Stay True

Stay True (2022) by Hua Hsu

Genre: Memoir that uses a nostalgic examination at a previous friendship to examine things like what it means to search for identity as an American immigrant and in the process explores what it feels like to look back at the unsure footing of college-aged youth.

Recommended For: Anyone who has ever thought about why they like the things they like or why they are friends with who they are friends with. Also recommended for just about any thoughtful person.

Buy here or check out at your local library. (Don’t go to the Jeff Bezos website).

Bonfires are already such fuzzy visual memories. So, when you’re drunk, they become swirls that sort of just lock into your memory and erase the immediate before and after.

I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. I got drunk for the first time when I was 14, and for most of high school I either chased or succumbed to the possibilities of parties and girls and peer pressure and just saying yes to the next thing because going with the flow was just inertia within this context and stopping myself from drinking would have been a much more conscious, effortful decision.

Fort Worth is a big city, but it could be one of the most country-ass big cities that exists (especially back then), so when there wasn’t an obvious place to have a party, there was usually someone within the network of four or five high schools we were dealing with (this was pre-smart phone but within the cell phone era) whose parents owned some sort of land outside of the city limits that we could all just caravan to and drink upon.

Sometimes I would do the driving, pack a couple people in my car, open containers in the front and back seats, music playing loud, as the city turned into dark country roads before the days of GPS and I don’t really recall how we managed to find these places with some surely terrible directions. I’d probably had a drink or two on the way, but I’d nearly blackout while there, and I’d still drive back. I can still very clearly picture the colors and design of shirts and sweaters I vomited on during a few of these excursions 21 years later. My parents didn’t deserve for me to be living that recklessly. Nothing about their parenting styles led me to that. Sunday night through Thursday night, I ate dinners with them. I loved spending time with them (still do). Was never running from anything at home.

Being drunk in that open Texas air, with a bonfire blazing, it’s a memory that feels good. I can actually remember the way the buzz kept me warm. We were never all huddled close. These were wide open spaces with a lot of people. You could stumble between cars and into different spots and see new people and it would be a new warm welcome and a laugh. The space is what I liked. It wasn’t the cramped quarters of most parties and drinking environments. That closeness never allowed me to think. I could only be on edge, feel an awareness of the meanness and insecurity that led us all to want to just break rules and impress each other while never acting impressed by one another. It made me feel like a child, which I was. Out there by a bonfire I could feel a sense of surveying my own choices, and even if I wasn’t proud of them, I could tell myself I had come to a place, rather than being backed into a corner.

I don’t think I found out a lot about myself until later. The things I carried with me from that time when I left Texas for college and came back to Dallas later were things from my home. The way my parents looked at the world. The way my sister obsessed over music. The books I read.

—

A few weeks ago, I officially made it one year since my last drink.

I would have thought it’d have been more difficult than it was. To be honest, I had to stop. A couple years ago, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition. Not one that a doctor or a Google search ever told me had any adverse relationship to drinking. But I was getting intensely sick. Three beers over the course of four hours would result in the symptomatic equivalent of alcohol poisoning. I tried to limit my drinking with hard caps, but that inevitably failed every few weeks, and I was torturing myself. I figured I had to legitimately quit.

So, you could argue it was easier to quit because I had the recent memory and fear of the consequences if I slipped up. But if I can give myself a little credit, plenty of people who have blacked out as many times in their lives as me, would have just as much incentive and still fail.

The hardest parts were really just associations with drinking. Five PM on a Friday felt like it should be punctuated with a beer; the taste and the ever so slight buzz officially releasing me from work. I’d never realized how much a drink seemed like part of the deal at a Mexican restaurant, as much as chips and salsa.

But my success was tied up with me generally feeling emboldened by the fact that I didn’t need a drink to socialize. It’s not a crutch for me, and I’m not even close to the person for whom that was the case. Despite what this self-indulgent essay might suggest, I’m not one of those people that needs to make sobriety my personality either. I held my recent birthday gathering at a brewery, out of convenience. I’d guess about 60% of my friends don’t even realize I stopped drinking.

I’d hesitate to say I have a lot of regrets, as I’m pretty clear about the notion that I couldn’t have landed in a good spot if I took a different path, but I do have a bit of a pang of sadness knowing it was always possible to be this clear eyed. To become any degree of self-actualized is not easy, but to look back and see a version of yourself that was trying to discover things is really lucky. I can see that if I squint, but I see a lot of blank spots, blurred by someone who wanted to dull that discovery process when I was a kid and walked closer to it as I got older.

—

Obviously, that discovery process is still plenty messy for most people.

Stay True is a beautiful book. I’d have to rack my brain to try to figure out if it’s my favorite memoir, but it’s one of my favorite books I’ve ever read. Hua Hsu has that clear vision of formative youth. He remembers so clearly the process of figuring out what was cool to him and trying to act on that. He also remembers grappling with the frustration of living in a dynamic world where friends could think other things are cool, and you totally disagree and yet somehow still think those friends are so cool.

This book feels nostalgic for a life I didn’t live, and I think anyone reading it will have that same experience. There’s tragedy in the middle of the book, but the feeling the entire text conveys is being somewhat carefree at the time of your life when you are afforded that and yet choosing to have your wheels spinning at each and every moment.

“Stay True” is such a broad term for the book. I never would have thought of it as the title if I had read it without being told what it was called. That’s actually how I like to think of the title. As an afterword. You read the book, and then you are just given that advice. Do with it what you will.

3 More Things You Can Read Today:

-Miranda on Miranda (Or, Some Golden Interview Outtakes)

-We Reshaped the Landscape for Cars, Not People. Will We Do the Same for AI?

-Falling in love with Joan Osborne…