Hua Hsu and his memoir, Stay True.
“The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories,” writes Hua Hsu, professor of literature. In an excerpt from his upcoming memoir
Stay True, published in the
New Yorker under the title “My Dad and Kurt Cobain,” Hsu writes about his relationship with his parents, immigrant identity, and music. “My father’s record collection had the effect of making music seem uncool to me,” he writes. However, through years of correspondence via fax and phone, the two would come to relate to each other through a mutual appreciation of American popular music. “We seemed to spend hours apart, occasionally intersecting in some unlikely aisle,” Hsu writes. “We were enthralled by the same music, but we related to it differently.” Hsu weaves personal history and cultural critique, exploring themes of assimilation and double consciousness. On the former, he writes: “Later still, I came to recognize that assimilation was a race toward a horizon that wasn’t fixed. The ideal was ever shifting, and your accent would never quite be perfect.”
Stay True: A Memoir will be published September 27, 2022.
Post Date: 08-30-2022