My Current Favourite Book
Plus a Medium-Length List of Undergrad Nostalgia
I hope you had an excellent long weekend (I did, I went camping!). My current favourite book (and the only book I’ve ever recommended on the semi-public platform of my Instagram story) is Hua Hsu’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Stay True.
It focuses on Hua’s undergrad years in the late 90s, when he and his friends would go on drives to nowhere in particular together, judge each other’s tastes in music and clothes, and try on different identities as they joined and quit different clubs and majors. At the same time, Hua and his friend Ken were exploring what it meant to be Asian-American in a time when Asians were limited to token roles and stereotypes in Western movies, and many Asian-American communities were still in their beginnings. “[We made] short lists of all the times we remembered seeing an Asian delivery boy, maybe even a tertiary Asian acquaintance orbiting the main friend group. I thought we were just goofing off and passing time. But Ken was piecing together a theory about the world.”
I’m always drawn to reading about diasporic histories and stories, and Hua shares some highly specific anecdotes about being the son of Taiwanese immigrants: the faxed letters he received from his father while they were separated by the Pacific were touching (his father always ended with “What do you think?” to try to engage his teenage son), and I’ve added Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon (1985) to my watch list1. I’ll let you read the book for his explorations of the immense diversity of Asian-American identities and origin stories, but one other example that stood out to me was when he saw a non-Asian therapist at his Ivy League school who asked him about his relationship with his parents, and he was immediately defensive, saying his parents were “great” and “unbelievably non-stereotypical,” nothing like the case studies on Tiger Mom parental pressure in the books on her shelf2.
Ken and Hua would get to define what it meant to be Asian-American for themselves, they concluded, since no one else had defined it yet. Hua would go on to pursue a PhD in Asian-American literature, to become a staff writer for the New Yorker (dream job much?!), and ultimately, to write this memoir, 20 years in the making, about himself and his Japanese-American friend—he went on to write himself and Ken into the narrative.
Beyond a pretty surface-level demographic connection, though, why did I connect so strongly to the memoir of an American man who graduated from UC Berkeley in 1999? If you know me, you know I also have some… niche interests3—just look at this blog. This book, and the way its author gently deprecates his former self with so much fondness for who he was becoming and for how his friends have shaped him, have become one of my niche interests. Hua writes and publishes a zine about his niche interests, particularly his favourite underground 90s indie bands. He drives out to a weekly meeting of Black Panthers to help with graphic design for their long-standing publication. As I wrote on Goodreads (please excuse both the following hyperboles and the self-reference; I use Goodreads reviews as a way to try to get people to read things I like, not unlike this blog):
“This book is everything to me right now, and I’m so glad I read it after graduating undergrad and experiencing the ensuing unanswerable questions about the future. Seriously. I love things passionately and use 5-star ratings generously, but I could not be more enamoured by this book and believe it to be truly deserving of its Prize.”4
If you know me, you also know that, like Hua, I love my friends! So much!5 When I look back on my undergrad years, I mostly see my friends and I in various rooms of our houses and at restaurants and park benches in Westdale.
There’s Jen, Sask and I in the early days of moving in together, lying on our backs with our feet against the wall (stretching), talking about high school and time and maybe The Anthropocene Reviewed, a night that ended with us telling Jen to hang out upstairs with us more often and me writing about this scene in the first page of my then-new journal.
There’s all of my housemates together, playing music and forming a massage train.
There’s Imaan, Remiel and I at three different kinds of Asian restaurants and the various beautiful parks of Hamilton we’d go to after—we ate so well and appreciated the city and its scenery so much.
There’s Grace and I at Arkell’s dining table or at one of the cafes, being semi-workaholics6 who like a good baked good next to each other.
There’s Niva at the dining table, letting me watch anime or stand-up over her shoulder and her legumes on rice.
There’s Yao and I singing a song, stretching together, then going on a needed night walk.
There’s Syd and I sharing the kitchen in the morning and at night, going to the Fringe to join Amarah and Jen (with transit being an adventure in itself) or heading out for an excellent bike ride.
There’s Sanjana, Adda, Grace, Saskia and I appreciating the Auld Lang Syne The Anthropene Reviewed episode and each other’s company in the Dalewood living room, the best living room I’ve ever been in.
In the same room, the best Galentines’ night that ever existed.
There’s our viewing parties of international films (curated most excellently by Jen and Yao), of the Oscars (still so proud of Ke Huy Quan), and of enthralling current TV shows.
There’s Alisa, Niva and I saying goodbye to each other at least three times in two days (it was very sad).
I would be remiss to leave out the walks (“hikes”) and talks Bohmee and I had about books and representation (which I have been remiss to leave out and am adding a day late—our Asian author book club was almost too on topic for this book).
I could go on and on and on… and I will7. I haven’t even mentioned all the times we cooked and ate together (Maddie’s recipes were always a highlight).
This is why I love this book. A lot of it is about Hua being in various rooms and balconies with his friends, which is kind of what undergrad is all about. Another quote from my Goodreads review:
“The memoir focuses on wry and relatable stories from his undergrad days in the 90s that rang true to my past three-four years. How being roommates could feel awkward at first but you gradually develop some of the strongest connections in your life. How the music you play in car rides matters even more than your destination. How the movies you watched together and the used books you picked up often had more influence on your ways of thinking than your lectures. How people you have nothing in common with on the surface can understand you more than anyone else, can really see you even if you sometimes can’t figure out who you’re trying to be.”8
I’ve done Hua a bit of a disservice so far, because he was a poli sci major who then earned a PhD in the History of American Civilization at Harvard. In other words, throughout his memories, he sprinkles in a good bit of Derrida, or Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, or everyone’s favourite animal-eating activist, Aristotle9. With these references, I also felt transported back to the good old days of listening to my more humanities-oriented friends’ discourse and seamless references.
I really liked what Hua wrote about Taylor’s work (so much so that I screenshotted it from Libby):
“Being true to yourself cannot happen in a vacuum. Constructing your personality is a game, one that requires you to joust with the expectations of others. Authenticity, Taylor explained, presumes dialogue, and it is born out of engaging with those around us. We seek recognition, even if what you want to hear from a close friend is that you’re a one-of-a-kind weirdo that they’ll never truly understand.”
In my words/the words of my generation: “What the not-like-other-girls girlies really want is for our besties to tell us we’re special and that we’re so real for that.” No apologies there.
Hua and Ken were both Asian-American, but that’s not what made them friends. They were both drawn to thinking about the world and theory, about books and movies, and to enjoying it all in both different and shared ways (for example, co-writing the script for a satirical film based on their friend group which they never filmed). They built on each other’s ideas and encouraged each other’s personalities and identities to flourish, even while Hua would never fully understand why anyone would enjoy being a fraternity brother or swing dancer and Ken wondered why Hua only wore clothes from at least a decade earlier.
A turning point of the book and in Hua’s life is a senseless tragedy, one whose aftermath made me tear up. But the remaining section of the book includes reflections on Hua’s journey of trying to make sense of the events through remembering and writing everything down. He reflects on reading Ken’s annotated copy of What is History? and realizing how, although history can lead to us imagining alternate realities, this isn’t the purpose of the field. A true eulogy would represent its subject in their fullest joys and dreams, it wouldn’t dwell on the unresolved stories of the person giving it. So, on top of its beautiful memories and explorations of identity, Stay True is an ode to the process of writing as remembering.
I write to remember, and I write to express my love for the people in my life who have shaped me and continue to inspire me. I want to keep writing about the memories we share but I also want to live in the moments we continue to experience together!
As a TLDR10, Stay True is a love letter to being in undergrad, to the friendships that we hope will last a lifetime, and to the times together in rooms that shaped us.
As I concluded on Goodreads: “I want everyone in my life to read it! And I’m not done writing about it.”
P.S. Social media has transformed the way authors are able to add postscripts and about-the-process/inspirations descriptions to their books11. I think Ken’s indecipherable annotation either says “life changed” or “totally changed,” what do you think?
P.P.S. Just because I’m proud of it and since some of you are new here, here’s what may be the best blog post I ever write. Thanks for reading™!
On being 21
Hello from the extremely proud owner of three, soon to be four public library cards! I wrote most of the following on July 3rd, already belated, but here’s to the ceaseless journey of “catching up”…
Berry Gordy was neither director nor producer. The Last Dragon is the journey of a Black NYC-based martial artist “train[ing] tirelessly to attain the same level of mastery as the great Bruce Lee” and seeking to defeat a gang leader named Sho'nuff, “the self-styled Shogun of Harlem.” Maybe we can get a watch party going.
Like mine! I’d like to note. Parental pressure couldn’t have made me this cool, although I do think my parents are very cool.
And I don’t necessarily mean musical theatre and comics. At a single grocery store in Siena, Italy, my sister found me a Lindt FIG(!)-flavoured dark chocolate. I was annoyed that we couldn’t find another at any other grocery store in Italy or Canada. “They think there’s no market, but it’s me, I’m the market,” I was quoted saying. If you’ve known me for a certain period of time, you also know I love figs.
I have read at least a few prize winners that I disliked. You can ask me to elaborate by text/call/email/conversation but I don’t want to burn any bridges on this semi-public platform.
As I’ve written on not one, but at least two recent Instagram stories/posts.
Okay, maybe we’re workaholics. Workaholics who have finally learned how to retire from the Robbie Theatre and how to take vacations.
Listen to “We’re In Love” by Boygenius. It’s about friendship. They’ve said it themselves.
Another Boygenius lyric: “When you don’t know who you are, you f___ around and find out”
I did not know who Derrida was before Artsci or who Taylor was before this book. I knew Aristotle’s name but did not know he was such an animal lover. I did get a bit bored by at least one of Hua’s scholarly digressions, but that’s also just a part of reading about philosophy for me.
For those who are not part of the “girly bestie so real” generation, that’s Too Long, Didn’t Read.
Madeleine Thien has a whole Tumblr of photos and archives that inspired Do Not Say We Have Nothing, one of my all-time favourite books. The other favourite of all time is The Penderwicks on Gardam Street by Jeanne Birdsall, who replied to my fan letter with an Honorary Penderwick sticker and postcard of her dog. I’ve also met both authors in Vancouver! Stay True will be elevated to all-time status if it stays in my head rent free for a few more years, which it likely will.