麻豆视频

The title of my Scribner Seminar, 鈥淚n the Light of Death,鈥� is borrowed from a poem by my maternal uncle, the American Buddhist poet, Rick Fields (1942鈥�1999):

Funny

how

in the light of death

everything

shines!

Hua Hsu鈥檚 memoir, Stay True, explores the strange illumination that death offers by telling the story of a college friendship interrupted just as the two friends were beginning to imagine how their connection would carry on into their lives after college. Although Hsu is unflinching in his description of his friend Ken鈥檚 murder, there is not a hint of sensationalism in his account. In contrast to the dramatic mode of true crime, Stay True dwells on the minutiae of everyday life that remained after Ken鈥檚 death: scraps of paper, a pack of unsmoked cigarettes, fragments of songs. While one friend searched for clues about the murder and another immersed himself in travel logistics for the funeral, Hua turned to writing: 鈥淚 listed things he鈥檇 left behind, because he was always leaving things behind: the bandage affixed to the air freshener in my car, the lucky volleyball shirt still in my hamper in Cupertino. All that I鈥檇 learned about time-travel, treating a hangover with steak, eggs, and a side of pancakes. (123)鈥� These ephemeral fragments of everyday life are seen with a kind of vivid clarity, as if for the first time, in the absence of the person who left them behind.

 

Anyone who has experienced the unexpected death of a loved one can recall the disorienting sensation of everything being the same despite the profound knowledge that nothing will ever be the same. Our senses take in our surroundings with sharper focus and attention to detail. A chair where the deceased once sat or the hat they once wore create a cognitive dissonance simply by being unchanged and unremarkable despite the world-shattering event they are unknowingly connected to. As I read Stay True, I found myself recognizing aspects of my own experiences with death in Hua Hsu鈥檚 recollections. The most troubling part of death is just how ordinary everything remains. In Buddhist traditions, contemplation of death is the starting point of all paths to awakening. In the words of one Tibetan verse used for this practice: 鈥淒eath is real and comes without warning. This body will be a corpse.鈥� While this may seem to be a morbid fixation from the perspective of our death-denying society, the goal is to recognize the value of life and to see the urgency in living life fully in each moment. Hua Hsu chronicles the ways in which Ken鈥檚 murder brings a radical clarity to the ordinariness of our lives and the ways in which remembering and writing both honor the dead and remind us of the mortality of those who remain living.