By Samantha Cohen
Journalist and author Hua Hsa visited the University of Maryland for a reading, interview and Q&A of his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, “Stay True” on Thursday as the 2024 spring speaker for UMD’s Honors Humanities program.
Hsu’s memoir is set at the University of California, Berkeley and highlights the unlikely friendship between him and his late friend who, referred to only as Ken, was killed the summer before their senior year of college.
Randy Ontiveros, Director of Honors Humanities and Associate Professor of English organized and moderated the event to help students appreciate the magic of friendship created during their college years.
“Even just the ordinary moments of walking into the Y to get dinner or having a conversation at 2 a.m. after a movie,” Ontiveros said. “There’s something about it that’s magic.”
Upon meeting Ken, Hsu was skeptical. Hsu described himself as a “real snob” who initially judged Ken on his confidence and the way he dressed in Abercrombie & Fitch.
Being Japanese American, Hsu believed Ken to be more assimilated into American culture than he and his Taiwanese family were. Hsu came to realize how Ken was an open and patient person and their differences allowed their friendship to grow.
“I think the book is a gesture that I wasn’t able to ever express in his life,” Hsu said.
When Hsu began writing, he didn’t have a vision for the end of the journal entries. To keep his friendship with Ken alive, Hsu felt the urge to write letters to Ken, and to himself, archiving all the adventures they went on together.
In the late 1990s, it wasn’t as easy to maintain a record of memories as it is with today’s technological advances, Hsu said.
“It was not necessarily memory. It was just anti-forgetting,” Hsu said. “I had to just have a record,” Hsu said.
Hsu includes several anecdotes throughout the book, whether it be as routine as driving around in the car together, or as exhilarating as destroying Ken’s rival frat house.
“I started out thinking there was a book about grief, sadness, feelings of guilt, but over time I realized that it was also a book about friendship,” Hsu said. “Not just my friendship, but friendship in general.
The event was hosted by the Honors Humanities program in the College of Arts and Humanities and co-sponsored by the Honors College, the Asian American Studies Program, the Center for Literary and Comparative Study and the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
At the end of the event, two Honors Humanities students joined the panel to continue the interview and Q&A portion, including freshman Razak Diallo, a journalism and cinema studies double major.
“[The book] was like a glimpse into the future as to how I can navigate and how I can be better at expressing my identity in a way,” Diallo said. “Staying true, if you will.”
Diallo said he hopes the audience will take away Hsu’s point of having a support system when expressing yourself.
With the widespread diversity on UMD’s campus, Ontiveros believes that bringing in guest speakers of different backgrounds is crucial.
“Having him as an Asian American writer and a really prominent Asian American writer is important to just continuing to make visible a really important community on campus,” Ontiveros said.
Featured image: Hua Hsu answers questions as part of the student Q&A. Photo by Amanda Sinofsky.