Stay True: A Memoir by Hua Hsu

Author:Hua Hsu [Hsu, Hua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Cultural; Ethnic & Regional, Asian & Asian American, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, Asian American & Pacific Islander Studies
ISBN: 9780385547789
Google: cVBTEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-09-27T07:00:00+00:00

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Friendship rests on the presumption of reciprocity, of drifting in and out of one another’s lives, with occasional moments of wild intensity. When you’re nineteen or twenty, your life is governed by debts and favors, promises to pick up the check or drive next time around. We built our lives into a set of mutual agreements, a string of small gifts lobbed back and forth. Life happened within that delay. I started a Secret Santa exchange, only I was anti-religion, and I didn’t want to call it that, so it became known as the Secret Non-Denominational Winter Holiday Gift Giver. “We celebrate goodwill and brotherhood,” I wrote, so no girls were invited. I scanned in all our pictures and made a flyer with the rules: no CDs and nothing that could be scammed from work, like “a spool of fax paper or children’s shoes from Nordstrom.” We were also supposed to pool together some money for charity. I imagined keeping this up into our forties.

I thought college was where I would find my people, which I assumed meant people who dressed like me, and listened to the same music as me, and wanted to see the same movies as me. Variations on the theme of me. But I realized, maybe too late, that all I wanted was friends to listen to music with. Someone curious enough to ask what something was and then reciprocate by playing me something by Styx or Christopher Cross or another artist I was far too cool to know. Ken devoured the tapes I made him and then, like an encouraging parent, offered a song-by-song critique. I joked that he was probably the only frat boy in America to like Belle and Sebastian’s meekest tunes. He left my tapes strewn about, on the floor of his car or in some dusty corner of the frat house, knowing there would be a new edition soon, requesting repeats of favorites—“the song about the horses.”

Everybody likes something—a song, a movie, a TV show—so you choose not to; this is how you carve out space for yourself. But the right person persuades you to try it, and you feel as though you’ve made two discoveries. One is that this thing isn’t so bad. The other is a new confidant.

Ken told me how he had driven all over San Diego in search of the CD single for Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” because of a song called “Yellow Ledbetter.” I rolled my eyes as aggressively as possible. Clearly a rip-off of a Jimi Hendrix song. I dug through my records trying to find “Little Wing,” but Ken was elsewhere, following the song’s fluttering guitar line, remembering a girl for whom he’d played it. Eventually, we struck a compromise. Before our finals, we would sit in front of my stereo and reverently listen to “Yellow Ledbetter.” It wasn’t so bad. Then my choice, David Bowie and Queen’s “Under Pressure,” would rouse us out the door. We lived for rituals, looking forward to the day when they would be so instinctive that we would forget how they started.

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