that anyone who has experienced trauma as a young adult can relate to.

This is a heartbreaking and beautiful story about an enduring friendship. I would recommend it to anyone that has loved and lost a good friend, as well as anyone who enjoys memoirs.

Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for the e-arc of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This memoir is written by the author to remember and honor a college friend, Ken, who died in a mugging and senseless kidnapping while in his third year at UCLA. Hua thinks of the What Ifs that could have saved Ken from that death - what if he had gone swing dancing as Ken had wanted that night, what if he had gone back to Ken's party in the early morning so Ken would not have been alone during that mugging.

The book focuses on the many reasons Hua and Ken became friends even though they were such different personalities. Both Asian Americans, yet one was Taiwanese American and a new immigrant, the other a Japanese American with deep roots established in the U.S. Their love of different kinds of music and movies, and their interest in analyzing everything for fun and intellectual sharing are only some of the aspects of this college friendship.

Deeply moving in parts, Stay True, the memoir, delves into the minds and hearts of a group of young university people in search of meaning and identity.

Thank you to Double Day Books for my digital copy.

Stay True is a memoir by Hua Hsu that describes his life into his early twenties in the U.S. He briefly goes into his Taiwanese background and parents’ lives, but the real focal point of this memoir is Hua Hsu’s life at college in Berkeley and the friendships that came with it.

The author has a way with setting the scene, poetically describing his tastes, worldview, and outlook, that gives you the sense of that late 90s culture and idealism. I love this quote from the book:

“It was hard to unlearn the usefulness of dichotomies. They made the world so much cleaner. I had defined myself by whah I rejected…” - if that sentence doesn’t capture of the hipster 90s aura then I don’t know what does.

He describes his friendship with Ken in a way that’s reverent and wholesome yet realistic, and he isn’t afraid to lay his emotions bare.

I’ll leave you with another lovely quote from the book:

“Friendship rests on the presumption of reciprocity, of drifting in and out of one another’s lives, with occasional moments of wild intensity.”

What does it feel like to make a close friend in college, to mesh in the excitement of transitioning from child to adult, to explore ideas., music, and reading from vastly different points of view, then to lose them suddenly to unimaginable violence at a moment when you are exploring dissipation and your own separate growth goals? This is a moving exploration of the vapidity and incitement of youth that ends abruptly with kidnapping, abject terror, and murder and how one keeps on moving forward while devastated at the absence of a beloved friend. The memories for details that should have been lost to time but weren’t is astounding. Hua Hsu revisits this pivotal moment in his history in this moving memoir about a best friend who dies with such vivid recollection that that period of time comes alive. Highly recommend.

Stay True was an incredible depiction of coming of age amidst friendships, love, and grief.
The author writes of his time spent at Berkeley acclimating to college life, and the friends he made, most notably Ken. I think what this book did best was depict their friendship, and how people can truly bring out the best in one another. How unlikely friendships are some of the best kind, and how people can fit in your life at the right time. I truly felt for Hsu and his love for his friend. Their friendship was written so beautifully it was one to be sought after. The struggle with grief as a young adult was also so important to highlight and dive into. Hsu describing his self blame and doubt was not only portrayed well, but is also important to include for readers to hear.
Hsu did a fantastic job showing how one person’s life can be both so individual and relatable for any young person reading.
Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC!

A devastatingly truthful memoir (I suppose the title is fitting in that regard) even if it at the same time questions the way our minds canonize our memories as time passes and tragedy falls. Perhaps the moments themselves weren't remembered to every last specific detail, but there's no doubt that the pulsing of emotion throughout was accurate to how the arc of a lifetime felt in the moment and in retrospect, and that's the important part when you're writing a book of memories.

Hua Hsu's prose is beautiful and captivating, examining his own life in a way that's both rambling and ever-so-clear. I can't imagine this book being one that's easy to forget, you can feel it living on.

A beautifully written coming of age memoir about the Asian experience in America. Written from the perspective of Hua Hsu,, born of Taiwanese immigrants and his extremely unlikely friendship with Japanese American Ken. The author explores belonging, family, immigration, college, exploration, identity, friendship and devastating loss.

**I received an electronic ARC from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review of this book.

In "Stay True", Hua Hsu has crafted a work that's part memoir, part eulogy, and part stream-of-consciousness as he looks back on his childhood and adolescence, and the impact his friendship with Ken had on the rest of his life.

Hua opens the book by speaking about his upbringing, jumping back to his parents' life in Taiwan, their immigration to the United States, and growing up as a Taiwanese American in California in the 1980s. There are fragments of memory he details, and I especially enjoyed the verbatims of fax messages that he sends to his father, who's subsequently forced to return to Taiwan for work, detailing current events and homework help. Hua is a self-proclaimed rebel, and instead of focusing on his studies, he finds his passion in music and in creating and running his own zine. When he enters college at UC Berkeley, he's thrown into a whole new world and makes a new group of friends, including Ken.

To Hua, Ken is everything he scorns: a Japanese-American who's assimilated too easily in his new environment. Despite their differences, though, Ken becomes one of Hua's closest friends - until he's shockingly murdered in a carjacking one evening. Hua spends the aftermath grieving the loss of his friend, dealing with his own guilt, and watching as his friends are able to move on from it more quickly than he can. In the years to come, Hua's able to see the influence Ken still has on his future choices in life and eventually, with therapy, is able to come to terms with Ken's death.

This is not a straight-forward read, as most novels are - but it's one that's been thoughtfully crafted, at times haphazardly meshed together as our own memories and emotions sometimes are. I think much of the novel still rings true, despite the passage of time, and will be a welcomed release in the AAPI community.

This felt like 2 books in 1. The story of the author's life and the story of the author's relationship with his deceased friend. The 2 narratives split and came together in ways that did not always make great sense to me, then a riff on an author, musician, or his zine would enter.

I did really enjoy the magical thinking written about after Ken's death. It is very realistic. We tend to pour over details and reevaluate everything when someone dies.

Overall, this is recommended to readers who like stories about friendship and loss. Unique flavor of college aged male friendships.

A unique written memoir about self-discovery, grief, and the challenges of being a child of immigrants. This particular memoir is best going in blind, as Hsu's takes you on a journey you don't expect. I was enthralled during parts I hadn't anticipated and I think it helps not really know what's happening so you feel what Hsu's was experiencing at the time. It took me a while to get fully into the style, it's a bit distant and somewhat informational. It doesn't flow as a memoir (or the many memoirs I've read), however, there are so many relatable bits about fitting in and acclimating to somewhere new. I really appreciated the way Hsu spent time on seemingly minute details that lent a lot of his personality forming.

I plan to reread this and gain more from it, to understand it more.

Stay True is a coming of age memoir of a Taiwanese immigrant 18 year old navigating his place at Berkely. Hua's efforts to fit in, find friends and his place in the world are existential. He develops a friendship with Ken, a Japanese American student who shares that longing for meaning and place. But a senseless crime takes Ken from him and he now deals with a layer of grief and loss that most of us never face in this time of our lives.

I was so excited to read this book! I really enjoy memoirs and the insight into others' lives and experiences I feel from them. And this is very much a life worth sharing and a tale worth telling. My expectations exceeded the experience when I read Stay True, however. Perhaps, I migh tnot be the best audience for understanding Hua's experience when my life is so very different, but while I enjoyed the book, the story telling felt a little detached. I just couldn't connect to much of the book with the exception of how adrift he felt at the loss of his friend.