Hua Hsu

Hua Hsu’s memoir Stay True revolves around his college years at the University of California, Berkeley. Hsu is the song of Taiwanese immigrants; he was born in 1977 in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. As an adolescent, Hsu felt himself “assimilating at the same time” (24) as his parents. He developed a deep love for music, art, and alternative culture. During his teenage years, he began making zines as “a way of sketching the outlines of a new self, writing a new personality into being” (27). Hsu decided to attend Berkely partly because of the campus’ reputation as a progressive, artistic stronghold. He noted that he “was bored, and… searching for my people” (35).

At Berkeley, Hsu began to sort “his classmates according to their music sensibilities… According to [his] blunt typology of the world, there were people who were cool and then people who weren’t” (39). Hsu soon met Ken, a...