His friend’s murder turned Hua Hsu’s life upside down – and made him the person he is today | Life and style

Self and well-being

Decades after his friend’s senseless murder, author and journalist finally feels a sense of peace

Sun, Sep 10, 2023 7:00 a.m. EDT

A few days after Ken’s murder, in the summer of 1998, Hua Hsu, then 21, went out into sunny California and bought a newspaper. Everything is bad, he scribbled in permanent black marker on the first page – because everything was. The laughter distressed him. The pop harmonies were unlistenable. He even shaved his hair with clippers. For some time after the savage murder of his friend, Hsu’s relationship with most things, including writing itself, changed beyond recognition.

“I think I searched for a language for a long time,” the author and journalist says of his evolving grief. In the 25 years since his friend’s senseless murder – Ken’s body was found in an alley after being kidnapped by three strangers as he left his own housewarming party – his sensory traces are still fresh in the Hsu’s mind as he speaks to me from his tidy desk. in Brooklyn, in the early hours of Monday morning. The past still permeates the present. So much so that that summer day in 1998 still lingers. His academic connection with Ken may well be “a three-year period in a life that now lasts more than 30 years”, but he still has much to say about the devotional pull that led the writer to revisit their friendship, again and again, over the years. the last decades.

“It’s one thing to hold on to a moment in the past, it’s another to think about all the good things that cemented that person in my mind,” reflects Hsu, now 46, as we talk about her poignant new memoir. Stay true, a book that took him a quarter of a century to write. Already a professor of English at Bard College and editor at New Yorker, Hsu took his time trying to understand the unfathomable: a senseless act of violence that deprived him of a budding friendship just a month after his 21st birthday. “He did what they asked,” Hsu wrote. “He got into the trunk. He gave them his bank cards. However, they shot him in the back of the head. The fact that we only encounter this monstrous act halfway through the book speaks volumes about the elliptical manner in which Hsu sought to investigate his grief at the age of 40.

“There’s always this lingering doubt when a narrative breaks,” Hsu says as we discuss this passing of time.

“I think the older I got and the more distance there was between me and that moment, the more meaningful the writing was as a desire to understand why I was still thinking about these things.”

Hailed as “an evolutionary milestone for Asian-American literature” by New York ReviewIt is in his cerebral exploration of memory in times of trauma that the Pulitzer Prize-winning author truly achieves his ascension. Are our memories always reliable, he asks? And if not, how can we trust those we carry, especially as time passes and we begin to rewrite the past to define who we are now.

What happened then? What did he have with this friend? “Before I started writing this book, I didn’t realize how male friendship wasn’t such a talked-about topic,” Hsu says as we return to their first interaction at Berkeley — and the complexities that surrounded them. initially separated. “The first time I met Ken, I hated him,” he says, deadpan, when we first meet 18-year-old San Diegan on the third floor of Hsu’s dorm. Ken’s hometown may seem unimportant, but when you add it to everything else — his fraternity antics, for example — it combines to create a “kind of person” that the serious Hsu doesn’t want to be: the mainstream. “I’m the joke in the book, I’m the one being made fun of,” Hsu says with a knowing smile. “I was quiet and Ken was loud,” he wrote. “He projected confidence, I found people suspicious.” Hsu is still friends with most people from his college days and most of them have said so since they read Stay true: “You’re not really an asshole.” He’s laughing.

For Hsu, son of Taiwanese immigrants, creator of fanzines and passionate author of the Nirvana fan club, Ken represented everything he was reacting against. In addition to being “glaringly handsome,” he also seemed overly eager for the adult world. At the heart of their differences, “he was comfortable with himself,” and yet from their first proper interaction, Hsu recognized something in the curious person he saw in front of him, and vice versa: a desire to understand. “The more we hung out together, the more I realized we were immersed in the same obscure ’80s TV and baseball trivia,” Hsu says. “He wanted to know about all the music I loved. He understood that everyone had their own gift for others and he was looking for what that gift was. Very quickly, the two young men were inseparable: they took evening walks, watched videos together, made mixtapes of their favorite music.

“Millions of people loved Nirvana, millions of people wore old cardigans, but my journey to that was a little different,” Hsu says. Despite his dominant aesthetic, compared to Hsu’s independent tendencies, Ken’s path to this was also different. As a Japanese American, there were parallels between the two friends when it came to their personal development. Although the couple is homogenized as “Asian American” in the eyes of white America, the differences between them shed light on certain subtleties of belonging and identity in the United States: the experience of being American when we feel altered by the culture around us. . At the same time that Hsu was shaping himself as a son of immigrants, his parents were navigating their own relationship with their adopted country. His father had left Taiwan in 1965, his mother in 1971, both taken in as students when the 1965 immigration law eased restrictions on entry from Asia. Mapping the proximity of friends and Chinese food, they chose Cupertino in California – now part of Silicon Valley – to raise their children, the suburb where Hsu grew up among bubble tea cafes and “a few Apple buildings which seemed like a joke. »

For Hsu, as an American child, creating his zines was a way to sketch a new self. For his parents, however, their allegiance remained to the home they had left behind. “Maybe there was an emotional language that I was looking for in the music that had something to do with that context,” Hsu reflects.

When Kurt Cobain died in 1994, Hsu’s father sent the sad 17-year-old a loving fax that posed what he calls the dilemma of life: “You have to find meaning, but at the same time, you must accept reality. »

In the years since Ken’s death, this prospect has proven difficult for Hsu to embrace. “Afterwards, my parents didn’t necessarily encourage me to stay in my thoughts,” Hsu says – by which he means his grief.

His parents thought his priority should be to get on with life, let life go on, “which I found to be cruel advice to give.” But today, at 46, “I completely understand why they felt that way.” In the same way that you can never fully understand your grief, I wonder if you can ever truly understand your parents. “From a young age, my father said that your life is more difficult than mine because you have so many more choices,” Hsu recalls.

“The first generation thinks about survival,” he writes, “those who follow tell stories. The answer, for Hsu, lay in writing, to make sense of the past and its grief. In the weeks following Ken’s murder, it wasn’t just the melodies that changed, his writing changed too, “becoming curvier and more ornate, like the violent fury of graffiti tags.” The first night without him, he wrote a letter to Ken detailing everything he’d left behind: the bandage he’d put on his car’s air freshener, the lucky volleyball jersey still in his basket at home.

“If it wasn’t for Ken’s death, I probably wouldn’t be a writer,” he says. “At all?” I exclaim. “Yeah,” he replies before pausing for a moment, which he does often throughout our conversation – always searching for language. “Deep down, I always knew I wanted to get back to the subject I was writing about in my journal. »

He should have stayed, he told his therapist early in his grief – he could have done something. Hsu left Ken’s party early that night to go to a rave. A few hours later, he was dead. Have the “what ifs” lessened over time, I wonder? It wasn’t necessarily guilt because of his movements that night because he was always going to leave, he replies. “It was probably the feeling of relief I felt that I wasn’t staying.” Ken had suggested that they take his co-worker swing dancing the next evening – which wasn’t exactly Hsu’s thing. “Not only did I not stay, but I was relieved when he didn’t call the next day.” His relationship to all this has changed a lot over the years, he hastens to add. “There’s a connection between finally writing all this down and feeling peaceful, but that wasn’t necessarily what I was looking for,” he says.

If anything, writing about his friendship with Ken gave him his first opportunity to feel happy when he thinks about it. Happy to have known him. One of the last remaining images of Ken heartbreakingly embodies this subtle shift in his grief. Ken sold children’s shoes, and one day when Hsu went to pick him up, he watched incognito as Ken carefully tied a balloon and handed it to a child who was waiting with his parents. It was a generous act, Hsu writes. “I just felt lucky to witness something so simple and kind: to see my friend doing something good.” When it comes to joy and sadness, he reminds me, one does not diminish the other. “The true story would necessarily be joyful rather than gloomy,” he writes directly to Ken in the book’s final lines, “and giving in to joy would not mean that I am abandoning you. »

Stay True by Hua Hsu is published by Pan Macmillan at £10.99. Buy it for £9.67 from Guardianbookshop.com