Poured Over: Hua Hsu on Stay True

“I think I figured a lot of things out literally as I was writing the book. I’m usually an obsessive methodical writer, or I have everything, if not mapped out, I kind of know spatially, what’s going to happen in a piece of writing. But with this, I just kind of had to write it to figure out what it was. For years, friends knew that I was working on this— friends who were in the book, actually. But I could never explain what it was nor could they imagine what it might be. You know, I would just say, I’m writing the story of us, I’m writing a story about Ken.”

Whether he’s riffing on music or sports or Asian American icons like Maxine Hong Kingston, Hua Hsu’s work in The New Yorker is a joy to read. Now he’s turning inward in his new book, Stay True, a beautifully written story of unexpected friendship, shocking loss, and his own coming of age. Hua joins us on the show to talk about grief and growing up, inside jokes, his literary influences, changing the conversations we’re having about Asian America, and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer.

Featured Books (Episode)
Stay True: A Memoir by Hua Hsu 
A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure across the Pacific by Hua Hsu 
The Hanging on Union Square by H. T. Tsiang 
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book by Maxine Hong Kingston 

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry liang. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays with occasional Saturdays.

A complete transcript of this episode is available here.

BN
I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I have been waiting to talk to Hua Hsu for so long. I read A Floating Chinaman when it came out in ’16. And if you’ve seen his byline in The New Yorker, I mean, dude—we’ll get to The New Yorker stuff—but I read everything you write. Stay True is your memoir. It is extraordinary. This is a book about grief and art and growing up and zines. Lots of zines, lots of music. This is such a great book. So happy to see you. Thank you for joining us on the show. 

Hua Hsu
Thanks for having me and I’m just astounded that you read my first book. So thank you, thank you very much for that. 

BN
It was one of those like, Who is this guy? Oh, right. I know his byline from The New Yorker. I really should just see what’s going on. And I had read The Hanging on Union Square, so it was kind of like, alright, let’s see what’s going on. But we’re going to get to that book in a second. Let’s talk about Stay True, though. Because this memoir, dude this is a really great book. And I had no idea this was part of your backstory. So would you just explain where your memoir comes from. 

HH
So it’s a memoir that I sort of started writing back in 1998. I mean, at the time, I didn’t know I would become a writer or write any books or that this would become a book. But what had happened was basically, I was between junior and senior year of college, and one of my very close friends, Ken was murdered over the summer. And so, you know, the moment it happened, everyone was in shock. You know, he was like, really beloved by a really wide array of people at Berkeley. Like he was just one of those people who felt at home in any crowd. And the moment I found out, I went down the road and just bought a journal and just start writing down all our inside jokes, just little memories here and there. Things I never wanted to forget. And some of that stuff ended up in a eulogy I had to deliver a few days later. I think my friends asked me to do it because I was already writing so much stuff down. They figured it would just be easy for me to do it. But it was collaborative, we all sort of pitched in. And honestly, just delivering the eulogy, writing down my thoughts. It felt so perfect. Like, I write in the book that I don’t know if it was good, but it was perfect. It’s exactly how I felt that week in that moment. And for many years, I was just kind of chasing that feeling of having the precise language or the precise description for the things I was feeling. For the next 20 years I did become a writer, it was never really the career path. I didn’t set out to do it. I was very fortunate to have found my way. But in the back of my mind, I would always return to this document. Like I returned to my journal, I returned to that night, that summer, the memories I still held on to. And so, it took me quite a while but eventually I started actually putting together the scraps, the notes, the little riffs, the ephemera into the thing that eventually became this book Stay True. 

BN
And there are a couple of pieces of this book that ended up in The New Yorker, there’s the piece about your dad and music. But there’s also a piece about Jacques Derrida and friendship. We have to talk about the connection between these two pieces. 

HH
Of course. For many years, I was just a music critic or a cultural critic, I’d write about literature and ideas. I didn’t really come up at a time as a journalist when journalists wrote about themselves very much. Like, in the late 90s, early 2000s, to write something in the first person, that was a privilege that very few writers ascended to. And I think particularly as an Asian American, I didn’t have that many models to draw on, you know? Like I later kind of found my models in novelists like Chang-rae Lee or Maxine Hong Kingston, the way they would really slyly bring kind of autobiography or memoir into their fiction. But you know, it’s not like nowadays where I think someone trying to process their own experience… you know, there’s just so many wonderful voices you can draw on and be inspired by. So anyhow, I was writing a lot in the 2000s just trying to pay the bills, reviewing records and whatnot. There would be these moments when I would think like, what is the point of reviewing this like Nelly record? But in the back of my mind, I would think well, there are these things you want to someday write and this is all in the service of practice. This is all kind of honing your skills and description because like, there are more significant things you want to someday describe other than this song. I’ve never really touched on any of this in my writing. I do see it in the background of a lot of the writing I’ve done where I’m always trying to write about different things. Music is one of my primary passions, but I’ve written about a wide range of things like literature, mushrooms, sports, all sorts of things. It’s because I’m just trying to become better at like describing stuff. Because I knew that I had to for this book. 

BN
You didn’t even like Ken the first time you met him. I mean you admit this in the book. You’re just like, yeah, I met him and I did not like him. So let’s talk about the start of this friendship, because that’s not usually what you hear. 

HH
Is it unusual? I mean, I feel like maybe it’s just that I’m by nature, like, kind of like that. 

BN
I wasn’t expecting it. 

HH
It’s sort of this running thing for me. I feel like I have a lot of great friends where I remember meeting them for the first time and thinking, I’m never going to be friends with this person. You know? So it is more of an indictment of me than of these people in my life. When the book begins, I’m essentially a teenager. There’s a discussion of my family and sort of the ways in which they taught me to see the world in a particular way. And the ways in which I was enamored with other ways of seeing the world that I was getting from popular music. Like I was super into Nirvana and alternative culture, and like, all of these things that, you know, millions of kids were into in the 1990s, but I felt like I had a singular grasp of what it meant to be different and alternative and into, like, DIY stuff. And so when I got to college, like I had a, you know, a fun time in high school, I had really good friends, but I just really sought out these adventures. I sought out people to have adventures with. And by adventure, I mean, like, you know, underground shows, going to see independent film and foreign film and just sort of talking about literature and theory and philosophy and all these things that I think draw people to college. You know? This is a time where your horizons are going to be expanded. And so when I first met Ken, we were both in the freshman dorms. I was at Sproul Hall 1995 at Berkeley. And he was just, he just seemed so generic to me. He was just into things that I thought were just super mainstream, and just kind of predictable. But the more I got to know him, the more I realized that he was not a predictable person, and that he was actually a dreamer in a way that I was afraid to dream. You know, I think he just really wanted to be part of the culture, like he wanted to see himself reflected in the culture. I would never have admitted that I wanted that too. I was very much happy being this person on the margins, just kind of making fun of stuff. He wanted to actually see himself represented and see himself as part of this larger America. Like, this was the 90s, like multiculturalism, how come there’s not space for us as well? And even though now I feel like I have a more mature outlook on that, I think at the time I was like too quote unquote, cool, to actually want any of that or to think that any of that was desirable. 

BN
You were also an adolescent, and our brains don’t finish cooking until we’re what 25? I mean… 

HH
That’s my excuse, right? I was still a kid. Yeah. 

BN
And one of the things that you talk about when you talk about Ken is the fact that you’d never met an Asian American guy who was as comfortable in his own skin as Ken. You’d seen this kind of behavior and this sort of carriage in white guys, but not in Asian Americans. And that’s something that you don’t always hear people in our community admitting to. 

HH
Yeah, I think there were there were other versions of that in my high school. And I still talk to friends who grew up in the South Bay about how the first-generation kids are so different from the third or fourth generation kids. And so I felt like I saw that in my high school when I was a first-year student. As a freshman, you’d see these senior Japanese American guys from the basketball team or something. Ken was the first time that I actually kind of fell under the spell. Just kind of gave someone like that a chance and really tried to understand them. And it is a very imperceptible difference. I mean, I don’t think it’s something that is even intuitive to most Asian Americans, right? The whole point of Asian American identity is that we’ve all chosen to be something together new, you know, and that we will figure out what it means together. It’s a term that only came into fashion in the late 60s. And so there’s something really exciting about that, but I think there’s also these like, really tiny specificities. I don’t know that it’s sort of like the stuff of identity, right? Just like how different is my experience as someone whose parents came from Taiwan, in the early 70s, late 60s versus someone whose parents came from the mainland in the 90s? Very different experiences. Totally imperceptible to like 99% of people, probably on the planet, let alone in the United States. 

BN
And even sometimes in the community. I mean, we’ve got people who embrace this idea of the model minority, which personally makes my eyes roll back into my head and get stuck. I can’t stand it. But here you are trying to figure out… you grew up in the Bay Area. You grew up surrounded by faces like yours. I mean, and I say this as someone who grew up in Massachusetts and I think there were three of us who were Asian American in my high school, maybe? That sense of community is really skewed I think and it depends on sort of where you grew up. And I mean, one of the things I love about Stay True is the fact that it’s shot through with photos of you in college. And just these full bleed pages and your babies. Your babies in these photos. But I want to talk about the design of the book, because it feels very intentional. And a little magazine-y. If we think about it for a second, just to have these photos of you guys in the moment, I mean, and these are photos too where you had to print them out on paper, and someone had to carry a camera. We weren’t all just, you know, whipping out our phones and going, hey, you know, click. 

HH
Yeah, you know, something you just said, something I think about a lot, is that I didn’t realize how unusual my upbringing was. Like I grew up in the South Bay before I mean, there was tech, but it wasn’t remotely what it is now, right? And, you know, there were a lot of Asian kids in my high school, but not as many as there are now at the same school. And I was also spending a lot of time going to Taiwan. Because my father worked there. And so I think I was sort of, I won’t say I was unconcerned, but questions of representation weren’t as front of mind for me, because I was exposed to so much in everyday life. My grandparents were living in the South Bay, and they had this really rich life as senior citizens. I was going to Taiwan; I was watching Taiwanese and Hong Kong cinema. So I was accustomed to seeing faces like mine in the movies and my high school had like Asian jocks as well as Asian nerds. And then there were people like me who were in-between. There were Asian skater kids. I was making a zine. It never occurred to me that this meant we should see these stories, like in literature or on TV, or in the movies, like maybe that was the part of me that felt like, why, why bother dreaming? You’ll just be disappointed. But personally, I think I experienced so much in that range that I couldn’t fully process the experience of people who didn’t have that abundance of Asian American life. Does that make sense? Even at the time, I found it like stifling and kind of boring. There are certain things that were just very normal to me that were like completely abnormal to most Asian Americans. When I was in high school, when I was in college, I was making a lot of zines. They’re terrible to look at now. But there was this whole community of people, of Asian American people, who did that. A lot of us were all inspired by Giant Robot, which was this magazine that these two guys Eric and Martin did. And now Martin’s daughter is in this band, The Linda Linda’s. 

BN
Which is so awesome to see!  

HH
It is like incredible to see that like tradition being carried on. But you know, it was like absolutely normal in the mid 90s, late 90s, especially if you’re going to like a UC Davis, UCLA, Berkeley, Irvine to be an Asian American person who made zines. It didn’t mean that you were like an anarchist, vegan punk or anything, although many were. It just meant that you wanted an outlet. A ton of my friends did it, I made a lot of good friends doing it too. And so that was really important to me at the time. And it’s become less a part of my identity the more I’ve kind of been absorbed into being like a quote unquote professional writer. But you know, it wasn’t my idea. Like my editor Thomas at Doubleday, one of the many great ideas he had was he was reading a section of the book where I refer to this photo I took of a 7-Eleven, just a random 7-Eleven sign. In the book, it just marks me as being like kind of this weird person who would just take pictures of signs, because nobody did that back then because you had to then develop it, pay to get it developed. It was not like today where it’s much easier to catalog your daily experience. And then I said to Thomas, well I actually still have that photo. Obviously, because I’ve kept everything. And he said, well, why don’t we use some of these images in the book? And I like the way it’s laid out. As you said, they’re just these full bleed images. They’re not really like captioned or anything, because the point is, just to give you this… it’s like you’re walking down the hall of a dorm and just peeking in different people’s rooms. Like, that’s all it is. I don’t want to belabor who these people are or what’s going on in these images. It’s just sort of to give you a sense of… a little bit of texture or dimensionality to the past. But it is weird, because I think there are entire years of my life where there’s no photographic evidence that I existed. Because you just would never, I don’t know, like in circa 1992 it was such a pain to have a camera. Nobody would bother taking pictures of all these things that one would now take like 100 pictures of.  

BN
And a lot of what you’re talking about in Stay True too though, is the search for authenticity. And I mean, even when you’re talking about you being stubborn, or you know, picky about music, or judging people on all of that. You’re essentially talking about wanting to find people who are their authentic selves. And clearly Ken had some of that about him, even at a very young age. Maybe more so than you or some other folks in your circle. But are you any closer to finding what’s authentic for you? 

HH
I think I figured a lot of things out literally as I was writing the book. I’m usually an obsessive methodical writer, or I have everything, if not mapped out, I kind of know spatially, what’s going to happen in a piece of writing. But with this, I just kind of had to write it to figure out what it was. For years, friends knew that I was working on this. Like friends who were in the book, actually. But I could never explain what it was nor could they imagine what it might be. You know, I would just say, I’m writing the story of us, like I’m writing a story about Ken. But there was never anything to point to, like it’s going to be like that. Because I didn’t know what it was. And I think in the process of writing it, I did arrive at a place that I didn’t know I was there. Yeah, I’m sure every writer thinks this, it’s just I’ve never had this experience. I’m usually just writing criticism or reporting where I kind of already know what the story is going to be. But because the story was also about my own, like, I guess self-discovery, to some extent. It was literally this thing where as I was writing it, I was figuring things out, and then I would write more. Back then I was really enamored with this version of cool. And wondering these philosophical questions like, well, am I really cool if I don’t think my friends are cool? Like, they’re cool. But they don’t understand why I’m dressed this way. Or why I listen to stuff. So what does that say about me and now I just don’t really care that much. It’s just kind of like, cool is property of young people and I’m no longer a young person. I feel very comfortable in my own skin. And part of that is, I think, reflecting on the lessons I learned from this part of my life. 

BN
Emotional discomfort, not a lot of fun for a lot of people. So the idea that you can capture all of these very fleeting moments. I’m so glad you grabbed that notebook in ’98 because I think this would have been a really different book if you had to sort of recreate. I think it’s really hard for us to sit in who we were when we were teenagers and college students. I think, for some of us, it was more than a minute ago. But to recreate that emotional honesty, I think is really, really hard. And when you’re writing a magazine profile you know when it ends. Or if you’re writing a piece of criticism, you know when it ends. I’m not saying you necessarily know exactly how it ends, but you know when it ends. And a book, you have to figure out when it ends. 

HH
It’s one of the many things that I look back on and I just think I probably should just talk to more people about this, you know? In the book, there’s this moment where I talked with a therapist, and I think after 20 minutes I’ve been fixed because she asked me a series of questions that are like so basic and obvious, but they just weren’t questions I was asking myself. But yeah, I think once I realized that part of the way the book worked was that I would just be continuously dunking on my former self, made it much easier to write. And it actually felt like I was hanging out with us, like it felt like I was just spending time with these other versions, another version of me and a version of someone who I continue to be very fond of. As well as younger versions of friends who are still my life. And so it felt very odd to enjoy this process of writing about something that at its root, is always going to verge towards tragedy, like there’s no way I can write my way out of that. But I had to accept no, this is part of the gift. The part of the gift that I still feel, having known him, is that I can reflect on these good times that I had. These good times and that it can be fun to write about this. That doesn’t change anything, you know. 

BN
In other words, you found the authenticity. You found the authentic moment you found the authentic people who you were, kind of in the moment. And I think that’s really powerful. 

HH
I’d like to think so. 

BN
I think you did it. But you were a Poli Sci major, which I didn’t expect. And I am slightly changing the subject only because Poli Sci led you to being a professor of English and a magazine journalist. So in other words, you’ve always been trying to figure out how to tell the story. I mean, a zine is a story. It’s deconstructing words and pictures and ideas. But you’ve always been sitting in story. I mean, Political Science, sorry, it’s learning how to tell stories. I mean, history is telling story. It’s all telling stories. So here you are with a very big formal education, Harvard, I mean, your first book was your dissertation. Which still kind of blows my mind a little bit. But I want to talk about your evolution as a writer. Because I mean, you sit with this professor, and every sort of couple of weeks, you show up with a bunch of pages and hand them off to him?  

HH
Oh right, Michael Rogan. 

BN
Yeah. But this sort of sets you on more of a formal path to writing about the arts. You just have a lot of steps in-between. So let’s talk about finding your voice for a second. 

HH
It might sound strange; I don’t feel like I have a voice. I feel like my voice is composed of just having copied a ton of people along the way. I think that I have a relationship to the world in my writing. And I think all art makes me think about the relationship that this person imagines with the rest of the world. I used to love, I still love, pop songs where it’s like, someone whispering against a hill of noise. Like that’s like one of my favorite genres of music. Where someone is just kind of lazily singing quietly, but there’s just sort of a wall of feedback behind them. Because I think that that’s an incredible position in the world, right? Like, there’s all this chaos, all this noise, and I’m going to keep my cool and not try and sing above it. I’m going to continue whispering my like beautiful song.  

Yeah, like Michael Rogan, my Poli Sci professor, dearly departed. He was one of the first people who I would like study and copy. And I think this probably goes back a little bit to not necessarily having these models to pattern myself after. There are a lot of people who I’ve borrowed very specific things from like Rogen, Greil Marcus, Maxine Hong Kingston. I feel like there are parts of this book that are just straight up like outtakes from her novel Tripmaster Monkey which is one of my favorite novels of all time. 

BN
You mean this one? 

HH
Yeah. I always tell my students, I hope one of you becomes like fabulously wealthy. And if you do remember me and remember that I would always love to see a film adaptation of Tripmaster Monkey directed by Wong Kar Wai. So please, please, someone make that happen. I mean, that novel is about an insufferable, pretentious Chinese American Berkeley student who has a friend who is this confident Japanese American guy. And it’s all taking place in the backdrop of the Vietnam War, like student protests, like acid trips. That book was very, very influential to me. But yeah, I mean, I think writing that thesis that you’re talking about, like I write about in the book for Michael Rogan in the Poli Sci department, writing film criticism, it was the first time that I felt like the kind of casual banter of my friends and I, of Ken and I specifically, it was something that had some value beyond lysine. Yeah, it was something that other people could possibly take seriously. And so, Rogan encouraged me to go to graduate school, he said, you should go to graduate school in anything but Political Science. Because he sensed that I did not actually have a passion for it and also, I don’t think he thought that the field itself would be that hospitable to people who were interested in the kind of cultural study stuff I was into. But yeah, I mean, I’ve just been really fortunate because I think being in graduate school, being in academia, it always just gave me like another world to go into outside of the world of journalism and freelance. I think that I kept them pretty separate for a while because that made it easy to not take either of them too seriously. 

BN
Also, health insurance is nice. Just little stuff like that. I mean, it is kind of important. 

HH
I mean that’s when my parents thought that I had properly made it was when I finally had health insurance. 

BN
I can see that. You know, Asian parents. They are practical. They love us. But they’re wicked, wicked, practical people. And I get it. I mean, you talk about this, too, you talk about, you know, the first generation being mostly interested in survival. And then the next generation gets to tell the stories. And I know, I keep coming back to this. But the idea of you having an authentic voice that is Asian American, and this idea of an Asian American identity, which yeah, it’s true, it’s roughly 60 years old. It was the late 60s where all of this starts happening. And this idea of creating an identity that is wholly itself and yet, you know, you were born in Illinois, I was born in Massachusetts, there are still some folks who would look at you or look at I and just be like, hmm, so when do we stop being immigrants? When do we stop being outsiders? I mean, you’re a New Yorker, I’m a New Yorker, I’m a part time Angelino.  

HH
I don’t really know. I mean, I often joke about how whenever I’m writing a piece about anything Asian American for The New Yorker, there always has to be that canned or that little potted history of like Asian American, an identity that… And will there be a point which we stop doing that? Like, maybe I could just stop doing that. And, you know, the copy desk would be fine. Maybe it’s me, bringing this up constantly. But I don’t know. I think that I feel some degree of I don’t know if optimism is the right word, because at the same time, the country seems more divisive than it’s ever been in my lifetime. But it does seem like difference has been normalized in a way where certain things still need to be explained, certain things still need to be contextualized, but it’s not everything the way it may have once been. I would say there could be even more of a range but there is a range of Asian American writers, people from like the Asian diaspora, contributing to culture. I mean, for me, a key part of being an Asian American writer is this kind of ever conscious thing about people not really caring that much about the Asian American experience. Just sort of like this self-consciousness about your own like marginalization. But you know, there are a lot of things you could do with that. I think like something like going back to Tripmaster Monkey or Woman Warrior. Like Maxine Hong Kingston does incredible things with this sense of like an outsider looking in and trying to play with those expectations. So I feel like there are a lot of possibilities for I mean, specifically for younger like Asian American writers, filmmakers, artists. I think the key is just to remember that there is this history behind us and that a lot of people feel as though they’re alone as though they have to reinvent the wheel. But, you know, you’re not alone. Like there is history. People have had these conversations for quite some time, even before the identity came about in the late 60s, you know, like, and to sort of draw strengths in that rather than the feel encumbered by it. 

BN
I mean, part of it for me too, though, is the fact that someone like you can write under your own name. Your byline is Hua Hsu. No one called you, Henry. No one made you pick, Hank, you know, and Chang-rae Lee gets to write under his own name. Min Jin Lee gets to write under her own name. Viet Thanh Nguyen writes under his own name. No one is anglicizing anything, we’re just saying Hi, we’re here. I mean, I spell my name 1,000 times a day, but these are our names. These are who we are. This is what we present. And I really, the first time I saw your byline in The New Yorker, I was like, Okay, who is this dude? What am I getting into? And it might have been a piece on hip hop too. I can’t remember the first thing I read by you, but I was like you and Jeff Chang like in these spaces, where it’s so important to see just that, you know, we have interests that aren’t necessarily food or fashion or you know…I mean, not that those things aren’t important either. But it’s taking space in a way that not everyone would have expected or even wanted to hand over. I mean, yeah, Ben Fong Torres was at Rolling Stone for a really long time and doing really interesting stuff. But he was first and only in a lot of rooms for a really long time. 

HH
Yeah, yeah, he was, you know, like, respect the architect. You know, Jeff Chang, huge influence on my life. He was one of my early mentors. He mentored another writer, Oliver Wang, was also one of my mentors. And so, I mean, for me, during this time, you know, we’re talking… the book is in college, late night. Seeing people like Oliver seeing people like Jeff, as a fan, like I was reading the San Francisco Bay Guardian, seeing them write about their experiences as DJs as like cultural critics, it was really powerful to me. And to be a part of that is pretty humbling. And it’s also cool that people can disagree with Jeff or disagree with me, there’s always going to be like the younger crew. And that’s cool. Like, I think that’s healthy, even though it’s also like a little harrowing too to realize that I’m on my way out. I mean, I certainly tried to anglicize my name for like a hot second when we were living in Texas. I insisted on being called Luke. But I’m glad my parents then responded to that by moving us to California. 

BN
You know, the stuff that we do… but we do have to evolve. We have to evolve as a community, as whatever Asian America is and we can’t stay static. I mean, if we do, then what’s the point? What do you want readers to understand about the story that you’re telling in Stay True? Because you were very deliberate in the ways that the story is told, you’re very deliberate in the ways that you talk about this book. 

HH
Yeah, I mean, I guess, without spoiling it, although like, I often think that nothing actually happens in the book, because so much of it just happens in conversation or happens in my own head. I mean nothing happens to me, obviously, something terrible happens. But it’s not like I could describe what the journey is for the protagonists, which ostensibly is me. But yeah, there is a very deliberate structure to the book, for a long time the whole point of it was just to recapture these moments from the past, these moments that I never had to think about until they were over. You know what I mean? Like you don’t necessarily historicize an inside joke with your friend, if you and your friend keep telling the same inside joke, you know? You don’t necessarily have to think about the parameters of friendship, if that friendship is enduring. And so all of a sudden, one day, all these memories became like, freighted with meaning. Or they seemed important, they seemed like something that may have like subtext, even though there is no subtext. And so for a long time, I was just like, you know what, this is just a story of someone who was like a good person, you may not have known them, but this is why they’re a good person. And this is why it’s unfortunate that they’re not here anymore. And honestly, it’s very weird to me when readers have their own relationship to him, because I’ve turned him into like a character in a book. But it’s also incredible that they find him as good of a person as I do. If that happens, like, that’s great. I think that’s sort of at a very basic level, you know if that happens then he’ll never be forgotten. Which is great, because he should have been able to do that on his own terms. 

BN
Do you think you’d be the writer you are now if it weren’t for that?  

HH
No. Definitely not. I don’t even know that I would be a writer. I think okay, first of all, I think everyone is a writer. Like I always tell my writing classes, we’re all writers. It’s just a matter of what kind of writing you do and how much how much writing you do. Like, I don’t know that I would have had the fuel to keep going. Not that it was a discrete goal, circa like 2000. Circa 2000 I was just trying to get some music reviews published so that I could pay my cable bill. But I think over the years thinking about writing, just spending so much time at a keyboard, I would often just kind of return to that moment through writing. And so I don’t know that I would have necessarily had the energy or the fuel to see through this project to becoming a writer and then eventually honing my skills to the point where I could do this. Because like I say it in the book, but like they’re like years where I thought, I’ll never be able to describe what his laugh sounded like, so what’s the point of any of this? It’s sort of one of those unanswerable questions. I’ve had that conversation with a few of my friends since the book has been finished and friends have been able to read it. Like the ways in which we see that moment as determining or as guiding us towards certain paths, or certain personal habits or tics or routines. I think, for me, writing also just kind of… I’ve never left campus, basically. Like I’ve been in college since 1995. It’s just that I teach at one now. These are all things that I think I wanted to do, but I don’t know if I would have had the will to keep doing them if I wasn’t trying to figure out this bigger thing.  

BN
You’ve been teaching undergrads for how long now? 

HH
15 years. Before that I was in grad school so I was also teaching. 

BN
Sure. Yeah. What have you learned from your students? 

HH
I’ve learned to be very open minded. You know, I think that that’s sort of something that happens in the book, too, is that I slowly come to terms with how narrow minded I was, like, how close minded I was as I was processing kind of the past and thinking about things that I had learned from Ken. I think it’s somewhat similar to how I view my students. You know, I’ve been teaching for 15 years so that’s a lot of cohorts of young people who are into stuff that like I don’t get. And it’s been interesting to see that progression, right? Like, maybe 10 years ago, kids who were like what I was in college, like kids that were into quote unquote, cool stuff, were into this and now they’re into this. Like this generation thinks that generation from a couple years ago is like weak and weird, you know? And I’m just there to watch over them to make sure they’re safe as much as I can. And to impart some sense of how to be in the world. Like, there are things that I teach them very specifically about, let’s say, the craft of writing or the history of American literature, but, you know, I’m there mainly to just remind them to listen to one another, to listen to me. When someone tells you about the past, and this is something that I think about what the book a lot because I don’t see the book is nostalgic, like, I don’t think I’m making an argument that 1997 was superior to 2021… 

BN
Oh, you are not. No. No fear there. 

HH
But I’m very much saying that, like, this is what 1997 felt like. This is what the rhythm of a day of a college student felt like before the internet. When you could pick up people at the airport much more easily than you can now. And so I think sometimes we project a lot onto one another, we may not listen with an open heart. And so I think that’s one thing that I encourage my students to do and then I have to remind myself I have to do that too. Just because I’ve done these things or been in school these years, or written these things, it doesn’t make me an expert on their lives. And I need to be open to their experiences, their struggles, their dreams and ambitions, sort of the size of the world they want to enter into. Which is why I don’t actually talk about any of this stuff, or like myself really that much when I’m teaching, because I don’t really want to over determine their sense of like the highs and lows of what their lives are going to be like over the next years. 

BN
I think it’s also fascinating too, the way they’ve forced changes in language that we could never quite get through. Like if you just look at the evolution of language—and not just pop culture language, but language in general, since the 90s—it’s amazing what we’ve been able to get moved forward in a lot of ways in a very short period of time. And I think that says something to the tenacity of young people who are just like y’all did not… what is happening here? And I frequently say this to people too, who are younger than I am. I’m like you don’t understand we were barbarians in the 90s. We were total barbarians. It doesn’t matter where we came from, or how we were raised or where we went to school. It’s just everyone. We were so uncivilized, completely. Like we had no idea what was going on. 

HH
But I always try to convey to them, that is true, but that they are barbarians to people who are just now being born. You know what I mean? I spent my college years calling out X, Y, and Z. Like, that’s wrong. That’s wrong. That’s wrong. I was right. Obviously, you know, but someone now might look back at me and say, like, well, these were your blind spots. And it’s my obligation, like, yeah, you’re right. I didn’t, we didn’t see that back then. But you have to be aware that there are things you don’t see, too. Maybe we can figure what those things are together. 

BN
I just want us to own our stuff. That’s all I’m asking. We can’t pretend that the past was better just because it was something that we were more familiar and more comfortable in. Like we all have to sort of be messy about the whole thing. And yeah, you’re absolutely right, the kids who are in their 20s now they’re going to be totally barbarians to the next generation. But I feel like there are still some of us in our advanced dotage that are swanning around saying, oh, no, we had it so much better. We had it figured out. You guys are just making a hash of things. And I really don’t think that’s true. I really think that we just have to keep pushing forward. And you know, I miss zines, I really do. They were kind of groovy and weird. There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent. Like Tumblr is not a zine. And I know Tumblr is gone too but like, TikTok is not a zine. There was something really kind of fun and weird and different about making a zine. 

HH
Last semester was my last semester teaching at Vassar, which is where I’d been for 15 years. And there was this little get together and I was hanging out with some students, and they were all seniors. So they were born in I don’t know what, 2001, maybe 2000? And they all had digital film cameras, like point and shoot film cameras. But they were like the high-end film cameras from I don’t know, like 2005 or something. And we were just talking about the nature of like, why do you have that? And they’re like well shooting film is kind of cool and this is like the best. The point and shoot of 2005 is probably like really good technology, right? And it was just fascinating to have this conversation and then to reflect on how back then we never took pictures of ourselves, because you just never think to do that. And it was interesting to have this conversation with them because you could sort of acknowledge what was better and worse about the past at the same time. Which I think is a hard thing to do. Because they were all kind of fascinated with this idea that we could take pictures of ourselves, but no one would ever see them. You know, maybe you’d make doubles, give them to your friends, but they were just for you, there was no sense of like public display of identity of self. And they thought that was really liberating. That sounded very liberating to not have to think about social media. But then I was like, well, when I was 21, in 1998, I would have killed for a device that could summon any song in the world on this box, you know? And so it’s sort of like there are things about the past that were better, there are things about the past that were worse. Much like the present. And you just have to think about what those tradeoffs mean. And sort of what your relationship is to them. But I mean, that’s one of the reasons I like teaching is because it prevents me from having any like truly fixed ideas about my own life and my own past. 

BN
What was on your playlist when you’re writing Stay True? 

HH
So I wrote it at the public library. I had this fellowship. I was very lucky to have a Cullman Fellowship.  

BN
Oh, those are great. 

HH
You’re essentially forced to write every day. Like if you don’t show up to your office in the library, someone asks like what’s wrong? Why aren’t you writing? And part of is that they give you these old PCs. And so rather than trying to import my iTunes and all this stuff, I say, like I’m just going to use Spotify, finally. I’d never used it prior to 2019. And so I made these hyper specific playlists for specific months of the 1990s You know, obviously I remember a lot of the music from the summer after Ken’s death and I remember what I was listening to right before it because my sense of taste like drastically changed in a moment. Like I could no longer listen to stuff from the past. And so I just have a collection of hyper specific playlists to addresses, to like where I would listen to this, other certain playlists. And I still have a lot of mixtapes from the 90s. And so I would just sort of reassemble them. Yeah, it was like, weirdly very helpful to finally join the streaming revolution all these years later. 

BN 
What’s next? 

HH
I don’t know. I mean, I think for quite a while this was the thing I wanted to do, even before I knew it would be a thing. It was just sort of like this is all what it’s amounting to is being able to do this. I’m sure I could have published something like this years ago but I don’t think I was able to do it in the way that I wanted to until like, fairly recently. After finishing it, I kind of felt like, well, I don’t have anything left to say, like, I think I’m actually done. I do owe Doubleday another book. And originally, there are parts of this book that were in that book. It’s called Impostor Syndrome. It’s really just a title right now. It sounds like a good title. But, you know, it explores the idea of imposter syndrome, which is this idea that particularly affects women and people of color, just the sense that like, you’re a faker in these institutional spaces. Just this this insecurity that you’re faking it, that you’re an imposter. That someone, even if you’re high achieving– someday, someone will come and say actually, there’s been a mistake, you’re actually not. This isn’t your position, right? These are your achievements. It’s something that kind of arose in the 1970s, these psychologists studied the sort of inferiorities of women who had ascended the corporate ranks and discovered that they felt like deeply insecure and kind of unstable about like, not unstable but like that they were they were constantly on shaky footing. That they were being judged differently. And I just think it’s an interesting dynamic through which to understand like, I don’t know, like the immigrant experience, the experience of being a writer, like I don’t actually think I’m an expert in anything I write about, even though I think I can write in a way that feels authoritative. And so I think I was just very drawn to a book that could be about teaching. Because teaching is another place where I personally feel like I’m maybe a quarter step ahead of my students. Writing, where I feel like so much of it is about performing authority, and also just kind of general immigrant experience, notions of pedagogy. So I think it’s just a collection of related essays that sort of circulate around this notion of like imposture and performance. 

BN
And I can’t wait to read it. Hua Hsu, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. Stay True is out now. 

HH
Thanks so much. This is a joy.