A Love Letter to College Friendships and the Late ‘90s - "Stay True" by Hua Hsu

A memoir immersed in his college years at UC Berkeley in twilight of the 1990s, Hua Hsu’s Stay True provides a time capsule back to my own youth as he explores the significance of his college friendships in this ode to his friend Ken who was killed in a carjacking in July 1998. While Hse dives into his own unique story as a son of Taiwanese immigrant parents, this true story of his college journey evokes a California culture that captures the angsty explorations of the Xennials who came to age at the turn of the millennium. 

Despite both being Asian Americans, Ken seems like the teenage Hse’s polar opposite. Hse, who enters UC Berkeley in the Fall of 1995, embodies the geeky snobbery of ugly thrift store sweater wearing, zine reading, mixed tape making, chat room crashing young adults. He describes judging his new classmates on their musical tastes with references to Pavement and the Fugees - the less mainstream, the more intriguing - and discovering the limits of these rigid classifications. Ken, meanwhile, a Japanese-American from El Cajon in San Diego County is outgoing, pledges a fraternity, cheers for the Padres, and brings people together including folding the introverted Hse into his circle and stepping into his. 

Over the next three years, the two young men build a friendship that explores pop culture, the Asian American experience, philosophy, government, rhetoric, baseball, sitcoms, movies, and music. When Ken is murdered in a random carjacking the summer after their junior year at UC Berkeley, Hua sets about trying to capture every memory to honor and mourn his friend. He does more than that - he draws the reader not just into his quest to memorialize his friendship with Ken, but an era and a state of mind.

As I read, it was impossible for me to extricate my own memories of 1995 to 1998 from this story. A high school graduate in 1997, two years after the author, I graduated from Ken’s rival high school in El Cajon. My senior year, I worked at the Pizza Hut across from the mall where Ken takes Hsu to rifle through CDs. I would walk home past the funeral parlor a few blocks from where Ken’s friends likely eulogized him. When Hua was deciding he was too cool for the now too popular to like Nirvana, my sister was creating Kurt Cobain paintings. When the boys were following the Padres 1998 battle for the World Series against the Mets, I was attending games with my family at what may have by then been called Qualcomm Stadium, but will always be the Murph in my heart, the chorus of Semisonic’s “Closing Time” following me down the winding ramps to the parking lot. Ken’s swing dancing evokes my obsession with the movie Swing Kids, memories of tagging along after my roommate Katie to Lindy Hop lessons and socials, two tone Doc Martens, and forever quoting “It’s dead in here anyways” alluding to the movie Swingers.

Hua’s transition from Pavement to raves echoes my own feeling of liberation in random warehouses as I embraced the idea that everyone around me was too high to pay any attention to what I was doing anyways - a freedom in sharp contrast to the ever more burdensome need to stay ahead of the constantly evolving trends that Hse describes, the neverending judgement we inherited from the cynicism and sarcasm of Generation X and the grunge and alternative music scenes.  

Even the settings that were less familiar to me, brought back memories. In the Spring of 1998, I’d visited Berkeley for the first time with my college roommate, Mia. I’d fallen in love with the energy of the campus and delighted in visiting the record shops and thrift stores that Hse describes as his favorite haunts. My connections to this story of two strangers, young men, I thought I’d have nothing in common with when I opened these pages, reminded me how oddly small the world can be and how universal our unique personal experiences are. 

Thus, while Stay True spirals from the author’s great need to remember his friend, to keep him alive with him as he and his friends move forward into the future, for me, this book tugged at a nostalgia for the college years, when life hadn’t been decided yet, when we lived on the precipice of possibility and potential. A pensieve, it helped me see my own college self in a new light.

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