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.

Disorientation: Being Black in the World

        When I reflect on my life, I often linger on those small moments of embarrassment and shame that have disrupted my sense of self. Ian Williams’ Disorientation: Being Black in the World is somewhat of a memoir that lingers on similar moments, but specifically with a racial layer that my being White shields me from. That is the sense of disorientation: moments when race makes itself visible and distorts a racialized person’s sense of themselves in the world.

One of the most explicit examples of this, in both senses, is when Williams recounts his niece being called the n-word by a young White girl. The first time she is called the word, she feels herself at a disconnect from the world around her, disoriented from her usual experiences and reduced to her race. Other moments seem more innocuous (generally what are described as microaggressions), but nonetheless create a profound impact on the person experiencing them. For example, Williams discusses being in middle school and having to select instruments for music class. He initially wants to play the trumpet and is told that his lips are too big. He switches to the French horn and flounders at it. The narrative seems like it ought not matter much (I was told I couldn’t play the trumpet in grade 7 because I was going to get braces), but the exchange with his teacher lingers. He considers the comment about his lips as a form of biological determinism that is pervasive and causes him to question his own place based on his racialized features.

The book is replete with personal stories, and therein lies its strength. If you’re looking to read about race from a more theoretical framework, there are other texts that serve that purpose more effectively. If you’re looking for a more personal connection to issues, Disorientation is the way to go, since it gives the personal touch with a hint of the wider systemic issues. Consider, for example, his brief commentary about how racialized professors are routinely ranked lower on University course evaluations—which he ties to the moment when he had to leave the room for evaluations and when he returned a student announced that his green card was ready. In the context of being a Black academic in the United States, Williams also discusses the use of African American as a general term for anyone Black, regardless of citizenship status (American) or place of origin (Africa vs. Jamaica, for instance).

One of the highlights of the book, in my mind, is a chapter that uses traffic stops as an anchor. Williams recounts driving with his friend and the chapter drifts in and out of anecdotes of being stopped by police. Williams’ friend’s disorientation is poignant because there’s an element of self-doubt. Everything he describes, as Williams notes, is racially motivated. The police officer keeps his hand on his gun, approaches the car from the passenger side window, repeatedly asks if the driver is the owner of the car, and so on. Yet, the driver was going over the speed limit. It’s a rich chapter for exploring the standards of perfection that Black people need to achieve in order to feel totally guiltless in situations where their race is leveraged against them. The pathos of the chapter is beautifully wrought and presented in such a literary mode that it’s hard to ignore William’s strengths as a writer.

Something I need to question in myself, or at least continually keep in check, is that the sections of  Williams’ book that I find most engaging are the pieces that also appeal to my White sensibilities. For instance, Williams has an excellent section about his troubled relationship with David Foster Wallace. The famed writer has an essay about the dictionary in which he talks about how he teaches standard White English to Black students, essentially out of a kind of tough love—they need to learn how to write White because that’s the standard of the Academy. Williams offers a beautiful commentary on how he imagines DFW might treat that Black student today, given DFW’s sense of curiosity and willingness to engage with others. It’s a loving consideration of an author, flawed perhaps, and a generous reimagining of how the same author might address racism in the institution today. Williams adds dimension to the argument that I find particularly resonant.

I’m going to quote a section of the chapter at length here, since it offers so many wonderful insights and dispositions towards writing that I find valuable. Williams writes the following, nearly a eulogy, about David Foster Wallace:

Why must the work fall on the Black student to close the breach between groups? [...] Would it be any more work to appreciate SBE than it would be to appreciate Black music? But the fear of contamination keeps White people from engaging with Black expression until it becomes profitable economically or culturally. I’d like to believe that if David Foster Wallace were alive today, and paying attention to the current racial conversations in America, he’d have a significantly revised version of this speech: that it would have become a conversation, not a speech. Instead of expecting the student to step towards Whiteness, he would step towards Blackness. I see in him [...] over the course of his work, the potential of White people to become less casual about the psychic violence they do to Black people. I know he’s dead, and I know there’s no way to confirm his trajectory, yet the evidence of his thoughtfulness and humility indicates a White man with capacity for growth. His curiosity and self-analysis prevent him from being willfully ignorant. Can we forgive a person their ignorance? Can we take heart that dead White people might yet change their minds?

This passage is the culmination of the discussion and identifies some central problems with Academia—that systemic change relies on the system’s victims to reshape it. It is strange, after all, that we have an appreciation of Black arts and yet insist that White English is the standard. I also appreciate the generous reading of figures from the past, which gives us the opportunity to select what is valuable and dismiss that which is not. I fear that when clearly influential personages are dismissed wholesale that it leads to a culture of conflict, so to be willing to give DFW the benefit of the doubt, that he would switch from a speech to a conversation, seems to be the most productive way of having the conversation. I also really love that question at the end: “Can we take heart that dead White people might yet change their minds?” I find that such a rich question, contrary to nature and yet at some level it resonates.

Disorientation is a short work that offers a number of specific moments that are worth discussing at greater length, especially in conversation with others. Williams offers his perspectives in an approachable, personable tone which I think appeals to many potential audiences, including ones who may hold more overtly racist views. Since Williams is less dense theoretically than some other texts in the same field, it’s much harder to feel that the argument is controversial. It’s another person’s experience, which has a universal quality while remaining effectively focused on its particulars.

It’s a good book. A short book that is a great introduction to conversations about race—and one that is more personable than controversial. Like moments of Disorientation, perhaps the book will stick with you—but this time in a positive and productive way.

Happy reading!