BLUE ROSES by Frances Hwang

　　This is a story of Lin Fanghui, an Chinese American around 60 years old. She has conflicts with her two daughters, Eileen and Elizabeth, and her son, Andrew. The most troublesome person for Lin is Wang Peisan, a picky, nervous, proud, sensitive, and stingy woman. In the end when Wang is hospitalized for pneumonia, Lin and Wang seem to become good friends.
　　The story ends when Lin closes her eyes for a moment and tries to describe to Wang what she saw in her dream. The ending is abrupt. It sounds as if it were introducing another episode. Similarly the story starts abruptly too when Lin asks Eileen to invite Wang over for Christmas dinner. It is said that a short story describes a brief span of the protagonist’s life. Blue Roses is a model for this definition. The reader finds no climax, no surprising development, no paradox, or no moving scene. The story just describes episodes centering around Lin, her children, and Wang.
　　The author describes Wang so well that the reader can easily form her image. One of the important elements of a good short story is character description. Frances Hwang described the characters vividly and understandably. The more the author describes the protagonist’s psychology, the more the readers identify themselves with him/her. The description must be accurate, precise, and proper.

Frances Hwang teaches at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana, was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award as well as the winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana and has held fellowships at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and Colgate University.