Stay True by Hua Hsu

It’s probably been almost two years since my friend Maddy recommended that I read Stay True by Pulitzer Prize winner Hua Hsu—and now I have finally read it and can say that I did, indeed, enjoy it.

I hope this isn’t me just living in the past, but I love the milieu of “the academy.” Stories that focus on people in University feel rife with possibility, and Hua Hsu does not disappoint. His memoir gives an account of being a young person at Berkeley and I felt transported to a nostalgic time in my life. The opening part of the book gives an account of being into hardcore punk rock and studying Derrida and working on magazines and I felt right at home. Reading the book made me feel nostalgic for that time in my life when it was normal to read Heidegger all afternoon and then go watch Fear Before the March of Flames play at the nearly stageless comedy club in downtown Kingston.

Of course, for Hua Hsu the experience is somewhat different because there’s also the layer of being a second generation American. Part of his text, I think, would resonate with a number of children of immigrants for the way he discusses the disconnect of expectations and the small ways generations find to connect. There are some tender moments bonding over music that are sweet without being saccharine. The experience of being a racialized person in avant-garde and subversive spaces is a compelling narrative to explore—

—but it isn’t the primary focus of the book. About halfway through the book, Stay True shifts into being more about loss and grief than youthful idealism. After spending several chapters establishing his core friendships, Hsu then reveals the tragic impetus guiding the memoir: the random murder of one of his friends. Hsu narrates going to a party and wanting to leave early to pursue a romantic connection. Then: police calls and visits, looking for information about one of Hsu’s friends. He was found dead, shot in the back of the head.

It feels crass to call his friend’s death a “mystery.” That makes the memoir seem like it’s geared towards our entertainment. Hsu, though, treats the case with a reflective and contemplative tone. Hsu goes through phases of responses, the first of which is being disconnected from joy. His music taste at the time goes through transformations to reflect his feeling, at first losing connection with his musical taste, cycling through more bleak and esoteric work before later embracing the kind of ‘mindless’ fun, escapist bops. Hsu’s survivor’s guilt gets its due, as well. We bear witness to his self-doubt: what if he had stayed at the party that night? Moreover, what if he wasn’t even close with his friend in the first place? One of his girlfriends prompts him to reconsider if his friendship was even a genuine friendship, and that is such an emotional gutpunch, especially because Hsu had been writing letters, essentially journaling to a ghost.

The reveal of what happened and the fallout does read like a traumatizing true crime documentary. Hsu’s friend was at the party and it just so happened that two men and a woman (one of them a couple) were scouting the scene. It’s a freak incident; a completely random target. When they see him leave his apartment, my understanding is that they held him up for his wallet. They then stuffed him in the trunk of his own car and they drove around to ATMs around the city, trying to use his debit card. At the end of the excursion, according to the testimony of the woman, the men led him out of the trunk and she heard a shot. The police report identifies that he was shot in the back of the head. The couple then took his car back to their place and left it on their front yard, out in the open. They were caught within a few days. No extended mystery. Anti-climactic with no good explanation for why Hsu’s friend was targeted, not that it would be any better if there was a ‘justification.’

The book offers an authentic and vulnerable account of the feelings Hsu experiences throughout the loss of his friend. The journey from young and idealistic students starting University towards this dark look at grief is a compelling one. Oddly, it lined up nicely with another read: Stuart Ross’ memoir The Book of Grief and Hamburgers. Both deal with the loss of friends and the complex and rippling effect of those losses into other areas of our lives.

Stay True is a compelling read; I felt connected with Hsu’s voice and saw myself reflected—a version of myself that is young, idealistic, and inspired by all the beauty of the world. I have been fortunate enough not to experience a loss so shocking or of such magnitude, but I nonetheless felt connected to Hsu’s self-doubt and his conflicted feelings about coming into joy after such grief.

It’s not ideal to use my usual sign-off of “happy reading” here, but the book does offer some reconcilement at the end which makes it—not happy, exactly, but—at peace.

Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird by Agustina Bazterrica

Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird by Agustina Bazterrica is a book of short stories that might be better described as a book of premises. In a tight 154 pages, Bazterrica offers 20 horror stories, bringing the average story length to just under 8 pages, and that doesn’t count the blank pages between the end of one story and the start of another. Don’t get me wrong, short pieces can be moving and powerful, but a number of the stories read as concepts rather than fully fleshed out narratives.

Granted, short stories are not my preferred genre as a general rule, so Bazterrica is facing an uphill battle. Some of the stories have a compelling premise, but the condensed format seems to prevent the concepts from really breathing or building their emotive or thematic force. In some cases, the stories feel like they should be starting where they’ve ended. In others, the full narrative arc is there, but it’s glossed over too quickly to really hit.

One example of the issue is “No Tears,” which, despite its flaws, is one of my favourite pieces in the collection. The story follows Juan de Tartáz whose family has a long tradition of not crying. To them, tears are disgusting and vile and pathetic. His father’s dying words, even, were to never abandon the family tradition with tears. In the present, Juan goes to wakes for strangers and he tells jokes, sometimes distastefully, because he’s unaware of the circumstances of peoples’ deaths. His goal is to prevent as many tears as possible; yet, he starts noticing an eagle-faced woman at wakes for strangers whose sole goal seems to be to make them cry even more. She confesses that she is sad and refuses to be sad alone, and thus goes to funerals. Juan tries to force her to back off his territory, and there’s a scene where she bursts into tears, splashing him with the salty liquid, forcing him to flee. That moment felt so promising; in the hands of another author, I could see the story dwelling in his terror, his paranoia, his pain at feeling the tears of another. Bazterrica returns to the main narrative rather quickly and Juan notes the same woman crying at a website until her eyes have gone dry and notes: “I knew that this was her little hell, her private torment, because now she had nothing to cry about, because she was emptier than ever before, and her wings had finally dissolved into sadness. She needed me. She wanted me to stop the vultures, to wipe away the tears she no longer had” (110). The build-up to her catharsis seems unearned, and then Juan sees her smile, flies away, and sheds a single tear. This story, in my view, would have been worth fleshing out further in order to heighten the impact.

Other stories are probably the perfect length. “Unamuno’s Boxes,” for example, describes a ride in a taxi. The narrator describes all these small indications of the taxi driver’s murderous intent. She reads a bracelet on his wrist that reads AMANDA and imagines her his first victim. She describes the ritualistic practices he engages in when murdering, talks about playing his victims classical music and filing their nails, cleaning and lotioning these women in their final moments before killing them and collecting their fingernails in little boxes. What I like about the story is the twistedness of the narrator’s imagination; she pictures herself, even partially invites herself, being kidnapped, the cab taking a route not asked for. The self-destruction plot is unfortunately quotidian in reality. The cab driver charges her one eighty-four and she pays with exact change to punish him for not being a murderer. The final conceit of the story is that, as she’s paying, Unamuno places a coin in his box, which is full of nail clippers and nail polish—she leans back into the car and begs him to take her with him: “you know where” (18). It’s a twisted tale of imagining the abyss and willing your own destruction. The psychological framework of the story is enough of a justification for it, and it does not overstay its welcome.

Self-destruction emerges as a motif throughout the collection, sometimes in a frankly laughable way. “The Continuous Equality of the Circumference” is about Ada, who wants to be a circle. Not a sphere. A circle. Rooted in some kind of idea of perfection, partly as outlined by Saint Augustine, Ada wants to convert herself into a circle. She doesn’t want to be a “deformed rectangle,” so she tries to fatten herself up on spherical and later only round foods—grapes, cookies, etc. She develops a series of pulleys and creates a device to sever her own arms and legs to get closer to her ideal shape. She tries to roll towards a cookie—but her right arm blocks her. She bowls herself another way, rolling through broken glass, and is blocked again by her left arm. She dies by choking on a grape, “the mirror [too] far for her to admire the perfection she has become” (117). Honestly, the story is too outlandish for me. It’s a literalization of the harmful self-destruction of body dysmorphia and trying to meet societal expectations placed on women. There’s an essay in the literary theory world that essentially argues that neuroses in women are responses to societal expectations—women ought not to be seen, so they become anorexic to take up less space; women are not expected to be listened to, so they develop selective mutism. I’m not sure where that line of argumentation comes from, but I’d be amazed if Bazterrica had never heard of it.

There’s another story that involves gradual dismemberment (is it “Earth”? I can’t recall) and a number of the works in the collection involve body horror of some kind. “Roberto” is a more concise body horror piece with some genuine tension that gets undermined in the final lines. Narrated from a child’s perspective, the premise is that the main character has a bunny between her legs named Roberto. He’s cute and he’s hairy and he sleeps a lot. She coaxes another girl to take turns showing their vaginas to each other, but when she discovers her friend has no hair, she backs out of the big reveal. Her teacher hears the rumour and holds her back and tells her how pretty she is, and how she’s so much smarter than the other children, and how he wanted to see her bunny and teach it to be on its best behaviour. In just a page of dialogue, Bazterrica builds such a monstrous and disturbing scene. It’s a real shame that the final line of the story reveals there to be a literal bunny: “Roberto moved his ears and bared his teeth. Mr. García screamed and ran away. Roberto went back to sleep” (11). What a joke. It undermines the genuine tension with something so laughably stupid that the whole story feels like a waste. 

Contrasting that is the story “Anita and Happiness,” which also has a twist but one that lands much more effectively. The story is about a woman named Anita, whom Pablo suspects of being an alien. Everything she does feels too rehearsed. Pablo hates her, but falls in love with her, “if only to confirm whether her apparent weakness could be hiding a mastermind capable of conquering the universe, or a tireless predator harassing the human race” (33). She suggests that they should reproduce. When they have sex, it’s as if she’s studying his caresses “so that Pablo would notice she’d had an orgasm when she was supposed to have one” (36). Pablo’s anxieties provide a slightly comic tone to the piece, not only his concern that she’s an alien but also that she’ll tell all of her alien race how bad he is in bed. The twist to the story, though, is that she disappears. Pablo is proud because it confirms his suspicions that she is an alien that needed to return to her home planet. However, he sees her on the subway one afternoon and runs up to her asking how she’s doing. She tells him that she is not Anita. Pablo tells her to stop messing around and she says, “I’m not Anita, I’m Clarita” (37). Despite being identical, there’s something different about her: “She was prettier, if an alien could be described in that way” (37). The story ends with him introducing himself to “Clarita” and the thought that “The invasion has begun [...] and he felt a mix of terror and joy” (37). The story feels more satisfying as a narrative, but again, feels as if it could be developed into a more substantial and paranoiac doppelganger story.

The descriptive quality of the stories varies. Sometimes the sentences don’t really ‘pop,’ and I wonder if that’s a translation issue. That said, the story “Architecture” is rich with engaging turns of phrase. The story doesn’t really do much, but it describes dragonflies in a church: “The dragonfly of the night vibrates and engenders a violent void that settles into the walls, the architecture. It’s a great spiderweb of transparent threads that destroys the celestial breath” (132). What a wonderful cosmic image!

The closing two stories show some promise, but the endings simply don’t land. In “Mary Carminum,” we open with a compelling premise: two horrible men are competing to sleep with women during a night on the town; they rank them on numerical scales and it’s clear that they’ve drugged women before. We get these awful guys and see them getting into a situation where a woman has led them to a strange party. It’s a compelling reversal where the men can get their comeuppance. The few men at the party are essentially zombified and become the playthings of the Mother-Mary-worshipping women who also perform strange out-of-tune songs and make the men clap. It’s fine, but I think the lack of interaction and lack of self-awareness of the main character in his situation pulls away the dramatic tension. If only he started putting things together, trying to escape a little more dramatically, or resisting his capture, he might have been a more compelling character. Instead, he’s already a mindless zombie before he becomes a literal mindless zombie. The final story, “The Solitary Ones” is again a great premise but it ends when it should start. The main character is working late on New Year’s Eve and takes the subway to, hopefully, make it in time for the toasts. The power on the subway goes out and “you” find “yourself” having to walk through the unlit subway tunnels until “you” finally get to a room which, then, lacks an exit. There are mysterious white figures that turn. They have been waiting for you. The liminal space horror, vaguely intimating the afterlife, gives us something to work with, but there’s ultimately no impact. The psychological impact of the experience is cut short.

Ultimately, I think the selection is pretty forgettable. It isn’t overtly bad; it’s just flat. Bland. The style is fine. The premises are sometimes even good, but as a collection, the delivery is just lacklustre. The ideas need to be fleshed out, the suspense needs to be heightened, otherwise the payoff falls, at best, flat, and, at worst, laughable. I’m sure there’s an audience for these stories, but, sadly, it is not me.

Happy reading!

Walking in Two Worlds by Wab Kinew

  Well-known politicians often write books, usually about their career trajectories, the laws they passed, and / or shooting the beloved family dog. Two years before Wab Kinew was elected as premier of Manitoba, he published Walking in Two Worlds, a young adult fiction novel that I’m considering teaching in grade 9 English.

The big appeal of teaching Walking in Two Worlds is its relatability for a range of teenage experiences. Our main character, Bagonegiizhigok Holiday (Bugz) is an Indigenous girl who is a pro gamer and streamer for a virtual reality game called the Floraverse. I like the gaming aspect of the novel because it also provides the opportunity for some fantasy battles that I think would appeal to young people craving action scenes. Conversely, Bugz’ brother is a dancer at pow wows and impresses the folks on the reservation. With two worlds in the book, it gives a broader range of students the opportunity to connect—though the ‘real world’ sections are more prominent.

There’s another storyline, too. There’s a boy named Feng, a Uyghur sent from China to live on reserve with his aunt. He and Bugz develop a connection, despite Feng being part of an online gaming clan called Clan:LESS that targets Bugz. Indeed, the book starts with Clan:LESS teaming up against Bugz only for her to dominate them. The Clan:LESS group is essentially a group of white supremacist misogynists that want to take out the Indigenous girl and can’t stand that she’s better than them.

I like the idea of the online game being a focus, though it isn’t without some question marks. Number one: it is both a full-immersion virtual reality and a real-world crossover. The details are a little unclear on how it works. When you’re not in the game, it seems to play for you. Also, if you die in the game you have to start over again, and it takes real money to develop your player. It’s a little hazy when Bugz is streaming and hearing and seeing all kinds of comments from her fans where those actually appear if she’s experiencing the game. It’s also a little implausible when Bugz takes out groups of opponents at once and, repeatedly, “hundreds of gamer tags went floating up.” It feels implausible, but we have to just sort of accept it because Bugz has access to a magical resource, a sanctuary that exists in the real world as an Indigenous sacred site, that doubles as a special site in the game.

I think the game is the more engaging of the storylines in the text, though it gets a little less attention as the book goes on. There’s some tension with The Alpha (Clan:LESS’ leader) and Feng, a measly underling trying to earn his place among this misogynist horde. It also seems a little implausible that he’d be friends with Bugz in real life, although maybe I’m just naive to think that young men can resist the temptation of the manosphere.

The book is a little bit on the nose and spells things out for the audience, but I suppose that’s okay for a young adult novel. There’s no ambiguity that Clan:LESS is in the wrong and that Feng needs to abandon the oppressive mindsets to reconcile with his real-world friend. There are a few things that grate on me as being both on-the-nose and stereotypical, but again, maybe that’s just speaking to the adolescent experience. Bugz, for instance, has a number of concerns about her weight; in the real-world, she’s a little overweight, while she made her avatar a hot badass girl with a thin waist. There’s also a sequence in which Bugz considers suicide, indeed goes so far as hanging the noose, and I feel a little uncomfortable with how direct the planning and execution are depicted in the book. The discussion of the Uyghurs and Chinese Islamophobia is also a bit direct, but helps to build a framework for broader issues in the world. The depictions of China and its government might not be entirely “fair and balanced” but maybe it will start a conversation.

The ‘real world’ storyline is a little less gripping to me. There are some interactions with mean girls, her budding romance with Feng, her anxieties about her weight, and so on. More importantly, Bugz’ brother has some health concerns and it’s revealed that he has cancer. The prognosis is not great. The support Bugz and her brother have for one another, though, helps to drive the story forward and leads to some moments of magical realism where they save each others’ lives.

The book touches on a number of key themes I hope to emphasize in the grade 9 English course: identity, community, and voice. It’s the story of a girl who finds herself through and in relation to her community and uses her voice to make a change in online spaces. The book drags a little in places, and the ending is a bit of a flop—we never see the big battle after Bugz’ resurrection—but overall the story is reasonably engaging. I think students would probably like it, but we’ll see how they feel about reading this one soon.

Happy reading!