A Formative Friendship Cut Short by Tragedy

In “Stay True,” Hua Hsu, a staff writer for The New Yorker, recounts his relationship with an Asian American college friend, whose search for identity quietly shaped the author’s own.

In his quietly wrenching memoir, “Stay True,” the New Yorker writer Hua Hsu recalls starting out at Berkeley in the mid-1990s as a watchful teenager who had cultivated a cramped sensibility. “I fixated on the lamest things people did,” he writes, delineating who he was by what he rejected — music by Oasis and Pearl Jam, anything “uncool” or “mainstream.” He identified as straight edge — no drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes — less out of punk-rock principle than out of fear: “I couldn’t imagine letting down my inhibitions around people I’d be silently judging the whole time.”

So of course he was suspicious of Ken the first time they met — Ken, the easygoing and confident frat boy who lived one floor above, a guy who listened to the Dave Matthews Band, “music I found appalling.” Ken’s style was “ruggedly generic,” all Polo shirts and backward baseball caps, while Hsu wore old-man cardigans and “an audible amount of corduroy.”

About the only thing they had in common was that they were both Asian American, but even that just obscured the gulf between their backgrounds: Hsu’s parents had immigrated from Taiwan, whereas Ken’s Japanese American family had lived in the United States for generations. Ken (identified in the book by only his first name) felt entitled to the dominant culture in a way that Hsu couldn’t quite imagine. Hsu remembers thinking how odd it was when Ken came over and didn’t take off his shoes.

「友誼在於去認識的意願，而非被認識的渴望。」

一部台裔美國人的成長故事

一則獻給逝去好友的真誠告白

★2023年美國普立茲自傳文學獎．美國書評人協會獎獲獎作品

★2022年《紐約時報》、《時代》、《滾石》、NPR等各大媒體年度好書

如何離開你而不拋棄你？對徐華而言，寫作帶來另一種活在當下的方式。日記中，他反覆審視發生在兩人之間或大或小的事件對彼此生命的影響，將那些與阿健已然開啟、但始終未完的對話延續下去。本書書名Stay True，是徐華與阿健私下在信件結尾使用的祝福語，意即「保持真誠」──無論如何，都要對朋友真誠，對自己真誠，對自己可能成為的那人保持真誠。本書圍繞著一段短暫而深刻的友誼展開，既是一段艱難而傷感的成年記述，也是一則哀悼也歌頌友誼的真誠告白。

本集故事借閱所，資深主播詹慶齡帶你閱讀《Stay True保持真誠》