A review by cubaitlubin
Stay True by Hua Hsu

emotional reflective

4.25

Friendship’s driver isn’t the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would “choose knowing rather than being known.” I had always thought it was the other way around.

I love these candid, loving, thoughtful reflections on being on the precipice adulthood - seeking to define oneself through friendship, art, culture. This beautifully captures the pureness and complexityof relationships at such a tender and bright age. Hua Hsu is incredibly honest and endearing in his writing, which paints a loving portrait of his best friend lost too soon. The best of coming-of-age with such a specific perspective and setting of Asian American youth in 90s California. A cathartic eulogy. 

There are many currencies to friendship. We may be drawn to someone who makes us feel bright and hopeful, someone who can always make us laugh. Perhaps there are friendships that are instrumental, where the lure is concrete and the appeal is what they can do for us. There are friends we talk only about serious things, others who only make sense in the listed merriment of deep night. Some friends complete us while others complicate us. Maybe you feel as if there were nothing better in the world than driving in a car, listening to music with friends, looking for an all-night donut shop. Nobody says a thing, and it is perfect. Maybe your lifelong fascination with harmony finally began to make sense in those scenes, packed in your family's station wagon, singing along to "God Only Knows," waiting in the parking lot until the song was over.