Stay True: A Memoir by Hua Hsu

Pulitzer Prize winner Stay True is a powerful memoir about identity, friendship, and loss. Follow Hua Hsu’s remarkable journey and connect with the powerful lessons it holds. This award-winning book is not to be missed! As always, 10% of the price is donated to support adult literacy through ProLiteracy - a cause worth celebrating! Get your copy of this award-winning, captivating memoir today!

From the inside front cover:

From the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art.

In the eyes of eighteen-year old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken--with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his frat--is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to.  The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them.

Despite Hua's first impressions, he and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the textbook successes and humiliations of everyday college life.  And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first met.

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on every since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He teaches at Bard College. He is the author of A Floating Chinaman:  Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific. Originally from the Bay Area, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.