Who Was She, Without Me?
Today I finished Hua Hsu’s memoir, Stay True.
The story examines the author’s relationship with Ken, his close friend, who was killed during the summer before their shared senior year of college.
Stay True serves as a record. It reads as though Hsu’s most important accomplishment in writing this book was to portray Ken correctly. To honor Ken’s memory with exactness and precision. Yet, while writing, Hsu wrestles with the fact that no historian is without bias—and we inevitably layer and mix ourselves into any retelling.
When I finished reading, I began searching through memory books and photo albums, attempting to excavate my grandmother, my B-ma, who passed away in May of 2003.
Who was she, separate from me?
She was a woman who fought for teachers and students. Who loved her friends and family deeply. Who exuded a vibrancy, a glow, a zest for interactions, even those seemingly mundane. She never missed a chance to connect, even with strangers, over shared interests or experiences.
Her voice. It had a sing-song quality, a lilting cadence. If I close my eyes, I can still hear it. She used to say, you know, as a filler at the start of sentences. It served as a holding pattern, so she could fill the space between thoughts with what she believed to be true.
When she was president of her teacher’s union, she would listen intently to messages left on her machine from members. She’d play these messages, always on speaker, and that particular teacher’s voice filled her home office. Then she’d scrawl notes on her yellow legal pad.
Teachers called to speak with her directly, asking if this or that situation at their school building sounded quite right to her. I just wanted to run this by you, does this sound normal? Just let me know. I can see her face as she listened. Lips pursed, reading glasses propped down toward the tip of her nose, eyebrows pinched as she assessed and prioritized the seriousness of each call. Who’d get the first call back? Whose issue could wait?
While writing about my grandmother Lois, I write to freeze her in time. But what I am actually doing is freezing my version of her. It is right there, in the above paragraphs.
If I close my eyes, I can still hear it.
I can see her face as she listened.
I could go back right now and edit my work. I could delete those two lines. But I have no desire to remove myself.
It’s the historian in me who understands the compulsion, the desire, the obsession with getting our loved ones—those who are no longer with us, in particular—exactly right. But preservation without bias is futile. Because there was no Lois Soglin without those whom she cared for. There was no B-ma without me.
She was the version that we remember. And she wouldn’t want it any other way.