The first surprise when reading Be yourself (Navona in Spanish and Catalan), by Hua Hsu (Champaign-Urbana, USA, 1977), are the points of contact with Els murs invisibles (L’Altra / Temas de Hoy) by Ramon Mas, like two sides of the same coin. If Mas tells the book about the suicide of his best friend from Vic while the author was integrating among his university classmates in Barcelona, ??with a lot of importance in hardcore music, Hsu explains the process of becoming friends with Ken, an Asian American like him – but one of Taiwanese parents and the other of Japanese origin – when they meet at university, they argue about the music they like until one night Ken is murdered. While Mas explains his story clinging to feeling and action and conceives the work as a novel, Hsu’s text has a much more essayistic tone, without ever losing the narrative thread, and the reader finds himself immersed in the university life of the years nineties in the United States.
Hsu, one of the poles of the book is the search for one’s own “identity, and also about youth, an age when you want answers for everything and at the same time you are open to all exploration.” For the author, editor of The New Yorker and professor of literature at Bard College (in the state of New York), “when you are young the world tends to be very small and you want to enter a larger one, so you think a lot about What’s normal and what is not”. His parents are educated Taiwanese who went to the US, where they met and started a family, so the writer realized that, although much of society saw Asian Americans as a relatively homogeneous community, his His story didn’t have much to do with other Asian emigrants, and even less with Ken’s, since his family had been in the country for more generations. “When I wrote the book, in the US only 5% of the population was of Asian origin, and I thought that my experience was very individual and would not be of interest to anyone else, but there is something that people can relate to, like feeling out of center, out of the norm. Whether you are white or Asian, whether you are an immigrant or a descendant of many generations, there will always be something that at some point will make you feel different.”
Part of the search for identity in his work, which won the Pulitzer Prize for the best memoir or autobiography of 2023, involves building friendships with the other members of the group. “When you’re young, you look for a type of narrow experience, a small group with whom you feel related, and I felt like I didn’t have that, but later I realized that it had always been there, my friends from home, those from school. student residence, those of the groups of which I had been a part, like the faculty newspaper, only they were not what I had imagined they would be.” Ken, however, remained frozen in memory: “He never ages, and at the same time he is the only thing to whom I have always remained faithful, but if he had not died, who knows what would have happened, if the friends would not have been so close, or if we would still be friends today. Realizing that and accepting it was very important to see that he was not idealizing it.”
It also focuses on his family, and explains surprising episodes, such as the time when his father returned to Taiwan to live and work – once retired, they live in California – and father and son communicated by fax, because it was cheaper. Oceanic queries about the homework he had to do peppered with comments on music or sports on the side that Hsu reflects in the book and serve as a humorous counterpoint.
“All personal writing is about turning real people into characters, but although it reflects how I remember feeling, it is a version of me. A friend of mine read the book and told me that in real life I wasn’t that funny…,” he explains.
Although writing helped him turn the page, he is clear that “I will continue talking about it all my life, but when people read the book and connect with their own memories, I feel that it is no longer just my story, it is no longer just something.” that I have inside.” When he wrote the book, “more than relief what I felt was peace. Not necessarily a feeling of catharsis, but of achievement. Once it is turned into a book and published, I no longer feel like it is mine, and that is fine with me.”
Catalan version, here
