Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

by Hua Hsu

The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories.

There comes a moment for the immigrant’s child when you realize that you and your parents are assimilating at the same time. Later, I understood that we were both sifting, store to store, for some possible future—that we were both mystified by the same fashions, trends, and bits of language. That my late-night trips to the record store with my dad had been about discovery, not mastery. Later still, I came to recognize that assimilation as a whole was a race toward a horizon that wasn’t fixed. The ideal was ever shifting, and your accent would never be quite perfect. It was a set of compromises sold to you as a contract. Assimilation was not a problem to be solved but the problem itself.

When you’re young, you are certain of your capacity to imagine a way out of the previous generation’s problems. There is a different way to grow old, paths that don’t involve conforming and selling out. We would figure it out together, and we would be different together. I just had to find people to be different with, a critical mass of others to flesh out the possibilities of a collective pronoun.

Suddenly I started describing anything that was taken apart as being “deconstructed.” Anything weird was merely “postmodern.” Maybe, in fact, there was no truth. The word itself was meaningless. How did we come to agree on the meanings of words to begin with? Talking about all of this was fun. Multiculturalism, and the inclusion of women and minorities in the canon, still felt like a meaningful intervention. But what if your issue was with the very notion of standards and hierarchies? Critics of Derridean deconstruction worried where these questions might take us. We could seek nuance and refine our political positions forever. How would we dream together if we couldn’t agree on any common values?

Within a few months, I would understand that being in public, shouting, chanting, singing, calling out evil—it wasn’t always about trying to accomplish something. Sometimes it’s just about your voice blending in with those of others. The anonymity of being in a crowd, knowing you are there for one another. More feelings than you know what to do with, so you scream at someone, even if they’re the wrong ones.

Back on campus, the volunteers talked about what it meant to guide someone who was just a few years younger than us. Our primary authority derived from the fact that we were college students. But if college was just a way of reproducing privilege, one of my friends asked, why offer higher education as the answer to their problems? Why should we encourage them to go to college?

You never guessed that a wide-open future might result in a retreat into the most obscure corners of your own mind.

For much of American history, the hierarchy that privileged whites over all others was encoded in law. And while the end of legal segregation brought opportunity to many, the logic of white supremacy remained, manifesting itself in ways that were furtive, almost invisible. There were still moments of racial terror. But in the post–civil rights era—with its mantra of color blindness—racism was no longer believed to be an institutional reality. This was the larger fiction that all the smaller ones served.

I no longer felt linear progress. The only progress, I continued, occurs on paper, as words and lines accumulate, as paragraphs became pages. Maybe someday there will be insufficient disk space.

The arraignment was the same week as the Columbine massacre. I remember reading all sorts of articles trying to grasp why the Columbine killers had done it, retracing their steps, reckoning with where it had all gone wrong for them. Was it the fault of video games, Hollywood, high school bullying? But I didn’t understand the point in offering them the privilege of narrative. I was more fixated on the paths that had come to an end.

The immigrant’s resourcefulness requires an exhaustion of possibilities. You may master tenses and forms, grammatical rules, what passes for style. And yet, consequently, you may struggle to hold a conversation with your grandparents. It’s possible they secretly wanted this to happen—a measure of generational progress.