Stay True: A Memoir

Chapter 1 introduces friendship as the central theme of Hua’s memoir. With evocative imagery and immersive prose, Hua describes the bonds he formed during his years at Berkeley, focusing on his close relationship with Ken. Hua paints a vivid picture of Ken and their unlikely friendship, describing him as someone who was “always overdressed” (5) in clothes Hua “would never wear” (5).

Hua’s tone is both nostalgic and melancholy in the book’s opening pages, foreshadowing his grief after Ken’s untimely death. On one alcohol-fueled night, for example, Hua and Ken “cycled through legendary infatuations sure to devastate [them] for the rest of [their] lives” (6), with Ken claiming he would “one day write the saddest story ever” (6). Little did they know that Ken’s life would end before they graduated college and that it was Hua who would write “the saddest story ever” about this loss.

Hua captures the contradictions inherent in his college friendships. His relationship with Ken, for instance, was both intense and mundane: “Back then, your emotions were always either very high or very low, unless you were bored, and nobody in human history had ever been this bored before” (6). Boredom was such that “a day felt like forever, a year was a geological era” (6), yet time also moved so quickly Hua feared he would “forget to remember things as they happen” (6). Hua closes the chapter with existential musings about memory and forgetting, noting that photographs were relatively rare before the advent of digital photography and wondering if, without proof, his time with Ken “had happened at all” (7).