Book club picked the book I voted for. I feel guilty winning, there were 3 other worthy memoirs by women: House of Sticks by Ly Tran, Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong, A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung. I'll try to get those out of my library maybe. I loved this book, and it made me think and write a lot of things.
I was interested in why he was still friends with a dopey friend with bad taste. That's an exaggeration, but maybe not in terms of what pushed him away in their relationship, which was actually quite strong.
Stay True won the Pulitzer Prize for memoirs in 2023.
Hua Hsu is the son of Taiwanese immigrants. His friend Ken's family came from Japan many generations ago.
He starts out talking about wanting friends in his car hearing his latest mixtape. I found a playlist of songs and artists mentioned in the book. I played the music while reading the book. I always think a lot about what music to play when I'm reading a book, and when there's a 77 song playlist, well, I'm quite pleased. He thinks Pavement is better than Pearl Jam. It's fairly bland classic rock playlist. I can see why one of his friends popped out his cassettes. Two jazz tracks and nothing the average American wouldn't have heard a million times.
Took 19 songs for me to hear one I wasn't familiar with: Sea of Joy by Blind Faith. Also Sonny and Linda Sharrock, never heard them before. Shonen Knife is a Japanese group. There aren't too many years they didn't put out an album 1982-2023. The Raincoats. He liked Nirvana, and Cobain liked Shonen Knife, Raincoats and Vaseline. When everyone had a Nirvana t-shirt, his favored find didn't feel as special. He was into Pavement and Polvo. He writes a Zine. I think of Klosterman's book on the 90's.
"Huascene" was on the cross country team in high school, and faxed math questions to his father back in Hsinchu, and get answers in the morning. Hsinchu is on the China side of the island, towards the north. His father asked a lot of questions trying to engage his son. They would fly to Taiwan every time he had more than a week off, and he came to resent being there all the time with his parents. He goes into his parents story and the experience of them moving around trying to find jobs. His father's efforts to father him by fax are sweet. He has the fax records of his father's counsel that he includes in the text. His father seems like a reasonable guy, trying to give a mature viewpoint on things, but the author wants to be passionate about the loss of Cobain.
Three Quotes: “My first class in college had about five hundred other students. You instantly realized the challenge of retaining whatever sense of uniqueness got you here in the first place. My smallest one was a seminar in the Peace and Conflict program, where our first homework assignment was to spend a week resisting the impulse to blame anyone else for anything.”
“I was quiet, and Ken was loud. He projected confidence. I found confident people suspicious. He asked questions out of earnest curiosity, and I asked questions that were skeptical or coolly condescending. Mostly, I never wanted to let on when I didn't know something. Oh yeah, I've heard of them.”After laying out his history, context, circumstances, we get a friendship narrative, that reminds me of Sally Rooney or Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, friendship porn. He has a few interesting turn of phrases, like "aggressively thoughtful" and he had an "... audible amount of corderoy," and looking at his friend Ken with ethnographer's curiosity, on p. 47, I decide I like this book at the moment.
I got a 3 month free trial of Spotify and I'm listening to musical references in the book, but not exclusively, I have my own independent quests and explorations. I do sort of feel like appreciating music is something one can use for identity, and I feel special appreciating good music. I'm remembering myself scoffing a little at his youthful attempts to define himself, and my own weird attempts so much later.
Listened to my stepfather's album collection, I heard the Beatles, Who, Bob Dylan, musicals. He got a few of my records when I went to college. Then things went to CD and I haven't gotten rid of those, and I have a bunch of copied CD. Then things go MP3. You almost don't need to collect anything, but then there's a kind of movement to go back to albums, and CD have value because they're hard copies. I like hard copies of books. We're having, I'm having so many growing pains as society evolves, but there's a kind of planned obsolescence with every format from 8 track, to cassette tapes, albums, CDs, MP3. The push to get everyone to subscribe or backup online for a month subscription is insidious.
I'm enjoying this 3 month trial, but I'm not going to keep Spotify. I think they're an evil corporation that has killed music, but I like to listen anyway. I was never the kind of guy who obsessively cruised record stores, but I like music, and I got 3 months of Spotify for free, and I listened to the soundtrack and found I liked Mojave 3, and Shonen Knife.
His Zine interests is likeable. I think my blogging is similar. I have a Buddhist blog, this literary blog, a sports blog, nature blog, politics blog and many more blogs. I understand the urge to say something edgy or important, or just to keep writing to practice writing.
I started up an online friendship with a friend in Iran, who we meditated together quite a lot in my effort to help him develop a meditation practice.
Ken says he doesn't have culture. I've often felt that way. When I worked for child welfare, they pounded on culture for trainings, and I opened up a file in my head. I've read a lot of books for culture, and honestly it's a wispy complex subtle thing.
In child welfare they would say it's OK for the men to be alcoholics, that's our culture, and that crossed a line, the child suffers with an alcoholic parent, they need to get into recovery. Convincing an alcoholic to go into recovery isn't easy. AA is cool because you choose to go there. You choose recovery. Forced recovery is all about identifying the disease, they have what they call motivational interviewing. Helping them to identify and motivate them to really own recovery. It's an uphill battle.
Understanding how the culture of capitalism encourages alcoholism, now there's a thesis.
What is my culture. WASP American. My nuclear family was non-religious, so maybe secular humanism American. I think the protestant work ethic is really prevalent, and rugged individualism, and manifest destiny, and American exceptionalism, and the culture of narcissism are all part of culture. Alcoholism is part of culture. My grandma and two aunts are in recovery and I doubt another will go into recovery, she's got a functional weed habit and she's retired. Someone who gets to retirement and is still using, I have little hope for them.
I love learning about Japanese culture or Chinese cult, or Ecuadorian culture. But you drill down a bit and there are all these sub groups. China is supposed to have 55 ethnic groups. Bill Porter, whom I've read 6 books of his about travel in China, says at least 3 of them have a similar frog origin story.
You can see the Native American tribes of North America map. I once tried to figure out who used to live where I live.
When I was in Ecuador, it wasn't just the Incan in the Andes, who were conquered by the Spanish, Incas had conquered tribes or cohabitated with them, Ecuador has lots and lots of different tribes.
Culture is a complex and subtle collection of ideas. I could probably riff on this quite a lot. I wouldn't say I learned anything about Taiwan culture from this book, and yet it's a Taiwanese immigrant child's memoir, and so that permeates the narrative. It's hard to put a finger on it, articulate it, but it is about Taiwanese culture interacting with American culture.
Could you say his fierce independence represents Taiwan, which proudly stays separate from China? To me independence isn't a cultural thing, but aspects of it's expression can be cultural.
He works with kids in the Mien community. They are related to the Hmong community which had a community in Madison Wisconsin where I grew up.
Later in the review I can express the feeling of being spoiled, reading an element of the story that gives away what you would rather have as a surprise. I read the back of the book and it spilled some beans that spoiled things for me.
Shakespeare spoils Romeo and Juliet, and spoilers isn't really a thing I worry about personally, but I found I didn't like this spoiler on the back of the book. Most of the time I'm polite, warn about spoilers, but honestly I don't usually like the passion in which people are so offended by a spoiler. Well, I feel that for the first time in a long time, reading the back of this memoir. Mostly I just don't like the fact.
116 pages build up, and the horror of grief at senseless violence. I cried. I cry easily and often, to be honest, I've developed into a crybaby. So many reasons to cry, a book can be one. I read online someone hasn't cried at a movie, and I think I cry at something daily, if not a movie, then in meditation.
I'm rounding towards 60 and I'm fairly isolated and alone. I have my daughter, and an ex who is in the car downstairs when Ruby leaves my place. We become close friends occasionally but currently we are on the outs and don't talk much.
As I round toward the last pages of the book, I remember how my second wife used to try to steal my book when I was near finishing a book. I'd tell her let me just finish this book, and she'd try to steal the book and prevent me from finishing. I don't know if she was jealous of the attention I gave the book, or whether she was just trying to distract me from the grief of finishing a good book. Some books can consume you, transform you, and when it's over there's a kind of void.
I think about my exes, my gone grandparents, my lost friendships. I don't want to go to my 40th high school reunion because my best friend died of a massive heart attack. He's the only one I really want to talk to. I had younger and older friends, I drew from a larger pool than just my class.
We didn't really connect as adults, only as adolescents in high school, unfortunately. I fantasized about visiting him in Texas where he now worked or at his vacation home in Wisconsin. He was such a fun guy. I read his widow wife's posts on Facebook, and she's mostly just shocked he's gone. He had 3 children, and she had 3 children, and it was a kind of Brady Bunch situation. I tried to connect with the widow but she wasn't into it. The spark of our friendship didn't transfer to her, we both just enjoyed his spark, but our enjoyment of that spark wasn't enough to connect us. The rejection felt for me as just another reason to miss him, he would have helped us connect somehow.
My second wife's brother had a friend who died of cancer, and he was quite a character too. He always drove Carolyn around and she always denied they were a couple, and then one day they got married. Then he died of cancer, and she moved to Arizona.
My grandparents were really sweet to me when I was a kid and I'd spend my summers, paradoxically going south for greater heat. I think about them maybe more than I should, considering how long ago that was. You live with relationships in your head for quite a lot of time with the other person around, and then they die, and you never have the touchstone of their actual being to refresh the relationship, but all that time in your imagination still keeps going on. We internalize people and relationships, and they become who we are.
Same with relationships that are dead, but the people are still alive.
I liked the funeral scene, I've been to quite a few funerals at this point. I'm not going to go on about that, maybe in another post.
More quotes:
"At first, I was drawn to raves more for the idea of community than the music itself. You found a flyer, called a number, copied down the directions. It meant surrendering to a void, a cluster of headlights the signal you were in the right place. I never did drugs, but it still felt magical to be in a room with no center, where the only way of orienting yourself was by following a bass line or synth wash. This was a range of faces you didn't see in daytime: vacant and somber, devoted to the rhythm; smiling and platonic, eager to share; rapturously free. Something was always already happening. People walked in casually, and their gait slowly adapted to the sounds around them, and within minutes they looked as though they were trying to punch and kick their way out of an imaginary sack. It didn't matter how you danced."
I sent that quote to my friend who moved to Portland. We've been friends since I moved to NYC, and then when my first marriage broke up, most of our friends seemed more interested in her, except this one guy, who I've stayed in touch with over the years, my longest living friend now that my high school friend died of a heart attack. I have another friend, but he slept with my girlfriend in college, and is a MAGA now, so I don't really consider him a friend. I can't accept the MAGA friends, I lose the friends. Maybe we could have a protest to grieve all the friends we've lost because of a murderous and cruel ideology.
“A few months into graduate school, we took ecstasy on the banks of the Charles River—an alternative to serious discussion of tomorrow Might as well be present, at least for now. Nothing happened at first. "The drugs don't work," I joked, the title of a song by the Verve that I'd liked in college. But then I looked at the Charles and it was no longer a river. There was no water, just an endless run of silver marbles rolling in slow motion. I laughed, and my body expanded to the ends of the universe. Any sensation lingered and rippled forever; there was no border between our skin and the Cambridge humidity. The drugs did work.”
My friend from Portland came over before he left and we did some mushrooms. I was kind of caught up on not eating so I didn't throw up and the hunger kind of confused me, and then I talked too much to him, when he wanted to be mellow, but I enjoyed the trip, and perhaps didn't need to do it again.
I thought about the great chain of being and that I would survive through my children, and their children. My friend doesn't have children, though he's attached to his girlfriend's children and his siblings children, so I didn't talk to him about that part of my trip.
My friend put the book on his TBR list, and so did his girlfriend who went to Berkeley.
He makes an offhand comment about late night vulnerability. It's taken me awhile to come to grips with this fact. There was a time when I was wracked with guilt over a mistake I made, and I turned the TV on to survive the night. I'm feeling better now, allowing myself not to be defined by the worst thing I've done. I still often have TV on near me sleeping to drown out the street noises, roommate noises, I've developed a habit. I sometimes listen to a book on tape, but usually I pick books I've already read because I don't like falling asleep and missing something.
Not sure what I'll say in the book club, it's so much that I've written here. I suppose I really liked the book, and really appreciate it. I had a lot of interesting thoughts in reading it. I could pick on of the many topics I explore above.
Supposedly 3 people already read my rough drafts of this post, I wonder if anyone comes back and looks at the final draft. I'm finishing the book today, so I think it should be today or soon that I have my last draft of this post.
A good book is one that sort of blows out my pile of books and demands that I only read it. It can take me awhile to get into a book. I've been neglecting my other books, I want to finish this book so I can return to my other books.
One final comment. In high school we read A Separate Peace, and in a way that feels like a similar book.
Links:
NPR Interview: Interviewer ask him about his baseball fandom of the Giants. The interview takes it into different realms, it's quite interesting.
A substantial part of my book club didn't like Hua Hsu. I wrote this to my friend:
"The book club, about half the people hated the book Stay True! I would cut one page, this one woman wanted to cut 100 pages. I was so surprised. They thought he was a jerk. That I didn't detect that he's a jerk is really scary to me. I see everyone as problematic, but you know it's just the deal. Or maybe they're just wrong. They thought he didn't really explain Ken, and was too self involved. I guess to counter that I see him working with kids, in prison, and giving a eulogy. He does things for others. I mean, sure I identified with the friend who chucks his mixed tape out the window on a drive, but you know that's a move of a friend, you wouldn't do that if you didn't feel comfortable with him. One woman talked about the arrogance of immigrant friends she had in college. One fellow talked about being an immigrant child, seeing the differences with each generation. Someone wrote in the chat that my enjoying the book was not a bad thing, I appreciated that, but it was someone who's face I couldn't see, it was weird. I was kind of shaken by the dislike of the book."
My friend's analysis snippet:
"I tend to identify more with man against himself as a theme more than man against man or man against society because that has always been my dominant struggle. I also love man against nature, which I guess in a way is another take on man against himself."
Comments
Post a Comment