I recently facilitated a class about Stay True by Hua Hsu as a part of the NYU Summer Reads program. It was a first year class, the students' very first university classroom experience, which made taking part in it extremely rewarding.

This memoir focuses on 3 main aspects: identity, friendship, and grief. Aside from being a memoir, it's a moving personal story that touches on college life and reminders of the ‘90s, themes many of us can connect to. The book was very relatable, almost annoyingly so. Hsu has the ability to summarize my childhood feelings and perspectives during college with impeccable accuracy. He writes as if his student days happened yesterday. With such descriptive writing, he effectively transports the reader within an instant.

Something that particularly struck me about this book is the ‘80s/‘90s references and strong connection to nostalgia. Nostalgia is everything to me, I live for it. It's amazing how certain senses can trigger nerves in the amygdala of the brain that are key for feelings and emotions. In Stay True, Hsu plays around with this idea, giving you a better sense of what he was feeling as he either listened to a song, smelled a scent, or heard a sound. It has a powerful sensory aspect to writing, and he specifically focuses on the musical element throughout the book purely because music was an important aspect of himself and his self-discovery.

This book reminds me of other writings such as The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, or Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner. In my eyes, East or Pan-Asian writers in the North American continent have been so skillful in the way they write their stories and communicate messages to the reader on topics such as childhood trauma, migration to the West, transformation of morals, environmental adaptation, and breaking of barriers. Very often they have a way of getting across all-too-relatable experiences of moving to the US from an "alien world" to try and find work, a new life, and a new way of living.

Death is a critical part of this memoir. One of the harshest truths about our world is that death is inevitable and can come from anywhere, completely out of our control. And similarly, Hsu's friend's death, Ken, came at a very unexpected time in his life. How does one cope with death? How do you talk about the death of a friend, and at that, at such a young and vulnerable age? What's normal and what's not normal to talk about? The answers to these questions are blurred and ambiguous, to say the least, but Hsu puts us in his shoes as he tries to find some meaning behind Ken's untimely death. He constantly tries to, as he says, "fathom darkness" by making sense of it all.

What I find interesting is that Hsu didn't mean for the book to be published initially. He was writing this memoir in the form of a diary for roughly 20 years. He didn't mean for it to be anything really. I guess his writing about those moments, like what happened, his thoughts at the time, etc. was his way of coping with the situation, with his life maybe. He just wanted to write. And I guess that is the power of writing. He said that his reason for calling the book Stay True was because of an inside reference between him and Ken, but in the end, even he forgot the true nature of the reference all those years ago. It's not just about staying true to yourself, but also staying true to who you will become.