Hua Hsu Quotes

Friendship rests on the presumption of reciprocity, of drifting in and out of one another’s lives, with occasional moments of wild intensity.

At that age, time moves slow. You're eager for something to happen, passing time in parking lots, hands deep in your pockets, trying to figure out where to go next. Life happened elsewhere, it was simply a matter of finding a map that led there. Or maybe, at that age, time moves fast; you're so desperate for action that you forget to remember things as they happen. A day felt like forever, a year was a geological era.

Derrida remarked that friendship’s driver isn’t the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would “choose knowing rather than being known.” I had always thought it was the other way around.

Smoking offers a way to build natural breaks into conversation. Lighting a cigarette starts a timer.

When you’re young, you do so many things hoping to be noticed. The way you dress or stand, the music played loud enough to catch the attention of another person who might know a song, too. And then there are things you do as you step out into the world, the real world full of strange adults, testing out what it means to be generous or thoughtful. In that instant, before every memory was placed along some narrative arc, before the act of remembering took on a desperate air, I simply felt lucky enough to witness something so effortlessly kind - to see my friend do something that was good.

Even then, they understood that American life is unbounded promise and hypocrisy, faith and greed, new spectrums of joy and self-doubt, freedom enabled by enslavement. All of these things at once.

A friend, he wrote, would “choose knowing rather than being known.” I had always thought it was the other way around.

It was exciting to meander and choose who you wanted to be, what aspects of yourself to accent and adorn. You were sending a distress signal, hoping someone would come to your rescue.

Some friends complete us, while others complicate us. Maybe you feel as if there were nothing better in the world than driving in a car, listening to music with friends, looking for an all-night donut shop. Nobody says a thing, and it is perfect. Maybe your lifelong fascination with harmony finally began to make sense in those scenes, packed in your family's station wagon, singing along to "God Only Knows," waiting in the parking lot until the song was over.

You know, you never know who will complicate you in a meaningful way.

Last Friday, I overemphasized the toughness. Don't be scared. The life is full of excitement and surprises. Handle it and enjoy it.

Assimilation was not a problem to be solved but the problem itself.

The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories.

Our students in Richmond had been identified as at-risk youth. But they weren’t just at risk of succumbing to specific ills, like gangs and drugs, which were ever present. The more general risk was that they would step into too much of the world too quickly—that they would never have the chance to discover their potential on their own terms, whatever that meant.

It was a sign of personal growth, I thought to myself, that I could be friends with someone who liked Pearl Jam this much.

My parents are great, I said. Unbelievably non-stereotypical.

We cycled through legendary infatuations sure to devastate us for the rest of our lives.

Modern life, theorists like Derrida explain, is full of atomized individuals, casting about for a center and questioning the engine of their lives. His writing is famously intricate, full of citations and abstruse terminology. Things are always already happening. But reflecting on his own relationships tended to give his thinking and writing a kind of desperate clarity. The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another. We continue to know our friend, even after they are no longer present to look back at us. 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. This isn’t meant to be sad. To love friendship, he writes, “one must love the future.” Writing in the wake of his colleague Jean-François Lyotard’s death, Derrida wonders, “How to leave him alone without abandoning him?” Maybe taking seriously the ideas of our departed friends represents the ultimate expression of friendship, signaling the possibility of a eulogy that doesn’t simply focus attention back on the survivor and their grief. We

Where did we learn about the American dream? What role models were available to us? You pontificate on the meaning of Michael Chang. Do the lessons passed down to us by books or movies to TV apply to our lives as Asian kids with Asian parents, or do they make us feel inadequate? Why are we always working so hard, proving our smarts, living up to someone else's standards? Maybe it's all a trap. Why are we looking out for help, when it's all around us? We are not men without a culture. We just have to make it ourselves.

The next generation would acquire a skill on their behalf - one that we could also use against them. Commanding the language seemed like our only way of surpassing them. Home life took on a kind of casual litigiousness. The calm and composed children, a jaunty bounce to our sentences, laying traps with our line of questioning. The parents, tired and irritated, defaulting to the native tongue.

The immigrant's resourcefulness requires an exhaustion of possibilities. 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. The child has learned to speak for himself, but to talk back as well. You write well, not good. The devoted student also internalizes a relationship to the language itself, one in which you remain conscious of your distance from the source, from who draws on this language to mine their authentic self, because you've been led to believe such a thing matters. A simple pronoun of "I" or "we," a first-person perspective, all of it seemed mysterious. We could never write in a way that assumed anyone knew where we were coming from. There was nothing interesting about our context. Neither Black nor white, just boring to everyone on the outside. Where do you even begin explaining yourself?

I bought a too-big Björk poster that I had to tape to the ceiling, just inches above my bed. Her head was the size of my entire mattress; I slept under the poster for a few days before it started to scare me and I took it down.

Like many immigrants who prized education, my parents retained faith in the mastery of technical fields, like the sciences, where answers weren't left to interpretation. You couldn't discriminate against the right answer.

Something terrible is always already happening. We are always unaware that we already live on the precipice of tragedy.

American history proceeded from conquest and domination.

Join me on the side of cynical despair!

We spent so much of our time in this mode--sifting through culture as evidence, projecting different versions of ourselves based on our allegiances and enthusiasms. We weren't in search of answers. These weren't debates to be won: certainty was boring. We were in search of patterns that would bring the world into focus.

There comes a moment for the immigrant's child when you realize that you and your parents are assimilating at the same time.

I told them about all the protests and rallies at Berkeley, the late-night hours I was spending on the Asian American newspaper on campus. I thought they'd be proud. But they didn't understand why these were distinctions worth fighting for. I was sympathetic, reflecting on their struggles back when they arrived - my mother's isolation, my dad getting mugged on his first day in New York. I was grateful they had made these sacrifices for me. "For you?" my dad said with a laugh. "We came for ourselves. There was nothing in Taiwan when we left.

I searched the internet for Ken, even though he had stopped generating content years before, and whatever version of the web we had used in our teens was long since gone. Back then, browsers were just directories, rather than layers of sedimented knowledge, preferences, data-mined keystrokes. The appeal was that it was ephemeral and labyrinthine, a web that dissolved, rather than a physical net. A series of unconnected wormholes.

My parents weren't drawn to the United States by any specific dream, just a chance for something different. Even then, they understood that American life is unbounded promise and hypocrisy, faith and greed, new spectrums of joy and self-doubt, freedom enabled by enslavement. All of these things at once.

There's a telos of self-improvement baked into the immigrant experience. As a teenager, I busied myself with the school newspaper or debate club because, unlike with math or science, I thought I could actually get better at these things.

Derrida remarked that friendship's driver isn't the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would "choose knowing rather than being known." I had always thought it was the other way around.

Mom and I have been proud of you. Not only on your accomplishment but more on your happy personality. We'll support you whatever you choose (most time! Ha!). Don't feel bad if sometimes we are too nervous. We just hope to give you all our guidance and help to make your decisions simpler. We might put too much pressure on you but that's not what we mean. Be relax but arrange your time to handle priorities.

American life is unbounded promise and hypocrisy, faith and greed, new spectrums of joy and self-doubt, freedom enabled by enslavement. All of these things at once.

Suburbs are about the leisurely conquest of space, an alternative to the uncomfortable density of the city. They seem to run free from history itself, offering a sense that nothing was there before. But the illusion of tranquility frays at the edges: the neurosis required to maintain so neatly manicured a lawn, the pristine sidewalks that nobody walks on, the holy wars fought to keep one municipality from oozing into the next. Suburbs suggest stability and conformity, yet they are rarely beholden to tradition. Rather, they are slates that can be wiped clean to accommodate new aspirations.

We weren’t in search of answers. These weren’t debates to be won: certainty was boring. We were in search of patterns that would bring the world into focus. We craved new contexts, initiating routines that might eventually feel second nature.

When one is a student, time is measured in clear increments—the rhythm of the semester, the expanse of summer, which becomes less carefree and more regimented with each passing year.

Anticipation draws you through your days—the impending release of a hyped new album, a trailer for a movie that we should see next month. You look forward to the future, even if you can no longer imagine life beyond that morning.

When you’re young, you do so many things hoping to be noticed. The way you dress or stand, the music played loud enough to catch the attention of another person who might know a song, too. And then there are things you do as you step out into the world, the real world full of strange adults, testing out what it means to be generous or thoughtful. In that instant, before every memory was placed along some narrative arc, before the act of remembering took on a desperate air, I simply felt lucky to witness something so effortlessly kind—to see my friend do something that was good.

the dilemma of life: you have to find meaning, but by the same time, you have to accept the reality. How to handle the contradiction is a challenge to everyone of us. What do you think?

Or maybe, at that age, time moves fast; you’re so desperate for action that you forget to remember things as they happen.