Hua Hsu: “A young Asian American and a young Spaniard may have more in common than it seems.”

Stay True has two very clear protagonists: you and Ken. Let’s start with you, who is Hua Hsu?

I’m currently a staff writer at the New Yorker and a professor of literature at Bard College in upstate New York. And the path to becoming both of those things began back when I was in college, in the years detailed in Stay True. I was typical of my generation—restless, mildly rebellious, anxious to distinguish myself. I defined myself by the music I listened to, the obscure books I read, and the fashions I refused to follow. Over time, as I write about in Stay True, I realized the importance of embracing differences, rather than just dwelling on them.

The book takes us back to your youth. How do you remember that time?

I remember this time in my life very fondly. For one thing, these are very quaint forms of difference or alienation, compared to how I see things now as an adult. When you’re younger, you feel everything more intensely, the highs and lows, so it’s nice to think back to a time when hearing a new song or discovering a new zine could really reorient my whole world. I didn’t really feel like an outsider in America, since I was American. I think I just felt alienated from mainstream culture, which is how most young people should feel. 

In the midst of it all, you met Ken. Who was he?

We met during our first month of college— we lived in the same dormitory at UC Berkeley. At first glance, I thought him to be if not the opposite, someone with whom I had little in common, other than the fact that we were both Asian American. He was handsome, athletic and confident in ways that I didn’t necessarily feel. Over time, I realized that we weren’t so dissimilar. And as I grew older, I realized that I almost preferred his way of seeing the world rather than my own. I wrote Stay True to inhabit our friendship a bit longer.

But he left suddenly.

This is the subject of the book. I think writing became a way of coping with the loss we all felt in college when he was no longer around. And writing became a pursuit, over time, that I wanted to use to explore and reminisce about the past. So in a way my career has been in service of being able to one day think about the loss and why it was so deeply felt by my friends and I.

Writing about this loss must not have been easy. How did you do it?

I’m glad I was able to spend around twenty years thinking about it before I sat down to write. It was such a different form of writing – when I’m writing journalism it’s often reacting to something discrete, like a new book or a political moment. Whereas this was just trying to reconstruct a very gauzy, spectral past.

And, during this story, the multiculturalism topic in the United States comes up. Today, how do Asian and American cultures fit together?

I think a lot of the things Ken and I would stay up late debating about the place of Asian Americans are still issues we face today. There are things we could have never imagined, like the successes in film and television. But I think that core sense of not being sure where you belong—and whether this is a good or a bad thing—remains.

Your parents emigrated from Taiwan to the U.S. How has the situation changed since then?

Naturally, it differs. They immigrated here in their twenties and had to figure things out on the fly. Whereas I grew up in the United States, which allowed me to feel more at ease but also more critical about American history and culture. They were largely focused on day-to-day progress. Whereas I had the luxury of thinking about this country more philosophically.

A personal story has ended up becoming universal. How did you experience the Pulitzer news and how have you lived the publication process?

It’s all been a delightful surprise to me. I wrote the book for myself and, to some extent, for my friends. I didn’t expect it to resonate do broadly. It’s humbling to think others see their own experiences, high and low, in this book. I don’t know what others have discovered. But I’ve certainly discovered that my experience of loss is not at all unusual.

Now you will reach readers in Spanish and Catalan. How do you think they will read you?

Hopefully they will find that we all have more in common than we might think. That’s something I learned for myself back when I was younger. Even if the story of a Taiwanese American kid growing up in the Bay Area in the 1990s seems to have little resonance to someone growing up in Madrid in the 2020s, we may share the same hopes, fears, and desires. I certainly hope the story connects with people in the process of integration in Barcelona.  I’m at least grateful for the chance to reach new readers and hopefully forge those connections.