Stay True: A Memoir

Stay True arrived at a time when xenophobia, racism, and violence against Asian Americans were on the rise (Health Affairs). The Chinese origins of COVID-19 led some Americans to blame Asians as a group for the pandemic, and instances of hate crimes against Asian Americans were widely reported in the news from 2020 onward. Some activists claimed that political rhetoric in the early stages of the pandemic inflamed anti-Asian sentiments—notably, President Donald J. Trump’s use of the slurs “Chinese virus” and “kung flu”—while data show that Trump’s “Chinese virus” tweet led to a rise in anti-Asian hashtags on Twitter (UCSF).

The memoir tells of Hsu’s college friend, Ken, who died at the hands of carjackers in 1999. The memoir discusses the possibility that the murder was a hate crime, but ultimately rejects it. In interviews published after the book’s release, Hsu has expressed mild dismay at the desire to turn Ken’s death into a symbol of something that it wasn’t for him. Stay True is primarily a coming-of-age story about an intimate friendship, the loss of that friendship, and the emotional aftermath of that loss. In other words, it addresses universal themes and stirs empathy for the author, with whom readers are asked to identify.

However, arriving when it did, Stay True can certainly also be read as a salutary response to contemporaneous events in America. The memoir presents a nuanced picture of Asian Americans, emphasizing that Asian Americans are not a monolithic group. For example, he draws important distinctions between his experiences as the son of Taiwanese immigrants and Ken’s experiences as a Japanese American whose family has lived in the US for generations. Hua is uncomfortable with the dominant culture in ways that Ken is not. Hua also notes the differences between his experiences and those of his mentees at a nearby youth center. Hua grew up in a middle-class family. By contrast, his mentees are children of refugees from across Southeast Asia, whose parents must work several jobs to make ends meet. Despite these differences, however, Hua identifies commonalities among Asian Americans that transcend nationality and class, including the cultural significance of food, taking one’s shoes off at the door, and having uncommunicative parents. By detailing these commonalities and differences, Hua offers non-Asian Americans an opportunity to understand various Asian experiences.

Stay True is part of a wave of books by Asian American writers to come out in the last decade. Other notable publications include Anna Qu’s Made in China (2022), a memoir that amplifies the traditionally ignored voices of Asian American youths; Daphne Palasi Andreades’s Brown Girls (2022), a coming-of-age novel about teenaged girls of diverse Asian and non-Asian backgrounds; Erika Lee’s The Making of Asian America (2015), a sweeping history of the role of Asian Americans in American life from the 1500s to the present; and Yellow Peril! (2014), a volume coedited by John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats that examines the anti-Asian images and texts that pervade Western history. At least one book critic, however, writing for Vulture in 2022, noted that Hsu’s book is distinct from other recent Asian American novels, memoirs, and other nonfiction works in that Hsu does not give the impression of trying to explain Asian Americans to the audience, which is presumably white.