And I'm Gonna Miss Everybody

Hua Hsu's "Stay True," Jordan, & Chosen Family

In many ways, this feels like the only way to start book(ish), which claims to be about both the head and the heart. I’ve tried to talk myself out of this particular book and this particular personal connection for the last month, scrambling to finish other books, think about other things, and connect other dots, but grief is perhaps the slowest of “slow considerations.”

So, here goes: I want to tell you about Hua Hsu’s wonderful, carefully observed, and heart-rending memoir Stay True, a book that might not necessarily need an introduction or more attention (it won the Pulitzer in May for Memoir/Autobiography), but a book that won’t quit on me.

I also want to tell you about my friend Jordan.

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I first met Jordan on the fourth floor of Carlson Hall at North Central University. We were schlepping cartloads of our stuff (books, guitars, clothes) into our rooms, which were across the hall from one another. It was hot. This was August in Minnesota in 2003, both our freshman years. As we hefted ratty couches and assembled cheap, wire bookshelves, Jordan pointed at my shirt: “Beloved. Sweet.” He was about 5-4 and had this magnetic, boyish grin and a swarthy complexion. Beloved was a post-hardcore band that occupied that funny stratum of “Christian members in a band, but not a Christian band.” I’d recently received an ultimatum from my high school girlfriend—her and God, or the band and the highway—so I quit my anti-everything punk band, joined up with some cheesy Christian rock dudes during senior year, and then moved to college with her in the city. At the time, I was listening to a lot of metal and post-hardcore, but my old stash of punk and ska CDs (The Clash, The Exploited, Mustard Plug) came with me in a massive booklet. Jordan and I stayed up till three or four in the morning on that first night. We talked about Figure Four, Comeback Kid, Stretch Armstrong, and Norma Jean, who were the cream of so-called metal-core in that world at the time. I was surprised to learn about Jordan’s love for dad rock like Counting Crows and U2 and stuff that I thought was corny emo like Copeland and Jimmy Eat World. I was leaving things behind and forging a new identity, but I sensed that he was leaving nothing behind and claiming everything about himself as good and true.

He would frequently arrange his face into this malicious grin that showed the little gap in his front teeth, and then he would honk his nose with both pointer fingers, saying, “Beep, Beep, Richie!” imitating Tim Curry from the 1990 miniseries of It. Though we bonded through music, serious talks of God, emotionally absent fathers, church politics, and our hopes for the journey ahead, there was a gentleness to Jordan that I was attracted to.

We fell in with Andrew and Steven, and the four of us quickly became a crew, played music together (but never successfully formed a band), terrorizing the hallways with what people at the time called “metrosexual behavior.” We would giggle, hug each other, talk about our feelings and art and books. Rick, a tall basketball player, once asked me in a hush-hush manner in the bathroom, “Yo, man, people saying y’all are faggots, but that ain’t true, is it?” I cared and I didn’t care, and probably said something like, “Don’t worry, Rick, I’m not going to hit on you. Plus, you’re not my type.” We relished making people squirm. One way we did this was by dressing up as ninjas and sprinting up and down the hallways, halting in front of someone’s propped-open door in freeze-frame kung-fu poses. We said nothing, just waited for people to react, freak out, yell, jump in surprise, or unveil their fragile masculinity with some choice words.

Andrew hung MC Escher prints above his desk and was better at guitar than any of us. Steven had a math mind but devoured books in a way that made me envious, and he read Haruki Murakami and Margaret Atwood. I was on a John Irving and classic poetry kick. Jordan wasn’t much of a reader, but loved art and music as much as we did, and he joined three bands almost overnight. He was far and away the most social out of all of us, making friends in seemingly every circle on campus quickly. We talked about the "spazzcore” band we would someday start, like Q And Not U or The Blood Brothers.

Jordan dropped out after the first semester, declaring college wasn’t for him but spent the rest of the year squatting, surfing from couch to couch in various rooms on the fourth floor. Once the RA got wind of what he was doing, he would check in with our room and a few other rooms he suspected might be housing Jordan and ask us sternly if Jordan was staying with us, to which we would always say, “no,” probably too conspicuously for our own good. It was a matter of time before he was asked to leave.

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Hua Hsu devotes the first thirty-odd pages of Stay True to growing up in the eighties and nineties in Urbana-Champaign, Dallas, and eventually Cupertino, California, where the bulk of Hsu’s memories are drawn, portraying the nuanced challenges of being a second-generation Taiwanese-American. Careful observations—and carefully chosen ones—stealthily do the work of theater. People are made manifest in a single swipe. At one point, we see Hsu’s mother criticizing newer immigrants at the Asian market for abandoning carts haphazardly in the parking lot. At another point, Hsu becomes aware that his command of English has surpassed his parents’, conjuring cache for settling disputes. His father moves back to Taiwan for work and trades tender, loving faxes with Hsu, helping with homework or talking about the meaning of the passing of Kurt Cobain.

“My worldview was defined by music,” Hsu says. He becomes straight-edge, makes zines, languishes on bands when they become too popular, and devotes himself to seriousness. He ransacks magazines, comic shops, record stores, and his grandparents’ old wardrobes for goods. “It was exciting to meander and choose who you wanted to be, what aspects of yourself to accent or adorn. You were sending a distress signal, hoping someone would come to your rescue.”

When Hsu meets Ken at Berkeley freshman year, it feels like a rescue, though he’s initially repulsed. Ken had a “dream” high school experience, liked Dave Matthews Band and Pearl Jam—“music I found appalling,” Hsu says—and is immediately courted by a fraternity. Most of all, to Hsu, who wears thrift store cardigans and eschews parties, Ken “was a genre of person I actively avoided—mainstream.”

Ken is third-generation Japanese-American, doesn’t take off his shoes inside, and comes from a more affluent household, but the two bond. Much of the memoir is devoted to Hsu’s friendship with Ken, how they approach subjects or books from different angles or hold friendly debates and smoke on the small balcony in their dorm, not because they actually liked smoking but because it provided momentary escape from the chaos of college life.

Various films, philosophers, and texts—from Derrida to La Jetée to Aristotle to Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon—intersperse between scenes, sometimes becoming fixtures of those scenes. Ken and Hsu debate everything, and double down on philosophizing, and Hsu steps back to offer poignant reflections on what it means to grapple with the self, test theories, and sometimes bullshit your way through conjecture—Derrida through the eyes of someone much older who now understands Derrida, while critiquing the younger self, who was too obtuse to know that he didn’t know what he was talking about. These reflections are brutal and funny in the way that laughing at the self, when done from a healthy vantage, is a joy in and of itself. “We came up with brilliant theories but failed to write them down,” he says.

Despite Hsu’s snobbery, Ken persists. He grows more curious about Hsu’s opinions and affinities. He wants to know people in bands, deconstruct films, and help Hsu see that Maxim might provoke more than a titillating cover. (Ken likes the articles.)

I don’t think it’s giving anything away—it’s on the summary inside the book flap—to say that Ken is murdered in a carjacking their junior year, sending Hsu and his group of friends into a spiral. Here, Hsu shines, capturing the feral nature of grief at such an eggshell age. They rage and demand answers into the mystery of the murder. Hsu rejects the campus grief therapy and says he was, “busy, frenetic, staying up all night reading and writing.” You could say the book shifts—it shifts seamlessly many times—into a Künstlerroman (a story of an artist’s growth). Hsu writes letters to Ken, not wanting to forget the agony and intensity of his grief. “I wanted to impose a structure on all that had come before that July night,” he says.

I first came to Hsu’s writing when I read “Wokking the Suburbs,” back in 2012 in an issue of Lucky Peach, part of which was adapted into early scenes for Stay True. In the acknowledgements, Hsu says the book took him twenty years to write, which, bearing the emotional excavation and powers of restraint, sounds about right. I’ve relished his encyclopedic knowledge of music on quiet display in his profiles for the New Yorker. His casual brilliance often sends me down rabbit holes, doing detective work to glean the full weight of suggestions like this in his Björk profile: “‘Utopia’ actually sounds like a place—a quiet, enchanted ecosystem with a constant thrum of activity. It harks back to one of music’s oldest aspirations, to replicate the delights of the natural world.” Music’s oldest aspirations? How did I miss that? And off I go, trying, as Hsu tries as a young man in the book, to beat my friends to the punch, to bump up the old “I found it first” cred. So, in a lot of ways, I’m predisposed to liking Hsu’s work, whether he’s writing about bell hooks, Sandra Oh, Vagabon, or Moses Sumney (one of the best live performances I’ve ever seen), or offering incisive cultural critiques on the myth of the model minority or “The Muddled History of Anti-Asian Violence.” Suffice it to say, I’ve learned a lot from Hsu over the years, on how to write about art, assess books and music, embrace obsession. Slow considerations. Slow, in the sense that they are thoughtfully mulled, quietly brimming with passion. You always leave a piece feeling like Hsu has much more to say, a quality I aspire to in conversation and in writing. If this piece is beginning to border on love letter rather than criticism, so be it.

The mark of a good memoir, in my mind, is one where the narrator walks through a firestorm and comes out with a cool eye, and Stay True is nothing if not cool. Sensitive, yes. Intense, absolutely. Brainy, sure, but not annoyingly so. Hsu never lapses into maudlin telling or saccharine nostalgia, and he doesn’t float into the clouds of academic jargon when explaining Derrida—though you sense he could. Because the last fifty pages of the book are so powerfully drawn, intimate, measured, and X-acto knife sharp regarding interrogations of self, culture, and race, I hesitate to say much more, as I wish for you, dear reader, only to savor it, to come to it if and when you are ready.

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I try very hard not to encroach on the text when reading. I’m fully aware of the dangers of using a book written by a minority to talk about my own white/male/cis-life, but usurping is not my goal, nor is centering myself. This is simply a way to close the gap of art and self, and seek the atmosphere between, plumb the mysteries of attraction and affinity. Stay True is not my story. I felt for Ken, and I felt for Hsu and his friends as they raged. My hope is that my experiences have only allowed me greater sympathy—or perhaps an easier entry point. Gratitude is all I hope to convey here. Please do seek out Hsu’s work. You will be better for it.

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Jordan was an open invitation—to many people, I’d learn later. You could always shoot the shit on his balcony or sit around and talk about music on someone’s thrifted couch. We did play in a band briefly, called Tractor Curtain, then Bribe the Ghost. Jordan on bass, me on lead guitar, Michael on drums, Chris on guitar and vocals. Our friend Andrew would replace me when I got sucked into the vapid machine of campus leadership. (I still regret quitting.) On one long weekend, we played four shows in four days in small venues around the state. At one point, on the last show we played at some dive bar in Saint Cloud to five people, two of whom were friends, Jordan and I put our backs to each other, leaning into one another—simulacrum of the rock gods.

When he would lift off—and he did lift off into unseen realms of goofiness— it was hard to pull him down, and you’d wind up trotting around the streets of Saint Paul, drinking beer in the great wide open, popping off at a playground for an impromptu obstacle course.

In September of 2007, we drove up to Duluth with our friend and bandmate Chris, my future wife Rebekah and her sister Bethany, to see Low and Wilco at Bayfront Park. It was unexpectedly brisk and drizzling, and we had to bum rush a local thrift store for flannels. We drank oatmeal stout to stay warm and danced (as much as too-cool white people can dance) and swayed in the rain. It was one of my favorite shows of all time. Lake Superior shushed beyond the stage, and occasional freighters chugged by. According to a setlist on concertarchives.org, Wilco played five songs from Sky Blue Sky, which had come out earlier that year, and which I’d heard for the first time in Jordan’s Marshall Avenue apartment. He made us Vodka tonics, and we sat on his mattress and talked about God and our growing bitterness toward Christianity and certain Christian institutions. Later, we probably wound up at Michael’s apartment down the road. With Jordan, there was always a crew floating around, and the longer you hung around him, the more you realized that you were one small member of one of the many crews he rolled with.

We drifted, but not out of any falling out. Our lifestyles simply diverged. We would often text and made it a point to hang out every couple of months. I would go see his new bands play and meet various members of his ever-evolving crew.

I often boast of my sharp memory, so it is embarrassing that I can’t remember the last time I saw him. I know I saw him for sure at a bar on a cold night in February of 2013, where he encouraged me to quit my job. I was miserable, and he saw it. Yet, he listened to my whole sob story, then very simply said, “Yep, you gotta get outta there.”

Jordan died suddenly on December 4th, 2014, of cardiac arrest. He was 29. He’d been born with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. At his funeral, the pastor cited his love for people and his many groups of friends, crediting his overlarge heart. He wasn’t the kind of person to talk about his own travails. He had a brother with cerebral palsy, and he would take trips home to Willmar to be with him for a few days. He kept in touch with his many siblings, calling them often or driving to meet them for a dinner or half a day. When he spoke of his family, he didn’t speak of them with the resentment many of us did as freshly released from the strictures of religious families. As much as Jordan could bitch with you when you were bitchy, or encourage you as you returned exasperated from a family gathering, he would quietly call you back in with his private tender love of his own family.

I’ve been fortunate not to have many people close to me pass, so naturally, after Steven called me in 2014 and broke the news, I thought about Jordan every day for a long time. I still talk to him, wishing he were here for this or that event, apologizing for letting our friendship fade, berating him for not taking better care of himself. I still can’t listen to Pedro the Lion, Counting Crows, The National’s Alligator, nor Sky Blue Sky—the one about getting clean and coming to terms—without thinking of Jordan. Though my spiritual beliefs have largely shifted to the realities of here-and-now, I want to believe in heaven just so I can see him again.

Stay True helped me actualize my grief. Back when I first met Jordan, at a time when my own family was finally putting language to our fracturing (“divorce”), I hadn’t realized what I was doing. I was constructing my first chosen family, and that is something the critical conversation misses about Stay True. Yes, there is family. There are fathers and fax machines. But there is also chosen family, and those bonds are true in ways that only friendship can be true.

Stay True. I read this and thought of you—Jordan, Andrew, Steven, Ashley, Michael, Chris, Sarah. You’re all there, and you’ll always already be there, in those deep caverns of our collective, overlarge heart.

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Have you read Stay True or something else that lit you up recently? Please comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts. (If you go in search of Stay True, please support your local independent booksellers, or shop online on Bookshop. Thanks, as always, for reading.)