Hua Hsu

AO

Maybe because I've been reading a lot of anthropological texts lately, I’ve been thinking about ethnography. I'll start with a question about the autoethnographic. It seems that while both autoethnography and memoir are from a remembering self, autoethnography differs from memoir in that it has the addition of the reflective self and the researching self. For example, photographs appear intermittently in the book, and the narrator—you—make detailed analysis of them.

HH

I hadn't thought about the book as autoethnography per se, but I think there is reflexivity. That seems to be the right word. There's a reflexiveness built into how the book is meant to work. Not that anyone has to read it in any specific way, but there are moments in the book in which doubt is cast on my sense of authority. This perspective as a doubtful author mirror how I feel about the narrative. But there’s also room to problematize the sense of memory or the notion of memoir for the reader too because this is just a version of events. There are a lot of very fixed references in the book, like the images that you pointed out. But I hope there's also a haziness to it, because I tried to write the book from memory. I didn't write the book or pursue it as a research project—there was research that went into it, but I tried to leave a lot of the memories unverified until much later, because I was just more interested in the effect of memory. It's sort of the effect of living in that space. So even though it seems as though it’s this very reliable archive of the past because there are these specific streets or specific stores or specific photographs, the actual telling of the story draws more from the fuzziness of memory. Does that make sense?

AO

Yeah, it does. It's interesting, though, that you use the word fuzziness, because so much of the descriptions in the book are so vivid, as if the space between memory and remembrance—in other words, memory as something seemingly embedded, and remembering as an act, a verb—seem to shift around. For instance, there was a moment in the earlier part of the book in which the narrator describes driving with friends in his Volvo station wagon one night, trying to be very alert about driving, being careful about blind spots, and recalling lucidly the expressions of the friends faces reflected in the rear-view mirror. Descriptions like this seem to detail a moment as if it’s happening in the present tense. This, of course, is the skill of the writer and a skill of recall, a way of trying to piece together things that might linger in spirit but trying to make connections between them.

HH

I think writing smooths out a lot of these frictions you're pointing at, which is why I think sometimes beautiful writing is very untrustworthy writing and that's why I tried structure the book through these moments of, well, did that actually happen? These are things that happened then that threw me for a loop. But they also function to, you know, push back against the seamlessness of the narrative, because part of it is memory, in the sense that I have been writing things down since the 1990s. I have all these notes, journal entries, different Word docs that would move from computer to computer. So, there is an archive of my memory over time. And as I was writing it was sort of the act of remembering, which I don't know if they're both attempts to reckon with the past, but I think they're both very unreliable in their own way.

AO

Are there other moments in the book where that slipperiness or fuzziness come in? Where you tried to somehow be truthful to that blurriness, as opposed to things that were more concrete?

HH

I think writing about other people always raises the possibility of ethical slippage. But, there are certain aspects of having an account of how life was feeling in, like, 1998 or 1999, which keep the story honest in terms of scale. Like, in terms of reflecting on 1998 from 2000, and sort of having this embarrassing written account of how I felt. I couldn't liberally valorize what I was thinking or feeling, or exaggerate, because I had this anchor in the past, right?

In terms of the book, it begins with thinking about photographs, and how our sense of reality now is mediated through being able to have this media archive of the present as it's unfolding. For example, people revisiting the pictures they took that day, and doing that all the time. And how difficult it is to really take seriously a past that doesn't have that, or that we can't access in that way. There are entire years of my life where I have no photographs because nobody had a camera in 1993. So, there are huge chunks of one's life that absence a record. Where you're sort of like, “Wait, did we do that all the time? Do we do it once?”

I think that's why I like that image of the photograph that opens the book. There are images that I can look at and then I remember the day, and then there's every other day for which this does not exist, and I just have to rely on my memory. I guess, in some ways, the faxes with my father are all about misapprehension or miscomprehension, because he's trying very hard to explain something that I did not understand. And since I was a teenager, I didn't care, or take seriously, all of those things that he was trying to impart on me.

Once you realize what the book is about there are these little clues along the way where it's clear I'm unsure of things—"Like, wait, did that happen that way? Or am I misremembering it?" So, yeah, it's sort of all in there. But if you don't look at it that way, it also seems like kind of pure nostalgia, which isn't meant to be, but it's fine if people see it that way too.

AO

Well, that starting point of the photographic was really fascinating to me, but I also think, related to what I was asking the very beginning, that the book, in many instances, does point how our sense of reality is very different from the pre-internet 1990s and that difference really frames the book in an interesting way. Can you talk more about the faxes, and having the sense of communication being delayed and not instantaneous? That kind of delay, where you could really think about how to respond is missing from the way that we think about the world now.

HH

Yeah, and this was not at all intentional, but that what you just pointed out—that time lag, the faxing—I mean, that's also in the discussion of gift giving rituals, delayed gratification, and the ideas of Marcel Mauss that I talk about later in the book. Sometimes, when you teach students about the past, it's hard for it not to seem as though you're saying that the past was preferable in some way. I mean, our culture sort of indulges in nostalgia, but any essay on the downtown art scene of 1980s New York, students sometimes feel bludgeoned, where it's like, “Okay, no, I understand it was better in the ’80s, but we're tired of hearing this narrative,” you know.

So, I was very conscious as I was writing about times that were pre-Internet—the early days of AOL or making cassettes or making zines. I didn't want it to be some sort of ethical judgment on the present and where we’re at. Even though the book has these moments of reflection from our present. I didn't want it to feel like this celebration of all these things that I personally enjoyed. Nobody who's eighteen should have to take these things seriously. I was just more interested in what you just pointed out, the experience of time and the experience of boredom, and the experience of human interaction in these moments, and how to represent that. How to represent what it was like before the Internet on a textual scale was something that I was really interested in trying to do.

AO

I was just thinking about a line in the book where you say, “We're always being asked to read things for which we were unprepared,” which seems to connect with what you were saying about teaching. But now, from the perspective of the present, it seems that the ideas, thinkers, and theories you encountered early on have helped to offer some further understanding of the things that have occurred in the past or, have been of some use?

HH

It's very hard to understand when you're young that such a thing is possible. I think even the idea of something being of use, can take so many different forms. And so, I think when you're in school, when you're younger, use and mastery are the same. But when you're older, or maybe when you're outside the academic setting, things can become useful in ways and have nothing to do with understanding the idea or mastering them, which is how I feel now.

I mean, don’t understand these thinkers more than I did before when I was younger, but I understand that I can just take the parts that I that resonate with me. Whereas maybe when I was younger, they were useful as a reference to, for instance, put someone else down, or to distinguish myself from a friend. But, yeah, I mean, part of the idea of having all those people quoted at length was that it's kind of a joke too, because that's clearly something that the character early in the book, who's a teenager, would do—draw on critical theory to talk about something as elemental as friendship. At the same time, I think what Derrida and Aristotle say about friendship is quite beautiful. And so, I was happy to be able to weave that stuff in, but it also was sort of performative in a way.

AO

Are there still instances when you encounter a text, and you feel unprepared?

HH

Yeah, all the time. But now I read things to figure out how they might be useful to me, rather than feeling as though there's this universe of scholarship or sort of canonical ideas that you feel like you need to master to be like a learned person. I understand my limitations more now. So, yeah, there’s tons of things I don't understand still.

AO

So, getting back to photographs, Stay True reminded me of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. In that book Barthes thinks through photographs, and most of all about his relationship with his mother, and his own sense of mortality. For instance, he talks about seeing his mom as a young child, and that image will obviously always remain the same. But, seeing the photograph again and again is, in each instance, a constant reminder that time has passed, that the connection to it has changed.

HH

That's how I feel about music. Every time I listen to meaningful music, it's sort of this index of past hearings that get stacked. The photographs are just meant to be chapter breaks in a way, which is why they aren't really interrogated at all. I describe a couple photographs in the book, as a way of just sort of thinking about memory and souvenir and things like that, but also as a way of kind of signaling that I I've kept a lot of things, because as the book progresses, it's this collection of artifacts from that moment that I sometimes think can yield some clarity that they can't.

But I don't reprint any of the photographs I talk about, they're all the photograph on the cover was taken on the day that I write about, but I don't refer to this photograph. And so, they're meant to make the reader feel like an intimate part of this world, you know, as though you're walking down the floor of a dorm, and you sort of peek in and get these glimpses of people's lives. But they're also meant to keep the reader at a distance. Like, you don't know what's happening in this photo, even though it's here. It was also just a way of not having to name the chapters or to number them, because I didn't really want the book to feel sequential.

I'm always curious what people think about the photographs because people always ask about them and the obvious references, like W.G. Sebald, and I had read and enjoyed Sebald’s books for like a decade before I read any criticism about him. I just sort of read his books and really found them, I read all his books before ever researching anything about him, so I never realized how much fabulation there was in his entire approach. And so, as I was putting the photos in this book, I was like, just reminded of that trick of feeling as though everything must be real because there are these photographs here. Even though if you think about it, there are ways in which the photographs hint at the fact that not everything is as it seems the way he uses them or edits them. But I like that idea of kind of persuading a reader by sort of presenting them with this evidence, and then maybe playing around with that sense of reality.

AO

That's interesting. I also went through a phase of reading everything by Sebald, but I haven't gone to the point of reading criticism about that, even though it's probably worthwhile to do.

HH

Yeah, it's fascinating to come to terms with how much of his work is purely fictive. I don't know why I assumed that it was any other way, but I think it had something to do with the photographs and the images and the sort of precision of his descriptions.

AO

Maybe we could talk about the circumstances around the murder of Ken in the book. The tone and the approach of those chapters or parts feel different than the others. The tone of those sections has a feeling of trying to really drill down and interrogate facts and of reading reports. Again, it feels ethnographic.

HH

Yeah, I think a lot of the anxiety that preceded the book was sort of how to do something like this without emotion, without forcing the reader to feel a certain way. I feel like beautiful writing sometimes has this kind of emotional blackmail dimension to it, where you can only feel this way because of how lyrical this is. And so, I was really trying not to do that, even though I think I still did that. When it came to reckoning with the actual event itself, and the record of what happened, it seemed like it needed to just be presented as completely unadorned. I sort of went back and forth on how to represent writing that was like unadorned, bureaucratic, and dry.

But yeah, that was a moment where as I was writing, I thought about that question that we talked about a while back: What does it mean to problematize your own memory, or your own sense of self? Especially when you're writing something that people will assume is this perfect, perhaps one-to-one representation of who you are, and maybe how good of a person you were? That's not how I felt. But I knew that that was an impression the reader might get. Does that make any sense?

AO

Yeah. I was interested in this consciousness of trying to not respond to what you're encountering in an emotional way or interpretive way. I was just rereading that part where you finally realized what had happened—the actual circumstances of his murder—that it wasn’t just a young couple who did it but also an older man. There’s a sense that you're trying to not cast blame, or not assign blame to each of them, or all of them.

HH

I wasn't trying to narrativize them.

AO

Yes, but at the same time, I think it left room for, as you were saying, the reader to somehow come to terms with these facts that are being delivered in the tragedy.

HH

Memoir is an attempt, of course, to aestheticize one's own life. And so, this was the moment that could not be aestheticized. So much of the book is about projection, speculation, and narrativizing things, and dreaming as well. The first time I read the police reports, I was curious about the criminal’s perspective, not because I wanted to feel any sympathy and not because I wanted to know what they were thinking or feeling, but it had just never occurred to me that there was another experience of that night. It’s sort of ridiculous that I'd never thought about them, but they weren't central to who I cared about, which was my friend.

And so, I think even after that section we're talking about, I admit there's this curiosity. I wonder what movie they saw; I wonder if there's any music playing, but none of that matters.

And I think maybe a lot of other things I thought matter didn't matter. Considering being confronted with the sort of cold, bureaucratic language of the nights events as they unfolded,

all that mattered was that this thing happened, and this was the outcome. You couldn't go back and piece together a reason for it and to pay tribute also fall short because ultimately this is all you're left with.

AO

I'm curious about the starting point of this book. I think I read somewhere that it took a long time to write, but the initial idea was to tell the story of your friend who was tragically murdered, and that you were trying to figure out a framework for that narrative to inhabit.

HH

Framework and structure were things that I thought about for a long time. All I knew is that I was going to write these little fragments, these little moments, no matter what. So, before when I was still in college, I started writing a lot of this stuff, not because I thought it would be a book, but just because it was like a form of self-soothing, a way of just being able to live in the past a little bit longer. And so, when I hit my 40s, to try and reflect on what the actual effect of this was, not that it could be distilled down to something simple, but it had always been in the back of my mind as I was writing other things.

Once I sat down to write about this directly, there were a few questions. How to write a story that is about me, because I'm the person writing it, but that also decenters me in a way? And how to structure that in a way to retain some of the feelings of skepticism or self-doubt that I still felt? Like, the older I got, the more distant this was in the past, and how to be honest to that distance? And so, it was a pretty difficult thing to figure out, but I kind of figured it out just by doing it, which is not how I normally would work. I normally am very fastidious about mapping stuff out.

AO

There are so many parts the book that surface when I think about it—your teaching experience and/or the mentorship experience, and the parts about your parents emigrating from Taiwan to the US, all those elements obviously give a lot of texture to the narrative. Were there things that you felt at the end or towards the end that didn't fit or that you thought needed to be eliminated?

HH

Yeah, actually, quite a bit. There there's a lot about writing that's still in the book, but there used to be much more about what it means to use language. There are all these digressions about criticism and the art of description. I took a lot of that stuff out. There used to be more about music and music’s capacity to allow one to imagine a future. But I'm happy with everything we took out. There was also a long chapter on speech and debate.

AO

From the rhetoric class?

HH

No, from high school. But I think when I set out to do this years ago, I thought that it wasn't just a story about friends and Ken's passing. It was also a book about growing up in the 1990s. And so, it's also this book about alternative culture and the Internet and multiculturalism and all these other things. So, I think I initially was like, this is going to be a 500-page book, because it's going to be a history of everything right that runs through this story of friendship. But the more I thought about it, it's like when I was growing up making cassette tapes, sometimes you would just have a good 60-minute tape. And then there were always a 100- and 120-minute tapes too, but I never felt like I had enough to really put into a 120-minute tape. Does that make sense?

AO

Totally.

HH

I always felt like a 45-minute side of a tape is ample room to express something, to put together an idea or argument, or like communicate some sense of infatuation or friendship. And so, once I realized that this was a small story, it didn’t need to be that long of a book. I mean, it's a big story, because something truly awful happens to someone but I understood how the length could work and that was like a weirdly liberating thing to feel—just to realize that the perfect length of this book, was akin to a 70-minute tape or 60-minute. This wasn't a double album. This was just a good short album. And so that made it easy to take out a lot of things that are still implied, like thinking about the experience of race, or the experience of watching MTV, rather than a long digression on the history of MTV, or the history of alternative culture. Does that make sense?

AO

Yeah, it does. So, how does it feel to have this book that's in a lot of ways very private out in the world?

HH

It's odd. It's strange to turn oneself and one's friends into characters. I'm very conscious that we're all characters, but that's probably not as clear to a reader, So I think that's strange. But then again, it's like, what do you expect writing a memoir? Obviously, you're welcoming people into some of your interior thoughts.

AO

Have your parents have read the book?

HH

Yeah, they read it.

AO

And what was your dad's response?

HH

They don't necessarily recognize themselves in it, in the sense that they are not the type of people who would have ever sat around trying to decode the themes and motivations or like subtext of their lives. They were just living, trying to provide and survive and whatnot. So, they would have never put the events of their life into a story or a narrative. They know that’s what I do. But they do find it a little odd to see themselves as characters. They did tell me, right after reading it, that they understand me more, so I thought that was cool. Although I didn't ask them what that meant, and I'm not sure they would have been able to articulate what that specifically meant.

My father doesn't see the faxes the way I see the faxes. It could be that he's forgotten, but he doesn't look back and say, “Yes, I was trying to impart all this fatherly wisdom on you from Taiwan through these faxes.” He was just working, sending me these faxes, he didn't really think there was anything particularly noteworthy about what he was doing. And he doesn't remember writing a lot of them, which I think just means that he was like a good person doing something nice, but not trying to call attention to that.

AO

It was interesting to read the first third of the book, which is mostly about your childhood. The exchange of the faxes made me think about parenting. When you were revisiting those boxes of faxes and reading through what your dad was trying to convey, did you find them useful, or find them as lessons for how you now parent, or how you approach interacting with your child?

HH

That's a great question. Part of the reason I think my father's faxes are so meaningful, in the context of the book, is that it's difficult when you're young to appreciate what you have and what's happening. And that was certainly the case for me, where my father was really trying to be present. And as with every teenager, I just sort of ignored it, not maliciously, but just like I have other things do. I'm a teenager and something similar happens when I'm in college. I have this dear friend who's patient and curious and very kind. But it's still hard to not take things for granted when you don't understand, like what it would mean to suffer loss. And so, the faxes kind of anticipate that sense of looking back and having this almost like paper trail of connection, and sort of wishing you could go back to it. And it was very weird to write that section, but also be a parent and think about how it’s just hard for a young person, for a child, to understand a parent. It's hard for friends to ever be equal partners in that friendship. And I wish I could say it's made me more patient, but it has in the sense that I always remind myself of that it's like pointless to take things personally when it's like a parent-child relationship, because everything is personal, and everything's sort of impersonal at the same time.

I feel like I do try and ask for questions now, which is what my dad did. I found that very annoying when I was young, and I think my son finds it kind of annoying when I do it to him. But yes, it's trippy to have written about my dad while also being a father and knowing that history was just going to repeat itself in some way, right? It's just kind of the nature of being young that you're only going to half listen to what your parents are saying.