Hua Hsu on his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Stay True

Episode notes

“Stay True” by Hua Hsu. Cover courtesy of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

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. 

Inside the book, there’s letters from Hsu’s father who worked in Taiwan. They’re earnest, beautiful and slightly awkward. That sort of intimacy—the exchange of words between father and son–lingers among the pages of Hsu’s memoir. And once Hsu heads to Berkeley, he finds a best friend who’s twice as comfortable in his skin and recounts a different story of intimacy. 

It’s two kinds of love story, really.

Hua Hsu’s memoir Stay True 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. 

This interview originally aired on October 7, 2022.