By the way the short story in this week’s New Yorker, “Blue Roses” by Frances Hwang, is really good. (It is not online. Buy the magazine.) It is about friendship and family and being a foreigner with American children and getting old. And dreams. Here is a little bit of it:
My friendship with Wang Peisan is strange, I know. She makes everyone around her crazy. Ever since she was a child, she has been indulged, her life as delicate as a teacup. She had weak lungs, and her parents didn’t expect her to live. They bought her larger and larger coffins as she grew. In one of her dreams, Wang Peisan wanders lost in a museum, room after room filled with coffins no bigger than a tissue box. She opens one after another—like Goldilocks, she says—and it exasperates her that she won’t be able to fit into any of them. What can you do with a person who has dreams like this?
I was just about to post about this! The narrator is a terrific character, one of the most fully-realized I’ve read in a long time. I rarely laugh out loud at short stories.
The New Yorker has made the last three stories that I really liked subscriber-only…
The New Yorker is something I used to peruse at the dentist’s office when there were no National Geographic or travel magazines to ogle. I also knew it was chock full of dry cartoons because there was a Seinfeld episode about it. Most recently, I discovered the magazine features good fiction and good writing in general, which I occasionally catch up on when browsing the website.
A few days ago, at the bookstore, I decided to finally buy one. See what the fuss is about. I skipped straight to the fiction and it was “Blue Roses.” I stood in Periodicals and read some of the story while a guitarist strummed in the cafe. The story played, the guitar accompanied, and all I could think was: yea.