Author and Critic Hua Hsu (The New Yorker) ‘Stays True’

10/08/23 • 63 min

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One year ago, The New Yorker staff writer and critic Hua Hsu published his singular memoir entitled Stay True. Earlier this May, the autobiography won a Pulitzer Prize.

Upon its paperback release, Hsu joins us to discuss the epigraph that frames the book (5:30) and his nomadic upbringing (9:45) scored by mixtapes (12:23) created by his Taiwanese father (15:14). Hsu then reflects on his arrival at UC Berkeley in the mid-90s (23:09) and how he formed an unexpected bond with a schoolmate named Ken (24:20).

On the back-half, Hsu describes the horrific night that Ken’s life was taken (36:58), the aftermath of this tragedy (40:15), his attempts to make sense of the past twenty-four years in Stay True (46:20), his complicated relationship to memory (49:00) and music (58:30), and how he’s held onto hope (1:03:02) through telling this enduring story of friendship.

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One year ago, The New Yorker staff writer and critic Hua Hsu published his singular memoir entitled Stay True. Earlier this May, the autobiography won a Pulitzer Prize.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This conversation was recorded at Spotify Studios.

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Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso - Author and Critic Hua Hsu (The New Yorker) ‘Stays True’

Transcript

Speaker 100:00:15.195

Pushkin. This is Talk Easy. I'm Stan Fragoso. Welcome to the show today. I'm joined by writer Wah Shoe. For the past two decades, Shoe has written about culture and music for a variety of publications, including by magazine grant Land, The Village Voice, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, where he's been a staff writer twenty seventeen. In last year, in twenty twenty two, he published his memoir entitled Stay True. The title came from Shu's friend