Summary:
Section nine, the book's final section, begins with a photo of an older Hsu smoking a cigarette. Hsu has started dating Joie, a fellow student at Berkeley, and Hsu writes that he was “enchanted by the way she moved through the world, taking in as much of it as possible, holding her body with purpose and intention” (p. 166). Hsu and Joie dream of attending New York University together for their PhD but only Joie is admitted to the school. Hsu decides to attend Harvard where he “would be studying all the foundational things about American history and literature" (p. 166).
One night, “sometime in the weeks after 9/11,” Hsu meets up with friends from Berkeley while visiting New York (p. 167). At a party, one friend asks Hsu if he and Ken "were...really that close" (p. 167). The question troubles Hsu and forces him to reconsider his memories of his friendship with Ken. The question, he writes, “cast a pall over my memories, my ability to tell a story about myself” (p. 167).
Back in Boston, Hsu and Joie go out one night and decide to take the drug ecstasy. Hsu does not initially feel any effects, but eventually looks down at the Charles River and sees that “it was no longer a river. There was no water, just an endless run of silver marbles rolling in slow motion" (p. 169). Hsu begins to think about Ken and grows upset. In the days following, Hsu is plagued by a "feeling of despair" and he and Joie break up (p. 170).
Hsu writes about the collection of Ken's possessions that he keeps. In the collection is a paperback copy of the book What is History? written by British historian E.H. Carr. One day while Ken and Hsu were shopping for textbooks, Ken saw the book and decided to buy it. He later gave it to Hsu, who neglected to read it, saying "this is all basic stuff, right?" (p. 171). Hsu returns to the book and sees that Ken had written notes in the margins of the book and had underlined specific passages.
Hsu looks up the specifics of Ken's murder – and the trial of his murderers – on the internet. He then reflects on the message of E.H. Carr's book that Ken had read shortly before his death. Hsu references some of the passages that Ken had highlighted, including the sentence, “only the future can provide the key to the interpretation of the past; and it is only in this sense that we can speak of an ultimate objectivity in history" (p. 176).
Hsu remembers the time he visited Ken at his job at the Nordstrom department store. Watching from a distance, Hsu saw Ken give a balloon to a child, and Hsu writes, “I simply felt lucky to witness something so effortlessly kind — to see my friend do something that was good” (p. 178).
In his second year at Harvard, Hsu begins to attend therapy sessions offered by the school. During the first session, Hsu tells the therapist that he feels guilty for leaving Ken's party on the night he was murdered. The therapist rejects this notion, and asks Hsu, "would it have made a difference?” (p. 180). She then tells him that “it was time to let go of that part of the story” (p. 181).
Hsu continues to attend the sessions. In one session, he talks about his parents, and recalls a memory of going to the mall with his mother shortly after Ken's death. After separating from his mother to look for sneakers, Hsu sees his mother sitting on a bench talking to a woman. Hsu's mother laters says that she was telling the woman about what had happened to Ken. As she explains, "he’s sad and I want to help him... I don’t know how. I don’t know how to talk to him" (p. 183). Hsu then reflects on the difficulties of communicating between generations in immigrant families. As he writes, "you may master tenses and forms, grammatical rules, what passes for style. And yet, consequently, you may struggle to hold a conversation with your grandparents. It’s possible they secretly wanted this to happen — a measure of generational progress" (p. 183).
Hsu reflects on the movie that he and Ken might have directed together, and thinks about how his life would have been different if Ken had not been killed. Explaining the significance of the book title, he suggests that it means being “True to yourself. True to who you might have become" (p. 188). The book ends as Hsu finishes his final session of therapy. Leaving the therapist's office, he tells her, “I’m going to write about all this one day" (p. 154).
Analysis:
In the final section of the book, Hsu has incorporated the grief over Ken's death into his own life. Time passes and he continues to live his life as normally as possible. Certain events, however, trigger his grief response. For example, when questioned about the details of his friendship with Ken, Hsu begins to doubt the bond they shared and wonders if he “misremembered a lot along the way” (p. 153). Later, he mentions “wondering if the stories you tell are false” (p. 164). Here, Hsu returns back to the theme of authenticity and the fallibility of memory. In writing this memoir, he has sought to represent the past with as much honesty as possible – he has tried to "stay true" to the past and to Ken's memory. At the same time, he acknowledges that it would be impossible to perfectly represent the past. In this way, what it means to "stay true" is to endeavor to capture the spirit of the past all while knowing that a perfect recreation is not possible.
In his attempt to describe Ken, Hsu pays particular attention to the objects Ken owned and that Hsu still keeps. Here, Hsu references the work of philosopher Walter Benjamin in order to shed light on the importance of these possessions. As Hsu writes, Benjamin explained that the aura of a work of art is not created merely by, say, the painter, but by the fact “the painting itself has passed through even more hands over time, beheld by a string of previous owners" (p. 153). In turn, each of these hands fill the object with extra significance. While Hsu does not directly relate the references to Ken's possessions, the connection is apparent: Hsu cherishes Ken's possessions so much because, in owning them, Ken imbued them with something of his own spirit. In this way, Ken's objects allow Hsu to connect with Ken's spirit. Thus, when Hsu reads a copy of a book that Ken had highlighted, he feels as though he is “reading... alongside Ken” (p. 160).
In addition to "reading...alongside Ken," Hsu also describes his practice of writing letters addressed to Ken. In the days, months, and years after Ken's death, Hsu filled up notebooks with an imagined correspondence with Ken “just to see if he could read from a great distance" (p. 114). In a way, Stay True is a continuation of this practice. In this final section of the book, Hsu addresses that fact by adopting the second-person pronoun. While he had previously referred to Ken by his name, Hsu now begins to refer to "you." Hsu writes, “these were our conversations. You were trying to explain where we had come from. How we had learned what it meant to be cool or normal, how we then modeled those poses for one another" (p. 171). This is a particularly moving passage that places the reader in the place of Ken's second-person "you." Thus, it becomes clear that Hsu has not only written the book for whomever may be reading it now, but also for Ken, whom he speaks to here directly.
