On history – Lucy Sante in NYRB:

‘Berkeley was a short hop for teenage Hsu. His parents were Taiwanese immigrants who settled in Cupertino in the early days of Silicon Valley. They met in the United States as students in the early 1970s and still retain some of that era’s political ideals, and its records. His father’s listening habits—Bob Dylan, Thriller, Guns N’ Roses, MTV—make Hsu think that music is an uncool adult thing. At some point in his teen years, his parents decide that his father will move back to Taiwan, a much more liberal country than the one he left in 1965. In Silicon Valley he had ascended to middle management but was seemingly stuck there forever, lacking the profile, racial and otherwise, to move up. In Taiwan he would have an executive position: “Never again would he have to dye his hair or touch his golf clubs.” Father and son begin communicating by fax—with voluminous faxes from Dad, patiently explaining the principles of geometry or delivering encouraging homilies.’

(…)

‘The friendship persists because Ken insists on it. He knows he has a lot to learn from our narrator; he immediately senses Hsu’s proclivities for cultural exploration, his firm and sometimes eccentric tastes, his prodigious memory. Noticing Hua’s thrift-shop couture, for example, Ken asks for help shopping for what turns out to be a 1970s-themed costume party. “He was a young man, I was an old one,” Hsu writes, “and now we were sorting through secondhand polyester shirts, blazers of the deceased, dust everywhere as we shook open every new marvel.” Hua doesn’t trust Ken at first, expecting ridicule. But although he may think Ken is condescending to him, he is himself at first very condescending to Ken, who is a great deal more perceptive and subtle than his tastes might indicate. He appreciates Hua’s labyrinthine self-protections: Ken noticed that I never really went out. More important, he noticed that I hoped to be noticed for this. I’d never touched alcohol, but it was mostly because I was a snob, not a straight-edge ideologue. I couldn’t imagine letting down my inhibitions around people I’d be silently judging the whole time.
And Ken is no slouch on the intellectual front, either:

He recommended a book on hegemony and socialism by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. I scoffed, as if he had just praised the Pearl Jam of post-Marxist thought—Oh yeah, I’ve heard of them—and then I committed their names to memory.
Hsu seems to have total recall, and apparently some very thoroughgoing journals. He is adept at evoking the flavor of specific times and places through a pointillist buildup of small details. He conveys the quality of passing time at an age when every day brings a new lesson with lifelong reverberations: “I was actually happy today, I wrote in my journal that spring. I mean bullshit happy, that lighthearted feeling of carefree dizziness.”’

(…)

‘Weaving through the story is a meditative essay on the meaning of friendship. Hsu pursues the theme from Aristotle to Derrida but finds the most useful insights in Marcel Mauss’s “Essay on the Gift.” “Mauss introduced the idea of delayed reciprocity,” he writes. “We often give and receive according to intermittent, sometimes random intervals. That time lag is where a relationship emerges.” The essay was originally published in 1923, Hsu notes, in the first postwar issue of L’Année sociologique, which begins with a lengthy memorial to the scholars killed in the war, name after name of young men with glorious ambitions, whose promise was evident to all, who might have become our greatest philologist, but who died in the trenches.
Hsu’s first book, A Floating Chinaman (2016), tells the story of H.T. Tsiang, a Chinese immigrant writer whose life story was as bitterly ironic a parable as any of his books. His novels were continually rejected by publishers, driving him to self-publication again and again, while China as a subject was thriving, selling big, as long as it came from the pen of Pearl S. Buck, whose viewpoint was missionary. Tsiang ended up as a minor Hollywood actor. Since 2014 Hsu has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker, where he covers a wide beat, centering on music and often racial matters and sometimes branching off into sports or academia. He is that rare thing: a chronicler and critic who files nearly every week while engaging fully, emotionally as well as intellectually, with every subject.’

(…)

‘The night Ken died, he was having a party in his new apartment off campus—a housewarming, he called it, in very adult fashion. Hsu, who by then regarded him as an experienced elder, tried to get him aside to ask earnest questions about losing his virginity, but they were interrupted and the opportunity was lost. Ken proposed they might all go swing dancing, a pursuit of his since seeing Swingers. Hsu, embarrassed by the very idea, begged off and went with some friends to a rave in a warehouse. Driving home afterward they saw Ken’s light still on, but thought nothing of it.
When they learn about the murder, Ken’s friends all cling to one another, overwhelmed by grief, eating and sleeping and traveling as a group: “moving as a pack felt essential,” Hsu writes. They fly to San Diego for Ken’s funeral, where they are comforted by Ken’s parents. They collectively write the eulogy that Hsu delivers. He is consumed by the thought that had he swept aside his snobbery and gone swing dancing with Ken, the story might have turned out differently—not that he has any specific reason to think so besides survivor guilt. He begins wearing a hat Ken left behind, drinking the English ale he preferred. He writes to Ken, filling him in and confessing to him. By slow degrees he absorbs Ken into himself.’

(…)

‘Hsu remembers how he and Ken were enthralled by E.H. Carr’s What Is History?, in particular this sentence: “Nothing in history is inevitable except in the formal sense that, for it to have happened otherwise, the antecedent causes would have had to be different.” During his second year of grad school he finally takes up the offer of a free semester of psychotherapy, somewhat defensively at first, until he realizes of his therapist, “She was asking, what is history? Do you see yourself in it? Where did you find your models for being in the world?” In Stay True Hsu makes us see how his and Ken’s and their friends’ stories are tossed on the sea of history, how identity takes shape from a thousand factors, how personalities flow into one another, how chance and destiny can be hard to tell apart. He had to write the book to perpetuate Ken and bring him to the attention of the world.’

Read the review here.

Noting is inevitable in history, except for the fact that it happened.

And since identity is first and foremost shaped by history, nothing is inevitable in identity.

Perhaps grief and friendship (and the love affair for that matter) have something in common, they are about slowly becoming the other, and then discovering that that is impossible. The disappointment is part of the excitement.