Stay True
by Hua Hsu.
Doubleday, 196 pp., $26.00
When they were undergraduates at Berkeley in the 1990s, Hua Hsu’s friend Ken was murdered, randomly and wantonly, in a carjacking. That is the precipitating cause of Hsu’s memoir, Stay True. The killing occurs a bit past the middle of the book and governs its trajectory: an edenic preamble followed by a long fall. Ken’s murder is not the subject, though, but more like the volcanic eruption that preserves in its gradually cooling ash the life that once went on. The real subject is friendship. Also youth. Also Asian identity. And incidentally zines, time, education, California, history, partygoing, menswear, mixtapes, and a dozen other matters. Hsu is never going to be the kind of writer whose books have just one subject.…