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.”
The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” recurs and turns into a specter haunting Stay True’s latter pages. At first, Ken leads boisterous, out-of-tune singalongs of the song. But after Ken dies, harmony no longer makes sense. The awed music, which once cast Hsu’s crew as a “chorus of nonbelievers, channeling God,” now repulses him. Hsu’s lucid, wrenching writing about “God Only Knows” shows how music can’t be untethered from the process of becoming.
As much as Stay True’s story hinges on despair, it’s filled with humor, too. “It was a sign of personal growth, I thought to myself, that I could be friends with someone who liked Pearl Jam this much,” Hsu writes with exactingly calibrated teenaged pretension. “Yet the more we hung out, the less certain I was of these distinctions.” Underpinning this epiphany regarding coolness, Hsu comes to grasp Derrida’s deconstructionist theory while contemplating Oasis and Blur’s legendary rivalry, ultimately realizing he thought both sucked—and that “there were more choices.” Listening to mixtapes with Ken, “I joked that he was probably the only frat boy in America to like Belle and Sebastian’s meekest tunes.”
Surrounding the release of Stay True, Hsu created a number of digital mixes, fake college radio broadcasts, and unindexed websites presenting collages of ephemera from that era—Hsu is an obsessive collector—all sent around in the mail via postcards containing QR-code links, an inspired promo scheme of sorts that he devised to recreate the “texture” of the ’90s underground. (Many of his favorite songs from the era are not on streaming services, hence the fake radio shows on Mixcloud.) Recently, Hsu also launched a new music zine, Suspended in Time. It’s all of a piece, he explains, with Stay True, a book that already feels like a crucial addition to the music-critical memoir tradition.
Hua Hsu: Writing about the past really brought back memories of sensations. One of them was how much time I used to spend making things for no obvious payoff. You could make a zine, and maybe there were three or four people you’d trade with, but there was no illusion that this was going to circulate very widely. And yet there was something really meaningful about spending all of your time making these things, and trying to sabotage someone’s everyday by putting one of your zines inside the local paper, or hiding it inside a magazine at the cafe. These are things I used to do. I wanted to see if I could inject some randomness into people’s days.
There are things that I remember from when I was young that I still think about because I never figured out the answer. It was sort of this open mystery, like hearing a song on college radio and they don’t back announce it—you’re left with that memory of hearing it and wanting to know what it was. I wanted to offer a glimpse of how not being able to access the full picture could bring a little joy or mystery to the day.
It was a real show that was actually life-changing, at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco. So many of my strongest memories around music are actually memories of watching other people be into something alongside me, being part of this moment that you’re sharing. It’s more about a look you share with a stranger, where you’re both just grateful to be there. I think everyone was just shocked that this fairly obscure, very stylish band was playing San Francisco on a weekday. It was the collective euphoria of being like: They actually came all the way here, this must be what it’s like to see them in England. You go to shows sometimes to see the performer, but you’re also going to see what other people who feel like you look like, and how they dress and how they stand and what kind of cigarettes they smoke.
It’s probably still in my top three or four. I love the way it starts in media res, like you’ve stumbled into it. You feel like this comet has already taken off, and you’re just hitching a ride. It feels like everything could go off the rails at any moment, but it keeps getting better and better. In real life, you can never replicate the way Aggi is singing very softly atop that amount of noise. She’s not screaming. It’s why I love My Bloody Valentine or the Jesus and Mary Chain, too: the fact that you could keep your cool over this hail of noise. It informed the kind of presence I wanted to have in the world.
Part of it is this idea of beauty and dissonance co-existing, or something being simultaneously loud and quiet. And structurally, there are motifs that get played around with or replayed throughout the book, and I do think of it a bit like a pop song.
When I was younger, I thought being true to myself meant sticking to a sense of rigid principles: that there was only one way to be interesting or cool, and everyone on the other side was lame and wrong. But allowing others into your life—people who ask you why you’re the way you are—it changes you. This is an incredibly obvious thing, but it wasn’t to me then. And it expanded my sense of where I located myself, how I wanted to understand what I valued or wanted to believe to be true about myself.
I never thought about that. It was not consciously intentional, but I know I meant to do it.
If you think about it, there’s nothing more utopian or hopeful than harmony, because it presumes that symmetry, or coming together, or beauty is innately possible, and it’s just a matter of singing along with someone else. But that just didn’t sound right to me after Ken died.
I also had these really strong memories of a bunch of us singing along in my car. When you’re singing, music is a physical force going through your body. When you harmonize with other people, you can feel it in your skull. It’s like a moment of community. Afterward, I didn’t want to feel reminders of that. It felt very different from what I thought of the world in that immediate aftermath.
I was really into Nirvana, but I didn’t understand what most of their songs were about. I was a 13-year-old in the suburbs, I had no idea what the word “lithium” meant. But I clearly picked up on the fact that they found the world around them to be insufficient. This world was now propping them up, but it didn’t mean anything because they were popular in a world whose values they didn’t share.
In my letter, I parroted those beliefs back: that I sympathized with their dissatisfaction with the world. The letter was very much like: Dude I totally get where you guys are coming from. I still have a scrapbook that I started keeping after Kurt Cobain’s death with newspaper articles and these op-eds I wrote for the school paper. It’s incredibly angst-ridden stuff, even though I learned my angst from watching them.
I feel like my intense love of Nirvana actually marks me as an incredibly generic person; so many people felt the exact same way. But what was truly transformative about them, for people who experienced it, is what you did with that moving forward. Like, yes, 30 million people bought Nevermind. But 30 million people didn’t then go on to wonder if corporate magazines sucked. Some of them became big Foo Fighters fans. Some discovered the Raincoats and the Vaselines. So it really was just this incredible moment where you felt a connection to this thing that was very much premised on offering a different vision of what life and culture could be. And it was up to you to take that and do whatever you wanted with it.
Taste still matters to me, but I see it less as some kind of moral failing. Ken was always really curious about the music I was into. I would make tapes for all my friends, and he always wanted to do the same for me. It was a bit of a joke—he knew there were things I would just never be into. But it was a mode of friendship that I wasn’t necessarily accustomed to. I always wanted to meet people who were into the same music as me, who would know the even better, more obscure version of it to tape for me in return.
It amused me, even at the time, that we’d be sitting in his frat house, listening to, like, a live Mojave 3 tape that someone had taped off the radio and sent me from Europe, and that we could share something like this. That really scrambled my perception of what it meant to be into things that I deemed cool, and that maybe it had nothing to do with what you’re into, and more just how you treated other people, or how open you could be to things that made you uncomfortable.
We weren’t ultimately that different. We were both middle-class suburban kids from California. It was a big school, so it wasn’t like we just stayed friends because there were no other people around. But honestly, he was just a good friend, and he was a persistent friend. He was always much better at checking in and tending to the rituals that cement friendship than I was. He was just really good at life. He was a super compassionate person and cared about what other people cared about. I think he just recognized that I was actually as much of a dreamer as him inside. It’s just that I dreamt about different things. If the book is itself a gesture of friendship, it’s not because I was this awesome friend all along. But he was.
Coming across that quote was startling, because the tension of our friendship is that he was very good at knowing, and I just wanted to be known.
Hip-hop is the music of friendship. How much time do you have to spend rapping together to finish one another’s lines? It’s about people sharing dreams and having one another’s backs. “I’ll Be Missing You” is so corny, and yet there’s something so aggressive and pure about it. I remember watching [OutKast’s] “Rosa Parks” video around this time and thinking about how cool it was that André and Big Boi were so close, yet so different.
I spent a lot of time in those years afterwards just digging for records, trying to find music that captured how I felt in that moment—because how you feel and what you’re capable of expressing are two totally different things.
You know “Waterloo Sunset” by the Kinks? I’ve listened to that song thousands of times. I couldn’t tell you what it was actually about other than a river, but it’s so melancholy. And yet it’s also such a beautiful song. That’s sort of how music modeled something for me: It could be really stirring not only because of the content—not only because of the lyrics in this case—but because it’s about the lyrics and also this achingly beautiful music behind it. I’m sure there are other examples, but that one comes to mind. It’s a song we used to listen to a lot.
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