Episode 10: Tandoori Chicken after 9/11
A reflection on Hua Hsu's "Stay True"
Hi friends,
I’m excited for this piece because its a book review. I’ve always wanted to do a book review, and in honor of this auspicious occasion, I’ve started a running book list at my website in case you’re interested to see what I’m reading or want to read. If you have any stories or books to recommend, please sound off in the comments below.
Also, I recently got accepted into the 2024 cohort of Viable Paradise, a speculative fiction workshop in Martha’s Vineyard! I’ll be going in the fall, and my time between now and then will be devoted to mentally and emotionally preparing for what is sure to be a big week of learning and writing.
Lastly, I’m one of the new facilitators for ’s Monday writing series! Check it out, we will be meeting on Mondays at 9a PST.
Vivek.
TW: Brief discussion of murder and death.
I recently finished Hua Hsu’s Stay True, a memoir on Hsu’s life as a UC Berkeley student in the nineties. It summoned up so much related to my time in the Bay Area community organizing after 9/11 with friends, including Birj whose passing I wrote about in my inaugural Substack post. While reading, I felt like Hsu’s quiet companion, gliding along with him during his life in college when he met his friend Ken (and others), and after Ken’s murder.
Reading the book felt like looking at snapshots, reminding me that writing is just a snapshot of where I am in the moment, that often when I sit down to write, I go wherever my thoughts take me. Just like with my depression messing with my sense of time, what I remember and what I care about are intertwined, doling out memory to me through filters I only get glimmers of.
Hsu’s book starts out with a tribute to youth, feeding off the thrill of curating a mixtape, friends crammed into Hsu’s Volvo, traveling to places one feels are the world when you’re that young, generating meaning and memory. Like them, Birj and friends and I would travel to a now long gone restaurant called TC USA at the base of a hill atop which sat the El Sobrante Gurdwara. TC USA stood for Tandoori Chicken USA, which Birj claimed was the best, and it was the best - for us. We would ponder what to get until finally someone would order some tandoori chicken, the rest of us imitating with only slight modifications. The styrofoam plates came out steaming with tandoor delicacies, slathered in a deep orange yogurt sauce characteristic of such fare.
But TC USA would only be the end of our journey. Like Hsu, we also worked with youth. We would go to the Gurdwara to work with the youth there to facilitate discussions about race after 9/11, to understand how they live and have lived, giving them space to talk (we thought they might not otherwise have that space to talk, without us). We did this as a collective through ASATA, without funding and without grants. After our meetings we got langar, where we would sit cross-legged on long paper sheets, eat a meal served by aunties and uncles, and talk with the kids socially until we would thank everyone profusely before heading down the hill to park at TC USA a few minutes later for round two.
All of this was possible the moment we piled into Birj’s Honda, since no one else had a car, and biking from Oakland to El Sobrante too solitary an affair. No one would have wanted to miss the ride there and back, nor miss Birj’s latest mixtape, not unlike Hsu whose text focused on the ride rather than the destination, his tunes carefully curated for the trip.
A good chunk of Hsu’s book felt like him and his friends were preparing for something big: finding dive bars that they would go to when they turned 21, discussing philosophy so they could see how it applies to their future lives, writing a movie script they wanted to film. In some ways, my move to the Bay Area after graduating college embodied the same search. In college I thought that adding anthropology as a second major was an act of rebellion, even though I was still firmly on the medical school track. Skipping keg parties, learning and then obsessing about Radiohead with friends, and organizing an Asian American film festival while also scoring good grades in both majors symbolized more my conformity and gunner status rather than any type of rebelliousness. My undergrad’s motto was “Work Hard, Play Hard” and everyone cited it like a mantra to justify the capitalist ethos that we could do everything all the time and get it all done, and done well. But I personally felt like I was on the precipice of something big, and it was as large as it was undefined. I ultimately decided against medical school, and instead move to the Bay Area to find that something big. But then 9/11 happened, and for a moment that was too big a moment to fathom, until I felt the fallout.
For us, we volunteered because of a collective concern for those racialized as terrorists after 9/11, for those whose pagdis got ripped off, who underwent routine secondary screening at the airports, who lost their lives like Balbir Singh Sodhi did within days after the towers fell. My post graduate self was optimistic that this was the moment we could all change the things we were seeing and experiencing at the airports, at the schools, on our streets and in the news. So we worked with an urgency.
As I write this, a fly flits around my head, settling in on the spots that seem the most uncomfortable for me - my nose, my emerging bald spot, my ears. In the book, the author notices flies after Ken’s death, appearing as a wandering talisman that Hsu attributes to Ken’s spirit or something like it. Which is what I like about the book, it’s not so explicit, not so over the top, not so clear. There are things to learn and remember and experience with him, and we go through the journey without knowing where it’s going.
By the end, Hsu’s book is about riding through life and learning how to mourn the changes we all go through. For him and me, that meant mourning our friend’s death in different ways. The book ends with Hsu attending free therapy sessions at his graduate school, where he starts making the connection between his depression and the death of his friend. And then he decides to write his book, which perhaps was his way of thinking about language or his way of avoiding presence. Or both.
Recently, I went on a camping trip with some friends from the Bay Area, including some that knew Birj and knew them more than I did because they never left the Bay. I was reading Stay True then, and my friend who also went with us to TC USA stole it from me, speeding through it while lying on one of the camp’s hammocks, back bowed and legs out in mansplained fashion (but without the actual mansplaining). I would be cooking or hanging with the kids, and we would connect over the book at intervals, reflecting on Hsu’s references to Bay Area landmarks, where we both lived together some 22 years ago. In this book, Hsu created an opportunity for us to think about the meander that is our lives, and connect with others who intersect with you and others who are now long gone.
9/11 changed so much. It's hard remember what it was like before then. My friends and I found a way to skip on our classes and tests and head to New York as soon as we could fly to be with community there. What a wild time.
A poignant and lovely review, Vivek. It brought me back to those immediate post-9/11 days. Indeed so much has changed since then, but so much of that time remains with us. Thanks for sharing this!