Stay True

When Hua Hsu first meets Ken in a Berkeley college dorm room, he hates him. A frat boy with terrible taste in music. For Hua, who makes zines and haunts indie record shops, Ken represents the mainstream. The only thing Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, and Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the US for generations, have in common is that American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them.

But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.

Capturing a coming-of-age cut short, and a portrait of a beautiful friendship, Stay True is an intimate memoir about growing up and moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.