Hua Hsu writes about his childhood, college life at Berkeley, and his postgrad years in his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Stay True. A young Hsu navigates life as an aspiring zine-maker and culture critic. He’s the kind of person who silently begs to be noticed for his secondhand fashion and who rejects the opinion of any listener of The Dave Matthews Band. That is, until he meets Ken, a Japanese-American frat boy, who challenges Hsu with his tastes, embrace of dominant culture, and his unabated passion for life, regardless of what is or isn’t “cool”. Their friendship develops over the years, until Ken is killed in a carjacking, and no matter how Hsu spins it in his derailed brain, it was seemingly both random and entirely unavoidable. Although it is absolutely a coming-of-age story, the true project of the book is philosophical. What does it mean to know someone, to be in the wake of a life cut short, to try and faithfully represent that person on a page? To reject or assimilate into the dominant culture as the child of immigrants? How can we say we know someone at all? There is something unknowably glorious about this reckless-yet-responsible brand of youth, but in the eyes of Stay True’s author, it’s worth investigating all the relationship blunders, all the thrifted finds, and all the broader aspects of the dominant culture that contribute to what we take for granted as quotidian American life.
Stay True is Hua Hsu’s second book, the first being A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (Harvard University Press 2016), a scholarly work on Chinese-American literature in the interwar period. Hsu is a professor of English at Bard College and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has contributed many pieces on American multiculturalism, music criticism, and other subjects.
Stay True is accessible in its presentation and profound in its insights. And even though it’s situated in a portrait of southern California, its resonance has cascaded all the way to Colgate, being its 2026 Community Reads pick, and has helped us think freshly about this phenomenon we call college.