Recent Reading: Stay True

 

I liked Hua Hsu’s short book Stay True quite a bit.

The way I see things there were three important themes in Hsu’s book.

The first important theme in Stay True would be Hsu’s friendship with a man who lived in the dormitory with him as an undergraduate named Ken. Ken was Japanese American and Hsu is Taiwanese American. (Quite a bit of the book is concerned with the nature of identity and the idea of being Asian American.) In the Nichomachean Ethics considers friendship to be a virtue or something inherently good humans should strive for. Depending on how you count, Aristotle identifies 12 virtues including courage, patience, truthfulness, justice and modesty. Aristotle believed that the pursuit of virtue contributed intrinsically to a person’s long term happiness (EUDAIMONIA). However, Stay True is not a book about virtue ethics.

The second important theme in Hsu’s book is tragedy and death and the proper response after he learns that Ken has been murdered after being robbed. I was surprised to see that this theme takes up less than a third of the book.

Finally, the third important theme in Hsu’s book is popular culture in the 90s as well as the relationship between popular culture and Hsu’s Asian Americaness, if I  may use this phrase. Hsu was spends considerable time discussing such things as the production of and culture of zines, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, MTV and the real world, the Internet, and shoes — what does it mean if someone wears Timberlands as opposed to basketball shoes? Being a few years older than Hsu and living half my life before the popular adoption of the Internet, some of these references just did not respect deeply with me.

The book is not long and can be read quickly; the audiobook is five hours long. But, for me, the prose style of the book was its greatest strength. Hsu clearly put hours into drafting and revising the text. There is not a poorly constructed sentence found anywhere in Stay True.