One Book, One BART: Pulitzer winner Hua Hsu on growing up riding local transit

In May, BART launched its first ever book club for riders, One Book, One BART. The inaugural book selection for the book club, which runs through August, is "Stay True," a memoir set in 1990s Berkeley by writer Hua Hsu. 

Hsu, a staff writer at the New Yorker and a professor of literature at Bard College, grew up in Cupertino before attending UC Berkeley. BART, Hsu said recently, played a key role during his youth, transporting him to record shops, to concerts, to summer jobs. Hear more from Hsu below. 

Pulitzer Prize winner Hua Hsu on books, BART, and the Bay Area: 

Being the inaugural selection for One BART, One Book is such an honor. My memoir, "Stay True," is largely set in the Bay Area in the nineteen-nineties. It’s a story of youth, friendship, and exploration—of stepping into the world at your own pace. I grew up in the South Bay and I have fond memories of taking the BART for a summer job in Berkeley back when I was in high school. I always carried a book with me, but I never got much reading done. When you’re young, your sense of the world is limited to your neighborhood, maybe your hometown, and I would spend the whole ride looking out the window, wondering what all these different cities were like. I stared at the map, memorizing the names of all the cities and stops between Fremont and Berkeley. In the mid-nineties, when I attended college at Berkeley, BART was how I got to San Francisco for record shops (24th St Mission) and concerts (Montgomery St), Halloween parties (16th St Mission) and summer jobs, the simple thrill of being able to eat burritos in a different area code. One year, thousands of high school and college students took the BART from throughout the Bay Area to meet up in Concord to demonstrate for more funding for our schools. That morning, each car along the train transformed into a classroom and a community, as we all overcame our differences and shared visions of a better future. I was no longer looking out the window, but at a new world coming into focus in front of my eyes.