Rerun: #533 Hua Hsu (May 2023)

Longform

Education, Arts, Books, News

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2024

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hua Hsu is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His book Stay True won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for memoir. “I've worked as a journalist … for quite a while. … But this [book] was the thing that was always in the back of my mind. Like, this was the thing that a lot of that was in service of. Just becoming better at describing a song or describing the look of someone's face—these were all things that I implicitly understood as skills I needed to acquire. ... It is sort of an origin story for why I got so obsessive about writing.” Show notes: @huahsu byhuahsu.com Hsu on Longform Hsu on Longform Podcast Hsu's New Yorker archive 03:00 A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (Harvard University Press • 2016) 30:00 "Randall Park Breaks Out of Character" (New Yorker • Feb 2023) 33:00 Shortcomings (Adrian Tomine • Drawn & Quarterly • 2007) 39:00 "What Conversation Can Do For Us" (New Yorker • Mar 2023) 39:00 "J. Crew and the Paradoxes of Prep" (New Yorker • Mar 2023) 39:00 "The Many Afterlives of Vincent Chin" (New Yorker • Jun 2022) 39:00 "How Wayne Wang Faces Failure" (New Yorker • Jun 2022) 39:00 "Maxine Hong Kingston’s Genre-Defying Life and Work" (New Yorker • Jun 2020) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	In December 2020, a Latino couple was falsely accused by a white mom
0:04.8	influencer of attempting to kidnap her children. The Karen phenomenon where white
0:09.5	women falsely accuse people of color of crimes usually fixates on the accuser, the so-called
0:14.6	Karen.
0:15.6	But for this series we focus on the innocent couple at the heart of this story.
0:19.6	I just want the public to know what she did was wrong.
0:23.8	In Perfect Paradise People versus Karen,
0:26.2	available now wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome to the long form podcast. I'm Aaron Lamer and it's rerun season, which is why I'm here by myself.
0:47.6	Happy New Year. This episode was taped last year in May 2023.
0:51.7	It's one of my favorite interviews of the year with Hua Shu, talking about his book Stay True, which I try not to say what the best book of the year is, but this book stayed with me like no other book I read last year.
1:06.8	Maybe not surprisingly, it's about his college years at UC Berkeley.
1:11.2	It's a memoir. I grew up in Berkeley. So like I'm in the background of this book.
1:16.7	Brought out a lot of nostalgia for me, but also it's a book that kind of
1:21.5	investigates the nature of nostalgia and memory and how we remember people.
1:27.1	Really, really recommend it.
1:29.2	Thanks again to Hua for this interview.
1:31.6	Thanks to everyone over at Vox Media who help us produce this show and we'll
1:36.7	be back with a new episode next week. Now here is me with Hua Chu. Welcome to the podcast for your second appearance, Hua Shu.
1:58.0	Great to be back.
2:00.0	I'm now saying what number appearance when people come in the show just so that if I have to go back and listen to this I've
2:08.0	Hard-Coded this information for myself
2:11.0	Who holds the record just like curiosity? Not that it's a competition but I'm just curious.
	...

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