Dani Austria

“Some friends complete us, while others complicate us. Maybe you feel as if there were nothing better in the world than driving in a car, listening to music with friends, looking for an all-night donut shop. Nobody says a thing, and it is perfect. Maybe your lifelong fascination with harmony finally began to make sense in those scenes, packed in your family's station wagon, singing along to "God Only Knows," waiting in the parking lot until the song was over.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“A friend, he wrote, would “choose knowing rather than being known.” I had always thought it was the other way around.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir

“Modern life, theorists like Derrida explain, is full of atomized individuals, casting about for a center and questioning the engine of their lives. His writing is famously intricate, full of citations and abstruse terminology. Things are always already happening. But reflecting on his own relationships tended to give his thinking and writing a kind of desperate clarity. The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another. We continue to know our friend, even after they are no longer present to look back at us. From that very first encounter, we are always preparing for the eventuality that we might outlive them, or they us. We are already imagining how we may someday remember them. This isn’t meant to be sad. To love friendship, he writes, “one must love the future.” Writing in the wake of his colleague Jean-François Lyotard’s death, Derrida wonders, “How to leave him alone without abandoning him?” Maybe taking seriously the ideas of our departed friends represents the ultimate expression of friendship, signaling the possibility of a eulogy that doesn’t simply focus attention back on the survivor and their grief. We”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir

“The events of 1986 spelled deliverance for many, a chance for the country to embark on a new beginning. And yet it appears now that the path to recovery is even more difficult, perhaps because freedom allows individuals and countries many choices, some of which can be foolish, even tragic.”
― Priscilla Supnet Macansantos