Stay True Literary Elements

Memoir

The United States of America (largely California and Massachusetts) during the 1990s and early 2000s

Hua Hsu is the first-person narrator of the book.

The book's tone is balanced between nostalgic wistfulness and sorrowful mourning.

As a memoir, there is no clear antagonist and protagonist; however, it could be said that Hsu is the protagonist and Ken's murderers are the antagonists.

The major conflict is Hsu's grief and regret following Ken's death.

The climax of Stay True is when Hsu discovers that Ken has been killed.

In their final interaction together, Ken and Hsu smoke a cigarette on Ken's balcony. Hsu is due to leave for a rave shortly, but wants advice from Ken on what to do with his girlfriend. When their conversation is interrupted, Hsu writes, “I left my cigarette to die a natural death on the edge of the railing, wondering if it would eventually smolder and ash onto the cars below us. I still needed advice, but I told Ken we’d resume this smoke later" (p. 116). By focusing on the fact that they would "resume... later" Hsu foreshadows the tragic fact that they will never be able to do so.

In a sense, Hsu writes about Ken's death with understatement. When he discovers that Ken has been killed, he writes “Ken’s body had been found in an alleyway in Vallejo, about thirty minutes north" (p. 118). While this would have been a shocking and upsetting piece of news, Hsu reports it in a flat and factual way. In so doing, he replicates the sense of shock and even disbelief that would be provoked by this traumatic event.

Hsu refers to the work of a number of philosophers and writers throughout the book. For example, he discusses theories of gift exchange developed by the anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski and Marcel Mauss and eventually agrees with Mauss's notion that “every gesture carries a desire for connection, expanding one’s ring of associations" (p. 95). Throughout the rest of the book, Hsu writes about the gifts that Ken gave to him. While he does not explicitly mention Malinowski or Mauss again, he is nonetheless alluding to their work and the commentary from earlier in the work.

One of the most striking images occurs toward the end of the book, when Hsu is living in Boston. One night Hsu and his girlfriend Joie take the drug ecstasy. After a little while, Hsu looks at the Charles River and notices that "there was no water, just an endless run of silver marbles rolling in slow motion" (p. 169).

After Ken's death, Hsu feels guilty for leaving Ken's party on the night he was killed. At the same time, he acknowledges that there was nothing he could have done to prevent the event. Paradoxically, this only makes him feel more guilty.

Hsu uses a parallel sentence structure in the lines, “I feared our plane to Mexico would crash. That the taxi to the resort would collide with oncoming traffic. That I would contract some rare illness from the bedsheets. That my softball scar would require amputation" (p. 139).

"Hollywood" is a classic example of metonymy, in which the area of Los Angeles is used to denote American culture more broadly. Referring to the Columbine school shooting, Hsu writes “was it the fault of video games, Hollywood, high school bullying?" (p. 160). Of course, he does not mean to suggest that the neighborhood in Los Angeles played a role in the school shooting, but rather the products of American culture that glorify violence and revenge.

As a work of non-fiction, Stay True features few literary devices like personification. At one point, however, Hsu refers to email as a "dumb...encumbrance" (p. 72). The use of the word "dumb," typically and derogatorily associated with people, personifies the otherwise inanimate email.