Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and an English professor at Bard College. Hsu’s 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Stay True is centered on his particular college friendship with Ken Ishida — a University of California, Berkeley undergraduate who was killed in a 1998 carjacking. In Stay True, Hsu writes about his indolent adolescence spent in the San Francisco Bay Area, and how his friendship with Ken and the aftermath of Ken’s death shaped his sense of identity.
Stay True is Hsu’s first memoir. His other work is primarily journalistic or academic. His subjects have been eclectic: he has written about Tupac, pockets, the World Cup, 60s music, and K-pop.
Hsu was taking a break from interviews at this time, so we were lucky to have snagged time with him via Professor Louis Menand, who supervised Hsu’s dissertation when he was a graduate student at Harvard. Following a short email exchange, in which Hsu’s missives were all in lowercase, we met Hua Hsu on Zoom.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
We were interested in what the research process was like for Stay True, which features Ken as a mythic center of the work. When you come across artifacts of life from a couple decades ago, with things that you may have remembered or misremembered, how do you deal with the challenges that those things pose to your own memory?
The book was written largely from memory and not as a research or journalistic project. Obviously I lived with the materials for quite some time. Prior to writing anything down, I did revisit my old journals or maps to figure out how far these places were in miles.
When I was in my mid-to-late twenties, I felt very uncomfortable about that gap between what I remembered and misremembered, because misremembering something could seem like a violation. I think as I got older, I just accepted that things I remembered were the things I valued at the time. Which I think is just how life goes.
It feels very rigorously researched because I have the ability to recall very inane details from the past. A lot of the fact-based stuff there sort of persuades the reader that it was a real time and a real place with real people, but I think a lot of the emotional stuff or the stuff about friendship is more just based on how I remembered things. After I wrote a draft of it, I shared it with some friends who were in the book, and they would point out some things that I misremembered, but I kept a lot of the mistakes in because it felt a lot more real. The book is really an attempt for me to demystify a lot of objects I kept.
We were wondering if the act of writing changed any of those experiences for you. For instance, did writing change how you feel about friendship and in what way?
It definitely [did] because I was remembering moments that are really ephemeral. There’s no need to remember most of the things you do with your friends, so long as you and your friends continue building memories. It’s only when that experience terminates that you have any reason at all to reflect.
This is part of where the misremembering happens, and I tried to write it into the book, where you replay a memory so often when it feels like a ritual. In reality, we were in school for six semesters, so how many times would we have studied for finals together? Four, maybe? But the memory is like an analog image, like a computer would have a flash on the screen so often that it would be burned in the monitor. It’s such an indelible memory for me that I look back on it now with such fondness and affection, when in the moment we were just studying in the library.
That’s not to say all of you should look up when you’re studying in the library and think aw man, we’re living life right now. That would be a cursed way to read the book. But there’s a way in which the small moments of friendship you may actually end up remembering. That is how our relationship with memories changes: it’s an outside observation of our own life.
You write about how you were “embarrassed about private hysterics,” and you also wrote about how “damn deep you tried to sound” in your diaries in Stay True. Confronting the self, especially the past self, is embarrassing in many ways. How did you reconcile the writing you used to have, and the writing you have now?
There are two questions here: first, whether it’s innately embarrassing to read things you wrote two, five, ten years ago, and second, in this case, whether the embarrassment had to do with the “private hysterics”. I don’t think I’m innately embarrassed by who I used to be. People find the book surprisingly funny given its subject matter, and most of that is me dunking on my teenage self, which is mostly something I would not have had the distance to understand when I was in my late twenties and thirties. It’s easier now for me as a 46-year-old to feel even more of a sense of sadness that he’s gone, because I’m like he’s missed out on 25 years of experiences, but also see how as a 21-year-old, you don’t yet understand the full scope of what you’re going to experience in life.
As for the specific embarrassment of rereading my own journals, that was actually crucial to the “research” part of the book. There was a different version of the book that I envisioned in 2018 or 2019 that would’ve been four times as long, but would’ve also contained these narrative histories of fax machines, mid 90’s internet, analog technology, a lot of the things that are in the book as things I’d experienced as a teenager. I envisioned the memoiristic part of the book pulling together the larger research history of culture in the 1990s. For a variety of reasons that didn’t seem like a useful way to approach this. But going back to my journals: I think that was why I started writing things from memory, because the only thing I couldn’t access about the past was how I felt. I could look back at an old AOL screen and homepage and listen to music, and those things are still the same as they were back then, they trigger the same sense of like, “Oh, the Internet was this,” “driving around was this,” but the depth of feeling — when you are younger, you feel things in such a wider extreme — those things are impossible to capture when you’re older.
That doesn’t make me unique, but I had for many years kept this journal where I tried to describe the highest highs and lowest lows; it was embarrassing because it’s like reading someone describing what it’s like to be on drugs or hallucinating. You’re trying to describe these sublime highs and lows with an immature grasp of language.
So that was the part where I was like, research will never turn me to that moment. But it provided a fascinating index. The book used to quote from my journals much, much more. It’s sort of like when characters in a movie are writing a song or writing a poem and you never hear the song and the poem because you’re distracted by whether the song was good. My embarrassment matters more than whether the reader finds it embarrassing.
You mentioned you envisioned the book to be four times as long. Was the intention of this exploration of friendship always the same, and you realized that the way you structured this book was not conducive to the intention, or did the intention become that as you wrote? There are still, obliquely, themes of identity or assimilation, but it’s touched upon in a more personal way rather than theoretical way.
I didn’t know what the book was about when I started writing in my journals in 1998, but it wasn’t gonna be a book then, I was just trying to collect as much trivia as I could. When I started to work on it around 2017 or 2018, it was still a story about friendship and grief, but I didn’t know it was necessarily a book about memory. I also felt insecure about writing an entire book about two Asian-American guys. It didn’t seem like anyone really cared about that. So I think part of it was a sense that making it be about more than that — maybe our friendship could symbolize something about our context, the 1990s, making it more about just two people. It’s sort of like when I’m writing criticism and I can’t think of what to write about the song itself, I write about the context, the history, it allows more people into the experience.
Then I felt that it was a dishonest way to approach it, because we were just kids. We had no idea what the history of email was, or how these things were going to evolve. What was more interesting about the experience was experiencing it, not necessarily knowing the history of it. It’s sort of like how people write a biography or memoir and know too much at every moment.
Take a very generic example of someone being made fun of because they’re Asian in elementary school. You’re in elementary school, so it’s very unlikely this would instantly cohere as an anti-racist aware of structural inequality. In your mind, you’re just like, that’s messed up.
I tried to be very conscious to what I could’ve possibly known or understood when I was 18 or 20. Turning it into a cultural history-shoehorned-into-memoir wouldn’t have really made sense, because we only understood this tiny sliver of the world at the time. Even though the book does cite theory and different thinkers, that’s also a gesture toward the 18-year-old version of me who would feel the need to cite Derrida just to have an honest conversation about friendship. There’s something slightly performative about it, but all of that is sort of the shape of the conversation.
The question I was trying to answer didn’t start off having fleshed out political or social dimensions. The book was purely navel-gazing. Over the course of writing, the question assumes these different moments, and sort of does intersect with a lot of questions that are still relevant or part of the culture today — I had forgotten the amount of debate Ken and I had about what we today call representation. We didn’t even call it that at that time; it was just sort of a debate, like would you rather be this, would you rather be that. There were no stakes to these arguments when we were kids, and now they kind of align with these larger political and social movements we have. Which is such a delight that people relate to this book at all, because it started off as such an intimate, almost selfish pursuit compared to other things I have to do. I had worked so long as a journalist answering to other people’s deadlines, taking assignments; this was this one thing I had never stopped thinking about, and in many ways it’s the origin story of why I became a writer in the first place.
But in a way, it feels very universal.
And that’s why it’s so funny I retain enough 18-year-old self to think that I’m singular and unique — "no one will understand any of this because I’m so iconoclastic" — but a lot of people were like, I was just like you, I experienced the same kinds of things. What matters isn’t the things that are most unique about ourselves, but what we share with strangers.
Did you think about how it was difficult to write about friends, Ken, other people, and whether that could feel like an act of betrayal, to paraphrase Viet Thanh Nguyen?
When I started writing [the memoir], I had a vision of it being a group biography. Not only would I research all of the 1990s, I would interview all my friends and bring all their lives into it. But that wasn’t the question I was trying to answer. The question I was trying to answer was much more solipsistic, which was, why did this man have such an abiding impact on me? To answer that, I had to engage with my own sense of self, identity, and memory.
I never felt worried about betraying anyone. I wrote a version of it, and that’s my version of it. The version that was edited and turned into a book that people read is a portion of the story I wrote, but it’s not the entirety of it. I knew that in that move from writing it all down to turning it into a book that I needed to do the first thing on my own, but the second thing required more conversation and cooperation. Anyone who was in the book once or twice were allowed to read portions beforehand, change their names, etc. I was just sort of bringing everyone together in my mind to hang out a little bit longer.
Also, Ken has this phantom presence in the book. I have a really hard time describing how people look, how someone looks or moves or sounds. Thankfully in this case that can just be mistaken as an artistic choice to leave him as more of this aura, or this brilliant specter, rather than a fully fleshed-out person.
You mentioned earlier you were “insecure about writing a book about Asian-American guys.” We were interested in whether you felt slotted into a certain Asian-American literature, or if you felt pressures to conform to that — especially since you also mentioned that the book that was published and distributed wasn’t exactly the book that you wrote.
I don’t know if “insecure” is the right word. I guess it was how I felt maybe eight or nine years ago, when I would describe what I wanted to do to other people. They would often compare it to things with built-in audiences. I don’t think there’s a built-in audience for a story about [two Asian guys]; it’s not a mystery, it’s not a love story, it’s just the story of two friends in college. It was interesting to write about it from the perspective of teaching Asian-American literature, reading it for the past thirty years, writing about it in magazines, and just having an awareness of the tropes people use. But after I finished it, I was thankful I had written this in 2020 rather than 1995 or 2004, because at this point there’s so much more space within the category of “Asian-American writing” that it’s capacious enough where you don’t necessarily have to fall within these preexisting traditions. I think my book probably does relate to a lot of those things, but I wasn’t really hung up on them by the time I started writing it in 2020 or 2019, because there were so many examples of people who haven’t had to do that, and those books were published anyway.
Also, if I had the chance to write this book in my 20s, rather than my 40s, it would have been a terrible experience. I think part of the challenge for younger writers is that every opportunity seems like it may be the last opportunity, because every year seems like the last year, like a lot of these institutions may not exist. But you have to know your own limits. For me personally, knowing that I had been waiting to write this for many years, I could not have done it when I was 30, and I certainly could not have done it in my 20s. But I would have been really tempted if someone in my 20s had said hey, I’m giving you this opportunity — but you just have to know what you’re actually ready for.
On the Time to Say Goodbye podcast, Jay Caspian Kang asked you about voice, and you talked about how Asians are just good at imitating things. Then Tammy Kim said that you had a fairly distinctive voice, and you said you didn’t think so.
I still don't think I have a distinct voice. I think that part of what writing is is a performance of authority. Whether you’re writing an essay for class, or I’m writing a review for The New Yorker, we’re just cosplaying as experts. With a term paper, you’re just responsible for being a master of a subject for like a week or two, and then you can just sort of wipe it from your memory banks. The New Yorker writing I do — it’s like I’m playing a character who knows a bunch of stuff about a subject. And in that case, I do end up knowing a lot about something because I just cram and I’ll read everything written about a subject, and then I’ll just sort of pretend like I knew all this stuff.
I guess when I think people have a voice it’s because they’re able to do that, but also a personality. Like there’s a sense of humor, or there’s like some strange connection they make.
I think the parts of the book that I read now and think "that's what you've been trying to say, all these years," are the very beginning and the very end. Like probably the first three pages, and the last eight pages. That's where I feel like, "this is your voice, this is you." But what's weird about it is that those are the parts that are in second person, which is not how I speak at all. I would never say these things out loud. But I felt like I still remember writing those parts and thinking like, "this is exactly what is supposed to feel like when you're writing the thing that you need to write."
But generally, I think that because the Asian-American experience is so fractured and weird, and because immigrant culture is still so foundational to that, and immigrant culture is one that prizes mastery but also mimicry, there is an element of pastiche to [Asian-American writing]. An element of being able to hear what other people are saying, and figuring out where you are based on those different polls, as opposed to growing up and being part of some hundred-two hundred-three hundred year tradition that you can seamlessly slot into. And that's not to say that everyone else feels that necessarily, but that's just what it seems like from the outside where a lot of us are trying to take what we can take.
You also talk about how tastes become personalities. Part of the book is about developing that taste, perhaps a kind that diverges from the mainstream. How did you go about that?
Taste is really about experimentation and openness. I think I thought that I was far more open minded than I indeed was — I was just open to everything that was just a little bit outside of “mainstream culture.” I don’t think I realized this at the time at all. And I didn’t probably didn't even realize it till I was much older.
But one of the things that I look back upon and felt nostalgic for was the amount of that, the degree to which that experimentation could happen in private. You didn’t leave a digital trail at all. And so you could just sort of experiment with, like, I'm gonna get these pants and see how they fit. You're never going to take a picture of yourself wearing those pants, so no one will ever know that you tried to wear the style of pants, and I'm thinking of a very specific pair of pants I used to own. Anyone with a phone has access to so much more information and so many more potential fits than I did when I was younger. And that’s both cool and very daunting. It would actually make it much harder to truly figure out who you are.
Did you ever feel like a literary outsider?
I certainly didn’t know what any of these things were when I started grad school. And then all of a sudden, I’m on the East Coast, I’m only reading music magazines and everyone’s like, I gotta pitch The New Yorker or something. And I was like, I don’t know what that is, is that different from New York Magazine. But then you very quickly just sort of get up to speed because that’s what everyone else is a part of, but I think that there’s also this sense of alterity that you can’t let go of, even once you find yourself in those spaces.
And so for me, for a while, I didn’t really feel part of any scene. But I didn’t mind that much, because I sort of liked the freedom of not having to follow one specific path. Part of it is because that path seemed highly unlikely, like, there’s no preordained instant sense in which I felt like it was possible that I would do any of the things that I’ve done.
It was very eye opening when I was a TA at Harvard, because my students were far more pedigreed than I was, even though I was their TA. They were definitely people who were more sophisticated readers than I was. It was strange to teach undergrads and think, like, well, they're just going to leapfrog me and become my editors very soon. I didn't feel one way or another about it.
Do you have advice for people just starting out?
The hierarchy in the publishing and literary worlds was much clearer, say 20 years ago, because there were more publications and it was easier to make a living as a writer. So you could just sort of hang out with people who were all paying their rent writing for music magazines. And then there were the people who worked at like Harper’s, but there was no need necessarily for all these different communities to eye each other, because there was just more money in writing. Whereas now I think the only way to make a living as a writer is to write for one of like, two or three publications, and even then it can still be like a real struggle.
One of the strangest lessons in life is when you realize that being good at things only matters to a certain extent. Whether you can turn things in on time is actually far more important. I think it's the challenge of being professional and being diligent, but then not letting the work consume you in ways that can be unhealthy.
I think on the more practical side of things, just figure out what people are not writing about and what subjects are not being covered, and specialize in those subjects. There's no end of people who have opinions on Donald Trump and Beyoncé. But there's not a lot of people who have ever been able to explain to me how biofuels work. The death of local reporting has really opened up a lot of opportunities in parts of America that are far less glamorous than working in Manhattan. But that’s where you get a sort of perspective on whatever is going to happen to the rest of the country.
To close off, based on your experience as a writer and being on the board of the Asian-American Writers Workshop, are there any broad trends or issues you see with the trajectory of Asian-American literature?
What makes a healthy ecosystem is diversity. And so the fact that there are incredibly successful people like Viet Thanh Nguyen or Michelle Zauner or Cathy Park Hong or Min Jin Lee — it's amazing that we have figures like that now or part of like, bestseller culture. But it’s really about ensuring that there's like a robust ecosystem of writing, and that means diversity of experiences, geographical diversity, class, writing across like class lines. I think people are doing all of these things, but they may not be as elevated. I guess the fear would be like when Maxine Hong Kingston both blew up in the 70s and 80s [and] publishers were only looking for the next Maxine Hong Kingston — like that is literally what writers would be told [by the publishers]. The important thing is to celebrate the successes, but also to stay vigilant about the stories that aren’t being pushed in quite the same way.
Thank you so much for the interview. And now to close off, we have our speed round of questions. Cafe or bakery?
Wherever I could hang out for a couple hours, with just a cup of coffee. Preferably with no laptops.
Next question: oceans or mountains?
Mountains. I can’t swim, so I find water terrifying.
That was all of our fun questions, unless you want to give one more from yourself.
I don't believe in binaries. As Derrida would say, I don't believe in binaries.
2025