2025 FYE Summer Reading
Stay True by Hua Hsu
Check out this page for ways to engage with Hua Hsu's Stay True and to connect with 微密圈 faculty, staff, and fellow students in this process. We鈥檒l be adding additional content to the page over the summer, so check back to see what鈥檚 new!
微密圈 the book
We are excited to announce the Class of 2029 summer reading is Stay True by Hua Hsu. Hsu received a Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for his memoir, and he is a Professor of Literature at Bard College and a staff writer at The New Yorker.
Many thanks to the 微密圈 Office of Special Programs and the McCormack Artist-Scholar Residency Fund for their support of the summer reading program.
Essays and reflection
BY BEN BOGIN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ASIAN STUDIES| The title of my Scribner Seminar, 鈥淚n the Light of Death,鈥� is borrowed from a poem by my maternal uncle, the American Buddhist poet, Rick Fields (1942鈥�1999): Funny how in the light of death everything shines! Hua Hsu鈥檚 memoir, Stay True, explores the strange illumination that death offers by telling the story of a college friendship interrupted just as the two friends were beginning to imagine how their connection would carry on into their lives after college.- BY AMARILIS FRANCIS, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR FOR ADVISING, OPPORTUNITY PROGRAM| As the American-born daughter of immigrants and a Black-presenting minority, I had to learn to connect with my parents鈥� culture while also navigating my own unique American experience. Coming into one鈥檚 self-identity while living between cultures is messy, and like Hua Hsu in his memoir Stay True, I felt this conflict most sharply in college as well.
- BY MICHAEL JANAIRO, HEAD OF COMMUNICATIONS AND STRATEGIC INITIATIVES, TANG TEACHING MUSEUM | Hua Hsu's moving memoir "Stay True" raises important questions about identity formation: Who shapes us? Our parents? Our friends? Ourselves? Strangers? "I defined who I was by what I rejected" (p. 27), Hsu writes, speaking of music, films, books, and people鈥攊ncluding Ken, at first. Rejection is often one of the first acts of identity assertion: think of a toddler yelling, "No!" Hsu's unexpected friendship with Ken can be read, in part, as Hsu recognizing that, perhaps, taste is superficial.
- BY MINITA SANGHVI, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, MANAGEMENT AND BUSINESS DEPARTMENT| Hua Hsu鈥檚 memoir deals with his and Ken鈥檚 identities and their likely/ unlikely friendship in college. As two Asian-American boys, many may see them as similar. But Hua who is a second-generation Taiwanese immigrant, and Ken who is a Japanese-American are different in many ways.
- BY LEIGH WILTON & DOMINIQUE VUVAN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSORS, DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY| In Stay True, Hua Hsu describes a point in his life when music was everything 鈥� including a means of constructing an idealized 鈥渆nlightened鈥� version of himself. He writes with vivid detail about the ways in which he actively searched for obscure albums, which became a calling card for his identity.