Hua Hsu on his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Stay True

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

Jesse Thorn

Society & Culture

4.5 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2023

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hua Hsu is a writer. You might have seen his profiles and criticism in The New Yorker. But his most recent work isn't about Bjork or bell hooks. It's about Hua Hsu. Stay True is Hsu's coming-of-age memoir. It traces his life from adolescence to the end of his college years at UC Berkeley. The book works toward what it means to be Asian American. But fundamentally, it's a book about intimacy – not sex, but closeness. Hua Hsu's memoir Stay True has recently won a Pulitzer Prize. On Bullseye, we're revisiting Hsu's conversation with us last year. He spoke about the writing process behind Stay True. Plus, how writing his memoir reflected and refracted his relationship with his own American-ness.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.
0:20.8	It's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorn.
0:22.6	Wash shoe, my next guest, is a writer.
0:26.2	His work covers a lot of ground.
0:27.5	He's written profiles and reviews in the New Yorker covering artists and performers
0:32.1	like York and Bell Hooks and Sandra O.
0:35.6	He's also a professor of English, with a passion for elevating underappreciated talent
0:40.4	in literature.
0:41.8	He wrote his first book, A Floating Chinaman about the writer H.T. Song.
0:47.0	Song was an undocumented immigrant from China who self-published his books initially,
0:52.5	handing out copies around Manhattan.
0:55.2	Lately, Hua has been writing more reflective work.
0:59.6	Stay true, his memoir, just won the Pulitzer Prize.
1:03.8	In Stay True, Xu looks back on his early 20s when he was an undergrad at the University
1:09.2	of California, Berkeley.
1:11.4	His mom was maybe an hour or so away by car.
1:15.3	His dad was overseas in Taiwan, working as an engineer.
1:19.5	In the dorms he made and lost friends.
1:22.3	He writes about road trips with buddies.
1:25.0	He shares correspondence with his father.
1:28.8	It's a book about his most intimate relationships and their interrelationship with his Americanness.
1:35.8	It's also a sort of tragic love story.
	...

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