Olivia: Jackson, I'm going to put you on the spot. Review today's book in exactly five words. Jackson: Okay... Mixtapes, friendship, heartbreak, cigarettes, zines. Olivia: Nice. Mine is: A quiet, devastating, beautiful punch. Jackson: That's a powerful image. It already tells me this isn't a light read. Olivia: It's definitely not. We're talking about Stay True by Hua Hsu. Jackson: Ah, the one that’s been getting so much attention. Olivia: That’s the one. And this book has some serious weight behind it—it won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir. What's fascinating is that Hsu, who's a staff writer for The New Yorker, wrote this over two decades, piecing together memories to make sense of a tragedy that completely altered his life. Jackson: Two decades... That's an incredible commitment. It makes me think about how we even build those memories in the first place. You mentioned zines and mixtapes in your review, which feels so... specific. Let's start there. What was so important about these cultural artifacts for Hsu?

Olivia: That's the perfect place to start, because for Hsu, these weren't just hobbies. They were the building blocks of his entire identity. He opens the book with this killer line: "Assimilation was not a problem to be solved but the problem itself." Jackson: Whoa. That’s a bold statement for a child of immigrants. Olivia: Exactly. His parents were Taiwanese immigrants who came to the U.S. for graduate school. They were driven by what he calls the classic "push-and-pull" dynamic—the promise of a different future. But for Hsu, growing up in suburban California, fitting in felt like a trap. Jackson: So he actively tried not to fit in? Olivia: He built his entire persona around it. He got into obscure bands, he made mixtapes with meticulous care, and he started a zine—a photocopied, handmade magazine. He says, "I was convinced that I could rearrange these piles of photocopied images, short essays, and bits of cut-up paper into a version of myself that felt real and true." Jackson: It’s like he was curating his own personality. We do that today with Spotify playlists and Instagram feeds, but doing it with paper and glue feels so much more deliberate. Olivia: It was. And it was also a way to stay connected to his family, but on his own terms. There's this amazing story about how he communicated with his father, who had moved back to Taiwan for a job. They used a fax machine. Jackson: A fax machine? That’s incredibly 90s. Olivia: Totally. Hsu would fax his math homework, and his dad would fax back the solutions with detailed explanations. But it became more than that. Hsu started including digests of American news, like Magic Johnson’s HIV announcement, and lists of new songs he liked. His dad would then go find those cassettes in Taipei and fax back his opinions. Jackson: That is so cool. It's like this analog version of a family group chat, but with more intention and a time delay. It’s a bridge between two worlds. Olivia: It is. But it also highlights the distance. His dad is trying to understand America through his son's cultural lens, while Hsu is trying to define himself against what he sees as mainstream America. He discovers Nirvana, and for a moment, it feels like his secret. But then "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is everywhere, his classmates are wearing the t-shirts, and his personal discovery becomes a mass-market trend. Jackson: Oh, I know that feeling. The minute your favorite indie band is in a car commercial, a little part of you dies inside. Olivia: Exactly. So that experience pushes him even further into the margins. He decides he needs to find things that are so obscure, so "alternative," that they can't be co-opted. Jackson: Okay, but let's be real. His whole identity is based on being 'alternative'? It sounds a little pretentious, honestly. Is he just a teenage snob? Olivia: I mean, a little bit, sure. He admits as much. But it's deeper than that. It's a defense mechanism. For him, and for many children of immigrants, the pressure to assimilate is immense. His parents saw America as this bundle of contradictions—"unbounded promise and hypocrisy, faith and greed." They were trying to navigate it. Hsu’s rejection of the mainstream was his way of navigating it, too. He was trying to find something authentic in a world that felt like it didn't have a place for him. He was building an armor of cultural taste. Jackson: An armor of cultural taste. I like that. Alright, so Hsu has built this carefully curated identity fortress. What happens when it gets breached? I'm guessing that's where Ken comes in.

Olivia: That is exactly where Ken comes in. Ken is everything Hua Hsu is not. He's a Japanese American whose family has been in the U.S. for generations. He's handsome, popular, joins a fraternity, and loves mainstream bands like Dave Matthews Band. Jackson: So, Hsu’s worst nightmare. Olivia: Pretty much. He describes Ken as "exactly like everyone else." He actively dislikes him on sight. Their friendship begins in the most mundane, unexpected way. The dorm elevator is broken, and Hsu reluctantly helps Ken carry his suitcases upstairs. Then Ken turns to him and asks, "Where do you get your clothes?" Jackson: So the friendship starts because Ken... asks for fashion advice? That's hilarious. It completely upends Hsu's whole 'I'm too cool for you' vibe. Olivia: It totally does! Ken, the mainstream frat boy, is genuinely curious about Hsu's thrift-store, grandfatherly style. He even asks Hsu to take him shopping for a 70s-themed party. It’s the first crack in Hsu's armor. He realizes Ken sees him, not just the cultural signals he’s sending out. Jackson: That’s a huge moment. It’s one thing to be seen for the identity you project, but it’s another to be seen for the person underneath. Olivia: And their bond deepens through this simple, shared ritual. One night, Ken invites Hsu out to the balcony for a "smoke," even though neither of them smokes. It just becomes their code for "I want to talk." They’d stand out there, pretending to smoke, and just talk for hours about everything and nothing. Jackson: I love that. It’s a shared secret, a space just for them. Olivia: Eventually, they do start smoking for real, and it becomes this punctuation for their conversations. But the core of it was the connection. And it’s through these talks that Hsu starts to see the real Ken. There's this one heartbreaking story where Ken tells him about running into an ex-girlfriend who said, "My life has always been a dream." And Ken is just mystified. He says to Hsu, "Can you believe she said that? My life has never been a dream." Jackson: Wow. That one line just shatters the whole "perfect mainstream guy" image. Olivia: Completely. And it leads to another moment of shared vulnerability. Ken auditions for the MTV show The Real World and asks the casting agent why there's never been an Asian American guy on the show. The agent dismissively tells him, "We don't have the personalities for it." Jackson: Ugh. That's brutal. Olivia: Ken is devastated. He tells Hsu, "I am a man without a culture." And that’s when Hsu realizes they’re both grappling with the same thing. Despite their different approaches—Hsu rejecting the mainstream, Ken trying to embrace it—they both feel like outsiders. They both feel this sense that American culture doesn't fully have a place for them. Jackson: That's the real common ground. It’s not about taste in music; it’s about this shared feeling of being invisible or un-writable into the main story. Olivia: Exactly! And Hsu later reflects on this using philosophy. He quotes the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who said that true friendship isn't about finding someone just like you. It's about "choosing knowing rather than being known." Hsu had to let go of his need to be known as "the alternative guy" and instead choose to truly know Ken. Jackson: That’s a beautiful way to put it. It’s an active choice, not a passive similarity. Olivia: That shared feeling of being an outsider is what makes their bond so deep. And it's what makes the tragedy that follows so devastatingly senseless.

Jackson: Right. The book is, at its heart, a story of grief. Ken's life is cut short in a violent, random carjacking less than three years after they meet. How does Hsu even begin to process that? Olivia: He writes. That’s the only thing he knows how to do. The night after Ken’s death, after all the friends have gone home, he sits down and types a letter to Ken. It’s this raw, desperate outpouring. He lists everything he’ll miss—Ken’s flatulence, their inside jokes, the way he looked. He ends it with, "So be with me, okay, Ken? Can you stay with me a little longer?" Jackson: It's gut-wrenching. And the fact that his first instinct is to write to Ken... it's like he's trying to keep the conversation going. The book itself is that act, right? Olivia: Precisely. The entire memoir is the ultimate fulfillment of that impulse. It’s his way of holding onto the memories. He talks about how, after the funeral, he and his friends tried to piece together a eulogy. They gathered at a Chinese restaurant, laughing and crying, sharing stories. Hsu becomes the keeper of these memories, the "executor of his spiritual estate." Jackson: He becomes the historian of their friendship. Olivia: He does. And he grapples with what that means. He reads the historian E.H. Carr, who argued that history is an "unending dialogue between the present and the past." He realizes that his memory is subjective, that he’s constructing a narrative. He even doubts his own recollections at one point, wondering if he and Ken were really as close as he remembers. Jackson: That’s a tough thing to confront. The fear that your most cherished memories might be a story you’ve told yourself. The book won the Pulitzer, but some readers have mentioned feeling a bit of that distance, that the style is more reflective than immersive. It sounds like that's part of the point—he's questioning the very act of remembering. Olivia: I think it is. He's showing us the seams of his memory. He’s not giving us a perfect, polished story because grief isn't like that. It's messy and contradictory. The healing, for him, comes through the act of trying to tell the story, not in finding a perfect resolution. Jackson: And does he find any kind of resolution? Olivia: In a way. Years later, in graduate school, he's going through a box of Ken's things and finds a script they had started writing together, a movie they called Barry Gordy's IMBROGLIO. He discovers that Ken had written pages of notes and dialogue he'd never seen. Jackson: No way. Olivia: Yes. And in the script, Ken is working through all the same ideas they had talked about—authenticity, identity, being Asian American. He finds a monologue Ken wrote for his own character that ends with the line: "We are not men without a culture. We just have to make it ourselves." Jackson: Wow. And finding that script years later... it's like Ken is speaking to him from the past, giving him the thesis for the very book he's trying to write. It's a perfect, heartbreaking circle. Olivia: It is. It’s the ultimate validation of their friendship and their shared intellectual journey. Ken was also trying to write their story.

Olivia: So you have this identity built from cultural armor, a friendship that shatters it and reveals your true self, and then a tragedy that forces you to rebuild it all through storytelling. Jackson: The book is a testament to the idea that we are the stories we tell. And when we lose someone, we keep them with us by continuing to tell their story, and our story together. Olivia: And in doing so, Hsu becomes the storyteller his father’s generation, focused on survival, couldn't be. He quotes his father's generation as thinking about survival, while the ones that follow tell the stories. Hsu takes on that role for his friend. Jackson: It makes you realize that 'staying true' isn't about clinging to a fixed identity you built when you were 18. It's about staying true to the connections that shape you, even after they're gone. The memory becomes the thing you're loyal to. Olivia: That’s beautifully put. The friendship, the memory of it, becomes the new anchor. It's a profound idea. It leaves us with a question for our listeners: What are the friendships that have fundamentally shaped who you are? And how do you stay true to them? Jackson: We’d love to hear your thoughts. Find us on our socials and share a story about a friendship that changed you. Let's continue the conversation. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.