Narrator: Imagine two college freshmen who are, on the surface, complete opposites. One is the son of Taiwanese immigrants, a self-serious teenager who defines himself by what he rejects: mainstream culture, popular music, and anything that feels generic. He finds his identity in obscure zines and indie record shops. The other is a Japanese American whose family has been in the U.S. for generations. He is effortlessly popular, handsome, a fraternity brother who loves Dave Matthews and Abercrombie & Fitch. The first boy, Hua, looks at the second, Ken, and sees everything he has built his identity against. Yet, in the crucible of late-night conversations and shared cigarettes, these two young men forge an intense, life-altering friendship. But what happens when that bond, which felt like it could last forever, is violently and senselessly severed in less than three years?

This is the central question at the heart of Hua Hsu’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Stay True. It is a gripping and exquisitely written exploration of friendship, grief, and the search for self, born from the very act of writing to hold on to what was lost.

Narrator: Before meeting Ken, Hua Hsu’s identity was a carefully constructed fortress built in opposition to the mainstream. As the child of Taiwanese immigrants navigating the American suburbs, he felt a pull towards assimilation but resisted it at every turn. This resistance became his defining characteristic. While his father, an engineer who had moved back to Taiwan, would fax him meticulous solutions to math homework, Hua was more interested in cultural artifacts that felt uniquely his own.

This search for a unique identity led him to the world of zines and alternative music. He discovered Nirvana in 1991, and for a moment, the band felt like his secret. When their music exploded into a global phenomenon, he felt a sense of betrayal and pushed even further into the fringes, seeking out more obscure bands and creating his own zine. This zine was more than a hobby; it was a way of sketching the outlines of a new self, a place where he could arrange photocopied images and reference-packed essays into a version of himself that felt real and true. It was through this deliberate curation of culture, this rejection of the popular, that he tried to find his people and his place in the world.

Narrator: When Hua arrived at UC Berkeley, he brought this carefully constructed identity with him. So when he met Ken, a handsome, good-natured fraternity pledge who seemed to embody everything mainstream, Hua’s initial judgment was harsh. But their friendship didn't follow the rules of adolescent cool. It began with small, unexpected moments. It started with Ken, despite his preppy appearance, asking Hua where he got his thrift-store clothes and then asking for help shopping for a 70s-themed party.

Their bond solidified through a simple, shared ritual. One night, Ken invited Hua to the dorm balcony for a "smoke," even though neither of them smoked. This became their code, a pretense for escaping homework and crowded rooms to simply talk. These conversations, first imagined and later fueled by real cigarettes, became a space for genuine connection. They talked about classes, girls, and their dreams for the future. In these moments, Hua’s rigid categories began to dissolve. He discovered that beneath Ken’s easygoing exterior was a thoughtful and perceptive person grappling with his own questions about life. Their friendship became a testament to the idea that true connection isn’t about finding someone just like you, but about the willingness to truly know someone else.

Narrator: Despite their surface-level differences, Hua and Ken’s friendship was anchored by a deeper, shared experience: the subtle, persistent feeling of not quite belonging in American culture. This came into sharp focus during a telling incident. A casting agent for MTV's reality show The Real World visited Ken’s fraternity. Ken, ever curious, asked her why there had never been an Asian American man on the show. The agent’s response was dismissive: she told him they "don’t have the personalities for it."

Ken recounted this story to Hua, his disappointment palpable. He then made a declaration that stunned Hua with its dramatic weight: "I am a man without a culture." In that moment, Hua realized that Ken, who seemed to navigate the mainstream world with such ease, felt the same cultural invisibility that Hua had tried to combat by retreating to the margins. They were both searching for a reflection of themselves in a culture that seemed to have no place for them. This shared sense of being outsiders, of being "men without a culture," formed the unspoken foundation of their bond, proving that their connection ran far deeper than their taste in music or clothes.

Narrator: Less than three years after they met, their friendship was tragically cut short. Ken was killed, the victim of a senseless carjacking and murder after his own housewarming party. The world fractured. In the immediate, chaotic aftermath, Hua turned to the one tool he had always used to make sense of the world: writing.

On the first night after Ken’s death, alone in his room, Hua typed a desperate letter to his lost friend. He listed all the things he would miss—Ken’s habits, their inside jokes, the lessons he had learned about loyalty and life. The letter ended with a plea: "So be with me, okay, Ken? Can you stay with me a little longer?" This act of writing was more than just an expression of sorrow; it was an attempt to keep the conversation going, to hold onto Ken’s presence. This impulse continued as he was tasked with compiling the eulogy. He gathered memories from their friends, weaving their stories together with his own, creating a collective portrait of the person they had all lost. Writing became his anchor, a way to impose structure on the chaos of grief and to begin the long, painful process of preserving Ken’s memory.

Narrator: Years after Ken’s death, Hua’s grief continued to evolve. It was complicated by a profound sense of guilt and by the very nature of memory itself. At a party, a friend, Gwen, casually asked him, "were you and Ken really that close?" The question sent him into a spiral of doubt. Had he exaggerated their bond in his own mind? Was his memory a reliable narrator? This uncertainty led him to the work of historian E. H. Carr, whose book What Is History? he found among Ken’s old belongings.

Carr argued that history is not a static collection of facts but an "unending dialogue between the present and the past." The historian, like the person remembering, is always interpreting events from their current vantage point. This idea provided Hua with a new framework. He realized that his memories were his own construction, an attempt to make sense of a random, brutal act. There was no single, objective truth to be found, only an ongoing conversation with the past. The memoir Stay True is the ultimate expression of this realization. It is not just a recounting of events, but an active engagement with memory, an attempt to understand how the future—the life lived after loss—throws new light on the past.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Stay True is that the act of remembering is a creative and life-sustaining force. In the face of unbearable loss, Hua Hsu discovers that writing is not just a way to document the past, but a way to keep it alive. By committing his memories of Ken to the page, he continues their friendship, extends their unfinished conversations, and ensures that the bond they shared is not erased by the violence that ended it. The book itself becomes the ultimate act of staying true.

Ultimately, the memoir leaves us with a profound challenge: How do we honor the people we’ve lost? It suggests that the answer lies not in creating a static memorial, but in engaging in an unending dialogue with their memory. It asks us to consider how the stories we tell about the past don't just preserve what was, but actively shape who we are and who we are still becoming.