Stay True Quotes

“At that age, time moves slow. You're eager for something to happen, passing time in parking lots, hands deep in your pockets, trying to figure out where to go next. Life happened elsewhere, it was simply a matter of finding a map that led there. Or maybe, at that age, time moves fast; you're so desperate for action that you forget to remember things as they happen. A day felt like forever, a year was a geological era.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“Derrida remarked that friendship’s driver isn’t the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would “choose knowing rather than being known.” I had always thought it was the other way around.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir

“Friendship rests on the presumption of reciprocity, of drifting in and out of one another’s lives, with occasional moments of wild intensity.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“When you’re young, you do so many things hoping to be noticed. The way you dress or stand, the music played loud enough to catch the attention of another person who might know a song, too. And then there are things you do as you step out into the world, the real world full of strange adults, testing out what it means to be generous or thoughtful. In that instant, before every memory was placed along some narrative arc, before the act of remembering took on a desperate air, I simply felt lucky enough to witness something so effortlessly kind - to see my friend do something that was good.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“Some friends complete us, while others complicate us. Maybe you feel as if there were nothing better in the world than driving in a car, listening to music with friends, looking for an all-night donut shop. Nobody says a thing, and it is perfect. Maybe your lifelong fascination with harmony finally began to make sense in those scenes, packed in your family's station wagon, singing along to "God Only Knows," waiting in the parking lot until the song was over.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“Modern life, theorists like Derrida explain, is full of atomized individuals, casting about for a center and questioning the engine of their lives. His writing is famously intricate, full of citations and abstruse terminology. Things are always already happening. But reflecting on his own relationships tended to give his thinking and writing a kind of desperate clarity. The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another. We continue to know our friend, even after they are no longer present to look back at us. From that very first encounter, we are always preparing for the eventuality that we might outlive them, or they us. We are already imagining how we may someday remember them. This isn’t meant to be sad. To love friendship, he writes, “one must love the future.” Writing in the wake of his colleague Jean-François Lyotard’s death, Derrida wonders, “How to leave him alone without abandoning him?” Maybe taking seriously the ideas of our departed friends represents the ultimate expression of friendship, signaling the possibility of a eulogy that doesn’t simply focus attention back on the survivor and their grief. We”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir

“Smoking offers a way to build natural breaks into conversation. Lighting a cigarette starts a timer.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir

“A friend, he wrote, would “choose knowing rather than being known.” I had always thought it was the other way around.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir

“It was exciting to meander and choose who you wanted to be, what aspects of yourself to accent and adorn. You were sending a distress signal, hoping someone would come to your rescue.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“Even then, they understood that American life is unbounded promise and hypocrisy, faith and greed, new spectrums of joy and self-doubt, freedom enabled by enslavement. All of these things at once.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir

“There comes a moment for the immigrant's child when you realize 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.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“the dilemma of life: you have to find meaning, but by the same time, you have to accept the reality. How to handle the contradiction is a challenge to everyone of us. What do you think?”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir

“The next generation would acquire a skill on their behalf - one that we could also use against them. Commanding the language seemed like our only way of surpassing them. Home life took on a kind of casual litigiousness. The calm and composed children, a jaunty bounce to our sentences, laying traps with our line of questioning. The parents, tired and irritated, defaulting to the native tongue.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another. We continue to know our friend, even after they are no longer present to look back at us. From that very first encounter, we are always preparing for the eventuality that we might outlive them, or they us. We are already imagining how we may someday remember them.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“Suburbs are about the leisurely conquest of space, an alternative to the uncomfortable density of the city. They seem to run free from history itself, offering a sense that nothing was there before. But the illusion of tranquility frays at the edges: the neurosis required to maintain so neatly manicured a lawn, the pristine sidewalks that nobody walks on, the holy wars fought to keep one municipality from oozing into the next. Suburbs suggest stability and conformity, yet they are rarely beholden to tradition. Rather, they are slates that can be wiped clean to accommodate new aspirations.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir

“Our students in Richmond had been identified as at-risk youth. But they weren’t just at risk of succumbing to specific ills, like gangs and drugs, which were ever present. The more general risk was that they would step into too much of the world too quickly—that they would never have the chance to discover their potential on their own terms, whatever that meant.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir

“It was a sign of personal growth, I thought to myself, that I could be friends with someone who liked Pearl Jam this much.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“For a while, you were convinced that you would one day write the saddest story ever.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“the idea of delayed reciprocity. You give expecting to receive. Yet we often give and receive according to intermittent, sometimes random intervals. That time lag is where a relationship emerges. Perhaps gifts serve political ends. But Mauss also believed that they strengthened the bonds between people and communities. Your obligation isn’t just to repay the gift according to a one-to-one ratio. You’re beholden to the “spirit of the gift,” a kind of shared faith. Every gesture carries a desire for connection, expanding one’s ring of associations.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“That’s the dilemma of life: you have to find meaning, but by the same time, you have to accept the reality.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir

“You make a world out of the things you buy. Everything you pick up is a potential gateway, a tiny, cosmetic change that might blossom into an entirely new you. A bold shirt around which you base a new personality, an angular coffee table that might reboot your whole environment, that one enormous novel that all the fashionable English majors carry around. You buy things to communicate affiliation to a small tribe, hopeful you'll encounter the only other person in line buying the same obscure thing as you. Maybe I, too, will become the kind of person who has books like 'Infinite Jest' casually strewn on his cool, angular coffee table. Maybe I'll become the kind of person who seems as if he should have that book but chooses not to.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“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. The child has learned to speak for himself, but to talk back as well. You write well, not good. The devoted student also internalizes a relationship to the language itself, one in which you remain conscious of your distance from the source, from who draws on this language to mine their authentic self, because you've been led to believe such a thing matters. A simple pronoun of "I" or "we," a first-person perspective, all of it seemed mysterious. We could never write in a way that assumed anyone knew where we were coming from. There was nothing interesting about our context. Neither Black nor white, just boring to everyone on the outside. Where do you even begin explaining yourself?”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“My parents are great, I said. Unbelievably non-stereotypical.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“Assimilation was not a problem to be solved but the problem itself.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“Where did we learn about the American dream? What role models were available to us? You pontificate on the meaning of Michael Chang. Do the lessons passed down to us by books or movies to TV apply to our lives as Asian kids with Asian parents, or do they make us feel inadequate? Why are we always working so hard, proving our smarts, living up to someone else's standards? Maybe it's all a trap. Why are we looking out for help, when it's all around us? We are not men without a culture. We just have to make it ourselves.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“For a brief spell, my father toyed with anglicizing his name and asked to be called Eric, though he soon realized that assimilation of that order didn’t suit him. You were free to name your children after U.S. presidents. Or you might name them something unpronounceable, since they would never be president anyway.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“The allure all these years had been the possibility of the asymptote’s line one day meeting the curve. At first this realization that I could never force a connection seemed tragic; then it became comforting to imagine that the line and the curve could go on forever.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“It would be an account of love and duty, not just anger and hatred, and it would be filled with dreams, and the memory of having once looked to the future, and an eagerness to dream again. It would be boring, because you simply had to be there. It would be poetry and not history.

...the deep ambivalence you once felt toward a song that now devastated you...the look when someone recognizes you.

I'm going to write about all this one day, I told her, and she smiled at me.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“What does it mean to truly be yourself? Around this time, in the mid-1900s, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor began thinking about how people throughout history had dealt with this question of individual identity. In the past, there was no such thing. You were born into a well-defined position, locked along a hierarchy, and you accepted that this was the natural order of things. With the dissolution of feudal, old-world bonds, new possibilities of economic and social mobility emerged, and this transience infected the soul. People began to wonder whether we possessed some innate essence that might be discovered by peeling away layers of our surface. Or maybe there was nothing innate, and we were always in the process of self discovery, self creation, and revision. For some, this manifested as a kind of endless drifting and searching; others found the possibility of claiming one's own identity empowering. But we were all in search of the same thing, that quality that made you yourself.

Taylor called this authenticity, and it became the unreachable horizon of modern life. It's a concept that makes sense only in its absence; we recognize inauthenticity, phoniness, when someone's clearly being a poseur. Yet the struggle to feel authentic -- this is very real, even if we know better. In Taylor's telling, everyone becomes a kind of artist, creatively wrestling with the parameters of our own being. He described the outlook as one where 'being true to myself is being true to my own originality, and that is something that only I can articulate and discover. In articulating it, I am defining it'. Even though all this sounds very navel-gazing, being true to yourself cannot happen in a vacuum. Constructing your personality is a game, one that requires you to joust with the expectations of others. Authenticity, Taylor explained, presumes dialogue, and it is born out of engaging with those around us. We seek recognition, even if what you want to hear from a close friend is that you're a one-of-a-kind weirdo that they'll never truly understand.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True