Summary:
The fifth section begins with a black and white photo taken of a sign for the 7-11 convenience store. Now in their junior year, Hsu and Anthony have moved “into a condo on Channing Way" where Hsu's friends Sean and Paraag live (p. 88). As Hsu writes, "this time, Ken’s housewarming gift was a modernist clock with no numbers, just a white circle with the minute and hour hands poking out" (p. 89). Ken asks Hsu if he wants to form a club called “The Multicultural Student Alliance" but Hsu tells him that it sounds too much like a frat (p. 90).
Hsu begins to volunteer at the Richmond Youth Project where he helps tutor “predominantly Southeast Asian middle school kids” (p. 91). Hsu reflects that many of the students were the children of people who had fled war in Southeast Asia – a situation very different from his own. Still, he argues, "to me, Asian American was a messy, arbitrary category, but one that was produced by a collective struggle. It was a category capacious enough for all of our hopes and energies" (p. 93).
Hsu then discusses the theory of gift-giving proposed by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Through his studies of the people of present-day New Guinea, Malinowski concluded, in Hsu's words, that "gift exchange was not a form of altruism, since there was the expectation of reciprocity” (p. 95). Hsu then references the work of anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who disagreed with Malinowski's findings. Hsu sides with Mauss's belief that “every gesture carries a desire for connection, expanding one’s ring of associations" (p. 95).
Hsu goes down to visit Ken in San Diego during the winter break of their junior year. Ken has taken up swing dancing as a hobby, much to Hsu's distaste. The two spend several days driving around the area, eating burritos, and shopping at the mall. On Hsu's last night with Ken, they watch a movie called Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, “a kung fu comedy that featured a predominantly Black cast, centered on a young man named Leroy Green–also known as Bruce LeeRoy–and his quest for “the Glow,” a mystical energy that only the greatest martial artists are capable of wielding" (p. 100). Hsu is enamored with the film, and regards it as a powerful "commentary on authenticity, the porousness of identity, the joyful, postmodern possibilities of mixing and matching Asian and Black cultures!" (p. 101).
The fifth section of the book ends with Hsu discussing his belief that “Friendship rests on the presumption of reciprocity” (p. 102). He then writes that he and Ken “lived for rituals, looking forward to the day when they would be so instinctive that we would forget how they started. There was still time to repay these gifts" (p. 103).
The sixth section of the book begins with a photo of a residential building with a sign that reads "The Rapa-Nui 2150." Hsu open this section by discussing the issue of the journal L’Année sociologique in which Marcel Mauss's “Essay on the Gift” was first published. The issue was published in 1923 and paid tribute to all of the scholars who died during World War I. As Hsu writes, "Mauss compels us to know them as thinkers as well as friends—to hold on to the possibilities of what could have been" (p. 106). Moreover, Mauss expresses the belief that he owes a debt to each of these deceased scholars.
Transitioning back to the narrative, Hsu writes that he and Ken began writing their own film script based on Barry Gordy’s The Last Dragon. Around this time, Hsu meets a girl named Mira, “a Taiwanese American girl from Southern California who worked on the campus paper” (p. 111). Hsu and Mira bond over their interest in music and politics. They start dating, but Hsu feels inexperienced with women compared to Ken.
In the summer before their senior year, Ken moves into an apartment building called the Rapa-Nui – the building photographed previously. He hosts a house-warming party, and Hsu seeks him out for advice on how to have sex with Mira. Ken and Hsu have a cigarette on the balcony, but they're interrupted before they can begin their conversation. Hsu then leaves the party to attend a rave and makes plans to see Ken the following day.
Hsu does not hear from Ken the following day, a Sunday. On Monday, Sammi tells Hsu that Ken had missed his shift at work. That afternoon, a police car pulls up at the apartment. An officer begins “randomly conjuring bits of Ken-related trivia but never naming him” before asking Sammi and their friend Derrick to come to the station with him. Hours later, Derrick returns and tells Hsu, “he’s gone" (p. 118). It is revealed that Ken's body was found in an alley “about thirty minutes north" (p. 118).
After receiving the news, Hsu and Mira have sex together for the first time. Hsu begins to call his friends to tell them the news, and speaks to Ken's mother. Hsu's friends grieve together and make plans to attend Ken's funeral on the upcoming Saturday. Ken's killers – “a young couple and a man they had met at the Berkeley BART station" – are found and arrested. It is discovered that on the night Ken was killed, they waited outside the party until he came outside alone in the early morning. They then took his bank cards and forced him into the trunk of his car before shooting him in the head.
Hsu writes that while grieving, he stopped listening to music that would trigger memories and started wearing clothes in the style that Ken would wear them. He also begins to write and becomes “obsessed with the possibility of a sentence that could wend its way backward" (p. 120).
Analysis:
By now, Hsu and Ken have firmly established themselves as friends. Still, many differences exist between them and Hsu still seems perplexed that they ever became friends at all. In order to make sense of the connection between them, Hsu now refers to the work of anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowki and Marcel Mauss. Throughout the book, Hsu explicitly mentions the gifts that Ken gave him during their friendship. Here, he discusses Malinowski's and Mauss's differing conceptions of gift-giving. Crucially, Hsu sides with Mauss's belief that gift-giving is not merely transactional and political, but rather an essential act of human connection and interaction. With this mind, Hsu's references to the gifts that Ken gave him begin to take on a different, more profound resonance. At the same time, it is important to note that Hsu is not referring exclusively to the material goods that Ken gave him. Rather, Hsu views friendship more broadly as a sort of gift-exchange in which two people share their time, knowledge, and care with one another. In his words, this exchange "rests on the presumption of reciprocity" (p. 95). In this way, it could be said that Hsu has written Stay True as an act of reciprocity for a friend he cares so deeply about.
Throughout the book, Hsu subtly foreshadows an impending death. For example, in his discussion of Derrida's work on friendship, Hsu writes "from that very first encounter, we are always preparing for the eventuality that we might outlive them, or they us. We are already imagining how we may someday remember them" (p. 55). Later, he references Marcel Mauss's feeling of indebtedness to the scholars who had died during World War I. Hsu also discusses his and Ken's dreams for the future and notes that in the cycle of exchange in their friendship "there was still time to repay these gifts" (p. 94). While at first glance these lines may seem simply descriptive, after Ken's death they take on a new significance as foreshadowing details.
Stay True is a concise book. In just 100 pages, Hsu has discussed his upbringing, has introduced Ken, has described their friendship, and now relates the events of Ken's death. In a sense, this quick pace replicates the way in which youth seems to pass rapidly, such that one day you might be in high school and then suddenly you are mourning the death of your friend. Moreover, the quick, almost dizzyingly revelation of Ken's death is designed to foster shock in the reader. Likewise, the days after Ken's death are related to the reader in the same sort of blur that would accompany a state of grief. In this way, Hsu endeavors to represent the shock of Ken's death in literary form.
Hsu's response to the news of Ken's death might initially seem curious to the reader. Indeed, shortly after discovering that Ken is dead, Hsu has sex with Mira for the first time. He describes this experience in only the briefest detail, writing "I... went to Mira’s and told her the barest outline of what had happened. I drew the curtains; we had sex in almost total silence" (p. 108). It might be hard to imagine wanting to have sex after receiving such traumatic, yet for Hsu losing his virginity is deeply symbolic. In the last interaction between Hsu and Ken before Ken's death, Hsu had wanted to ask Ken for advice about having sex with Mira. Ken was more comfortable with women and Hsu often sought his advice on such matters. In this case, however, their conversation is interrupted before Hsu can ask for advice. By responding to the news of Ken's death in this way, Hsu is asserting his independence and establishing his ability to live for himself after Ken's death. In a more basic sense, the act of losing one's virginity is often associated with one becoming an adult. In linking Ken's death and the loss of Hsu's virginity together, Hsu is suggesting that both events marked a major point of transition in his life.
