Review of “Blue Roses”

Story review, Blue Roses by Frances Hwang, in New Yorker, October 25, 2010.

The story is a character study of two women who try to dwell in an uncomfortable space in between two different worlds on two different axes. Hwang sketches a finely detailed narration that opens with a tiff between Lin Funghui, the mother and Ellen, the daughter about inviting Lin’s frend, Wang Peisan to Christmas dinner. Although the story’s fine detail works against revealing the finer complexities of existential undercurrents of an immigrant’s life, as the story progresses, we begin to appreciate the detail.

At first, the protagonist Lin comes across as a difficult, irritable, stubborn, unbearable character who finds it challenging to feel comfortable in her own skin. But as the story progresses, we are drawn into her shoes and that of Wang Peisan and feel for the challenges that are unique to the immigrant’s psychological makeup. Lin’s children have a tough time relating to their mother, let alone liking her. In fact, in no uncertain terms the author reveals that in Lin’s children’s eyeview, their mother is less than human with her funny eyebrows and overbearing personality who “spies” on her children. Expression of love, Chinese style finds no easy reception in the American context where the immigrants’ children grow up.

And then there are the universal themes in the story that find resonance in any context. Parents love, give and forgive their children. And yet the children, in their blissful ignorance, feel entitled to their parents without feeling the need to care for the parents.

Throughout the story, we find fault lines and friction arising from conflicting cultural values, generational expectations, outmoded familial loyalties, and downright malice when Wang’s children try to snatch every last possession from their mother. We find two thorny and unlikable characters that see each in the other, and feel a kinship for each other. We feel for them in the same way we feel for the plants we smuggle from homelands and plant them in the backyard, which struggle to survive in the foreign soil. Unlike their husbands, the two women refuse to come to terms with the values and exigencies of the world in which they feel exiled.

-Mahesh Senagala