With Zines and Mixtapes, Writer Hua Hsu Found Identity, Friendship, and Consolation

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KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2022

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When New Yorker writer Hua Hsu was growing up in Cupertino in the 1990s as the only child of Taiwanese immigrants, he created mixtapes and zines – homemade Xerox pastiches of writing, photos and collages – as a “way to find a tribe.” Hsu’s search for his people eventually led him to UC Berkeley where he, a lover of esoteric and undiscovered bands, forged an unlikely friendship with Ken, a Japanese-American frat boy whose love of the Dave Matthews Band, initially repelled Hsu. That friendship and Ken’s murder are at the heart of Hsu’s new memoir “Stay True,” which documents the profound and the mundane moments of a 90s kid seeking to forge his identity. Guests: Hua Hsu, author, "Stay True;" staff writer, the New Yorker; professor of Literature, Bard College Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:58.0	It is the 1990s and a young Washu is growing up in Cupertino.
1:03.0	He's mediocre at math, loves obscure music, and despises Pearl Jam, of course, and communicates
1:08.0	with his tech executive father in Taiwan, largely through the facts.
1:11.6	He creates his sense of self by setting himself against things, writing diatribes that he publishes in his zine.
1:17.6	Then he lands at UC Berkeley, where he forges an unlikely friendship with Ken, a Japanese-American fratboy and lover of the Dave Matthews Band.
1:26.6	Their friendship and its tragic end formed the
1:29.4	core of Shue's new memoir, Stay True, and he joins us here in the studio to talk about racial
1:34.3	identity in the late 90s, the best version of God Only Knows and being friends. That's all coming up next.
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