Summary

Hua Hsu’s memoir opens during his college years at the University of California, Berkeley. Hsu frequently drove his friends, including Ken, to various locations so that he could play his own music. Their emotions were “always very high or very low” (6). At the end of one semester, Hsu and his friends went on a short road trip. They took photographs of one another, and Hsu notes that he remembers very little from this time. He reflects on the photographs of this trip, noting that they “registered a pattern” (7) and created a sense of order.

In 1965, Hsu’s father came to the United States from Taiwan. Hsu’s father, a graduate physics student, slowly “acquired various characteristics that might have marked him as an American” (12). Hsu’s mother moved from Taiwan to Illinois in 1971. Both of Hsu’s parents worked to establish communities...