“This book, Stay True, is exquisite and excruciating and I will be thinking about it for years and years to come.”
The winners of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for books include Beverly Gage's biography of J. Edgar Hoover, Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power by Jefferson Cowie, and Hua Hsu's memoir Stay True
Hua Hsu’s Stay True is a coming-of-age memoir that brings music, memory, identity, and grief into a mid-1990s tableau of indie-pop mixtapes, late-night record stores, and xeroxed zines. The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Hsu enters UC Berkeley as a malcontent who hates parties, embraces a straight-edge lifestyle to better sharpen his judgments, and finds Pearl Jam“appalling.” He forges an improbably deep friendship with Ken, his opposite in almost every way: a well-adjusted frat brother who wears Abercrombie and listens to Dave Matthews, whose Japanese-American family has been in the U.S. for generations.
But Hsu’s growing kinship with Ken—a “mismatched pair” sharing cigarettes and tunes, admiring and goofing on each other in equal measure—contributes to the writer’s personal debunking of stereotypical binaries, and his realization that what constitutes “cool” is often more complicated than it seems. When, only three years later, Ken is murdered in a carjacking, Hsu writes to not forget his friend’s kindness and curiosity, his late-night theories, the particular pitch of his laugh.
Hsu, also a literature professor at Bard College, spent years as a music critic before joining The New Yorker in 2017, and music is the oxygen of Stay True, shaping Hsu’s worldview and illuminating all of his relationships. The pillars of identity that form the architecture of this brutal and beautiful story—subcultural, mainstream, Asian-American—are made of songs; Hsu’s father’s somewhat-neglected record collection becomes a symbol of how “becoming American would remain an incomplete project.”
Skateboarding in NYC in the 1960s
Bill Eppridge photographed all sorts of people skateboarding in NYC in the '60s.
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