The first surprise when reading Be Yourself (Navona in Catalan and Spanish), 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 narrates in the book the suicide of his best friend from Vic while the author was integrating among his university colleagues in Barcelona, ??with a lot of emphasis on 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 tells his story clinging to feeling and action and conceives the work as a novel, Hsu’s text has a much more essayistic tone, never losing the narrative thread, and the reader finds himself immersed in college life in the 1990s in the United States.
According to Hsu, one of the pillars 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 New York state), “when you’re young the world tends to be very small and you want to enter a larger world, so you think a lot about what is normal and what is not”. His parents are educated Taiwanese who went to the US where they met and raised a family, so the writer first realized that although a large part of society saw Asian Americans as a relatively homogenous community, their history had little to do with many Asian immigrants, and even less to do with Ken’s, since his family had been in the country for 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 interest anyone else, but there is something that people can relate to. relate, such as feeling off center, out of the norm. Whether you’re white or Asian, whether you’re an immigrant or a multi-generational descendant, there will always be something that makes you feel different at some point.”
Part of the search for identity in the work, which won the Pulitzer Prize for best memoir or autobiography in 2023, involves building friendships with the other friends in the group. “When you’re young, you look for a close experience, a small group with whom you feel close, and I felt that I didn’t have one, but later I realized that it had always been there, the friends from home, the ones from the residence students, those of the groups I had been a part of, like the faculty newspaper, but they weren’t what I had imagined they would be.” Ken, however, was frozen in memory: “He never ages, and at the same time he is the only one to whom I have always remained faithful, but if he had not died, who knows what would have happened, if the friends we would not have been so close, or if we would still be friends today. Realizing this and accepting it was very important to see that I wasn’t idealizing him.”
He also focuses on his family and recounts 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 more cheap Oceanic inquiries about the homework he had to do are interspersed with comments about music or sports on the sidelines that Hsu reflects in the book and make for a humorous counterpoint.
“All personal writing is about turning real people into characters, but even though it reflects how I remember feeling, it’s 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 to talk about it for the rest of my life, but when people read the book and connect with their own memories, I feel like it’s not just my story anymore, and that it helps me to turn a page in the sense that it is no longer just something that I have inside”.
When he wrote the book, “rather than relief, what I felt was peace. Not necessarily a feeling of catharsis, but of achievement. Once it’s turned into a book and published, I no longer feel like it’s mine, and it feels good to me.”
