Hua Hsu Stay True Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

It would be an account of love and duty, not just anger and hatred, and it would be filled with dreams, and the memory of having once looked to the future, and an eagerness to dream again. It would be boring, because you simply had to be there. It would be poetry and not history. ...the deep ambivalence you once felt toward a song that now devastated you...the look when someone recognizes you. I'm going to write about all this one day, I told her, and she smiled at me.

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.

You make a world out of the things you buy. Everything you pick up is a potential gateway, a tiny, cosmetic change that might blossom into an entirely new you. A bold shirt around which you base a new personality, an angular coffee table that might reboot your whole environment, that one enormous novel that all the fashionable English majors carry around. You buy things to communicate affiliation to a small tribe, hopeful you'll encounter the only other person in line buying the same obscure thing as you. Maybe I, too, will become the kind of person who has books like 'Infinite Jest' casually strewn on his cool, angular coffee table. Maybe I'll become the kind of person who seems as if he should have that book but chooses not to.

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?

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.

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.

In the early twentieth century, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski ventured to the Trobriand Islands, part of present-day Papau New Guinea, in order to study the region's practice of gift exchange. People of the islands would travel great distances to offer one another symbolic, seemingly worthless necklaces and armbands. Malinowski believed he was observing a kind of soft power. Gift exchange was not a form of altruism, since there was the expectation of reciprocity. And it wasn't random, since the flow of gifts followed discernible patterns. Instead, he argued that this act of giving and receiving bound everyone in a political process. The expansion of these exchanges across the islands represented an expansion of political authority. The sociologist Marcel Mauss found Malinowski's explanation insufficient. He felt that Malinowski placed too much emphasis on transaction, rather than how feelings of indebtedness actually work. In 1923, he published "Essay on the Gift," which placed Malinowski's island networks in conversation with gifting practices in other societies, like indigenous traditions in the Americas, systems of communal ownership in China. Mauss introduced the idea of delayed reciprocity. You give expecting to receive. Yet we often give and receive according to intermittent, sometimes random intervals. That time lag is where a relationship emerges. Perhaps gifts serve political ends. But Mauss believed that they strengthened the bonds between people and communities. Your obligation isn't just to repay the gift according to a one-to-one ratio. You're beholden to the "spirit of the gift", a kind of shared faith. Every gesture carries a desire for connection, expanding one's ring of associations.

You were describing people we had not yet met, maybe people we ourselves would become.

architectural, a palace of memories to wander at my own leisure.

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.

Immigrants are often discussed in terms of a push-and-pull dynamic: something pushes you from home; something else pulls you far away. Opportunities dry up one place and emerge somewhere else, and you follow the promise toward a seemingly better future. Versions of these journeys stretch back hundreds of years in all different directions.

The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories...the things around [my parents] were like the raw materials for new American identities, and they foraged as far as their car or the subway line could take them. Back then, it required a small fortune and months of careful planning to return home. It took weeks simply to schedule a long-distance phone call and ensure a quorum of the family would be available on the other end of the line.

There were aspects of their lives that felt familiar. Their parents were busy working as many jobs as they could, and whatever connection they maintained to the past had more to do with household tradition than politics. Words like 'genocide' and 'trauma' were forbidden. ...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. There were similarities that cut across nationality and. class: the uncommunicative parents, the cultural significance of food, the fact that we all took our shoes off at home.

There comes a moment for the immigrant's child when you realize you and your parents are assimilating at the same time. Later, I understood that we were both sifting, store to store, for some possible future -- that we were both mystified by the same fashions, trends, and bits of language. That my late night trips to the record store with my dad had been about discovery, not mastery. Later still, I came to recognize that assimilation as a whole was a race toward a horizon that wasn't fixed. The ideal was ever shifting, and your accent would never be quite perfect. It was a set of compromises sold to you as a contract. Assimilation was not a problem to be solved but the problem itself.

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. You flip through your father's old physics notebooks, and you know in your bones that these formulas and graphs will never make sense to you. But one day, you realize that your parents speak with a mild accent, and that they have no idea what passive voice is. 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.

I wrote a lot about music, but I could have been zealous about anything—film, literature, art. I fell in love with anything I felt I had discovered.

What does it mean to truly be yourself? Around this time, in the mid-1900s, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor began thinking about how people throughout history had dealt with this question of individual identity. In the past, there was no such thing. You were born into a well-defined position, locked along a hierarchy, and you accepted that this was the natural order of things. With the dissolution of feudal, old-world bonds, new possibilities of economic and social mobility emerged, and this transience infected the soul. People began to wonder whether we possessed some innate essence that might be discovered by peeling away layers of our surface. Or maybe there was nothing innate, and we were always in the process of self discovery, self creation, and revision. For some, this manifested as a kind of endless drifting and searching; others found the possibility of claiming one's own identity empowering. But we were all in search of the same thing, that quality that made you yourself. Taylor called this authenticity, and it became the unreachable horizon of modern life. It's a concept that makes sense only in its absence; we recognize inauthenticity, phoniness, when someone's clearly being a poseur. Yet the struggle to feel authentic -- this is very real, even if we know better. In Taylor's telling, everyone becomes a kind of artist, creatively wrestling with the parameters of our own being. He described the outlook as one where 'being true to myself is being true to my own originality, and that is something that only I can articulate and discover. In articulating it, I am defining it'. Even though all this sounds very navel-gazing, being true to yourself cannot happen in a vacuum. Constructing your personality is a game, one that requires you to joust with the expectations of others. Authenticity, Taylor explained, presumes dialogue, and it is born out of engaging with those around us. We seek recognition, even if what you want to hear from a close friend is that you're a one-of-a-kind weirdo that they'll never truly understand.

Occasionally, I felt preemptively embarrassed about my private hysterics. I think the most depressing aspect of keeping a journal is thinking, or knowing, that one day I’ll be sitting somewhere reading this. Trying to relive some moments, but struck not by recaptured emotions, rather being struck by how damn deep I tried to sound at some point in the past.

I remember leaning back in my chair and laughing as thunderously as physically possible. We were boisterous and loud, because we needed to be. I revealed Ken’s secrets, telling our friends the things he adored about them. I told girls he secretly loved that he had loved them.

That’s the dilemma of life: you have to find meaning, but by the same time, you have to accept the reality.

By the end of that semester of free therapy, I was very tired of talking about myself. I was tired of myself. Each week I dutifully showed up, because I was supposed to, and relitigated whatever I had talked about the previous week. Replaying the details of that night demystified it, at least in terms of my involvement. More accurately, noninvolvement, because how could it have ended any differently? That was just the historian trying to wedge himself into a story that was not his. Talking so much did nothing to lessen the fact that I missed you, and that I could now periodize different eras of that feeling. I miss missing you circa Oct 98, I wrote in my journal. I miss not watching my back, I miss going out for dinner at night, I miss your balcony and cultivating minor league tobacco habits. I missed that feeling of having once known exactly what to say. That feeling of writing a series of perfect sentences. In a sense, I was still, years later, stepping down from the podium at the funeral home, shuffling slowly back to my seat in the pews between Anthony and Sean. But this was exactly why Derrida resisted the eulogy form. It’s always about “me” rather than “we,” the speaker burnishing his emotional credentials rather than offering a true account of the deceased.

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.

Join me on the side of cynical despair!

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 history proceeded from conquest and domination.

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

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.

Straightness exists only by continually marginalizing queerness