The Red Chamber (57 page)

Snowgoose had purchased material for her burial clothes, but Zhen Shiyin had yelled at his sister. “No!” He had gone to the
kang
and sat beside Daiyu, taking her hand in his. “I heard you say when your cousin was here that you would like to see Suzhou again.”

“Yes,” she had whispered through her parched throat.

“Then why don’t we go? You were never sick like this down there. Perhaps the climate, the air, is better for you.”

“How can we go?” she had said, starting to cry from sheer weakness. “I can’t even get out of bed.”

“We’ll take a barge and I’ll carry you.”

“I’ll never make it.”

“Yes, you will. I’ll take care of you.”

“It’s so far, and we don’t have the money.”

“Yes, we do.” He had taken something out of his sleeve. With a rush of gratitude, she had seen that it was Baochai’s pendant.

That very afternoon, Shiyin had arranged to sell the forge and booked two seats on a barge. He had carried her off the dock onto the boat, with their modest luggage slung over his back. She remembers lying there on the deck, wrapped up in blankets, looking up at the cold, distant sky. The first week, she couldn’t do anything but shiver in Shiyin’s arms. She shuddered with dry heaves from the rocking of the boat. But once they passed Yangzhou, it seemed that with every mile south, some of the ice gripping her chest loosened its hold. She began to eat and drink again. When the barge rounded the giant gorge to the north of Wuxi, she sat
up against Shiyin’s shoulders and saw the lights of the city. In Suzhou, she had walked off the boat, leaning on Shiyin’s arm.

The first years were hard. She and Shiyin had used the money remaining from Baochai’s pendant to get married. She hardly remembers anything about the wedding. Instead, what she remembers about the beginning of her love for Shiyin was a moment when their hands met on the deck of the boat. They had always touched each other a great deal, because he had nursed her for so long, but this touch was different, their fingers intertwining under the cover of a blanket. Of course, she could never have embarked on this journey with him if she had not already loved and trusted him. Looking back, she can’t help contrasting her violent infatuation with Baoyu with her love for Shiyin, growing as naturally and imperceptibly as the moss that springs to life in the cracks between stones.

After they were married, they moved in with an old neighbor on Bottle-Gourd Street, sharing the single room with six other people. Shiyin worked long hours as a journeyman in someone else’s blacksmith shop, and she struggled to regain her health. Then something happened that gave them new hope and strength. Snowgoose’s mistress in the Capital, the Princess of Nan’an, had decided she was too old to be a maid, and had married her off. Her new husband was a merchant who did most of his business in the south. The third year after Daiyu and Shiyin had left the Capital, Snowgoose and her husband arrived in Suzhou. By the time that she and Shiyin could finally afford their own place, Snowgoose and her husband had moved in just down the street.

The path veers away from the canal now. There is one last hill to climb before they reach home. She tells Shushu to put the frog she has caught back in the water. As she waits for her daughter to catch up, she tries to picture what Baoyu and Baochai are doing. Surely Baoyu has risen high in the Civil Service by now. Who knows, perhaps he is in the Ministry of Works like his father? She imagines Baochai watching over their children as they play in the Garden. She imagines girls, plump and placid like their mother, and boys, tall and well-grown like their father. The picture makes her smile.

Shushu comes panting up the hill behind her, her face flushed from running. She sees that Daiyu is struggling with the baby’s weight, and takes Adou into her own arms. She puts him up on her shoulders, and he starts to giggle and babble.

“Why were you looking at that jade so long?” Shushu asks. She
reminds Daiyu of herself as a child, with her serious eyebrows and thin face. “Was that the jade? Was that Uncle Baoyu’s jade?”

Daiyu stares at her. She has forgotten that once, when Shushu was restless and couldn’t fall asleep, she had told her daughter the story of the boy who was born with the jade in his mouth. She smiles and ruffles Shushu’s hair. “No.” She shakes her head. “It looked like it, but I don’t think it was.”

“Tell me again how you went to live with the Jias in the Capital—” Shushu begins, then cuts herself off. “Listen! There’s Daddy’s hammer!”

Daiyu hears it too, the sound of Shiyin’s hammer striking the forge. She listens to the silver notes, steady and pure.

Shushu sets off with Adou bouncing and giggling on her shoulders. Daiyu labors after them the last few steps of the slope. She gasps for breath—her lungs have never fully regained their strength after her illness. There is only one more block to home. She thinks about seeing Shiyin, and begins to run.

A Note on the Text

Aficionados of the original novel may well be appalled by how I have shuffled, truncated, and eliminated both characters and plotlines of the original to create a cohesive and more compact work. At the same time, many of my changes have been guided by an attempt to be faithful to the novel’s deeper meaning and context:

A. While Cao’s original ending has been lost, the
Zhiyan zhai
, “Red Inkstone Commentary,” interlinear notes believed to have been written by one of Cao’s family members on an early manuscript, gives several clues to how Cao intended to conclude the novel. The “Red Inkstone Commentary” seems to suggest, for instance, that Baoyu is imprisoned and that Wang Xifeng recovers the lost jade while sweeping snow in the original ending. I have included these incidents in
The Red Chamber
, although they do not appear in the existing ending by Gao E.

B. In the original novel Zhen Shiyin and Jia Yucun are somewhat minor characters who make only intermittent appearances. However, their names are highly significant, being paired puns for “The truth remains hidden” and “The false words remain.” In
The Red Chamber
I use the names to contrast a faithful lover, Zhen Shiyin, with a false one, Jia Yucun.

C. Although history records that Cao Xueqin’s family, on whom the novel is based, did indeed suffer from demotions and confiscations following the accession of Emperor Yongzheng, the existing novel is carefully apolitical, appearing as it did during “Qianlong’s Literary Inquisition,” a period during which numerous writers were killed for supposedly seditious passages in their work. Indeed, some scholars believe that the original ending of the novel may have been suppressed because it contained passages that might have offended the Emperor. In
The Red Chamber
, I have reintroduced a fictionalized political subplot concerning the confiscation and Yongzheng’s succession based loosely on the experience of Cao Xueqin’s family.

While I have attempted to base my descriptions of food, clothing, architecture, holidays, etc., on the actual text, there are many times that
I depart from historical accuracy in the interests of narrative fluency. One of my most drastic deviations from accuracy is the elimination of a large number of servants. For instance, in chapter 3 of the original novel, we learn that Daiyu, like Baoyu and the other girls in the household, is to be attended by five nannies, two body servants, and five or six maids for housekeeping. However, the presence of so many servants would have made it difficult for me to stage the private interactions that are so important to the development of the relationships between the characters.

A note on footbinding: While aristocratic Han Chinese women continued to bind their feet during the Qing dynasty, Manchu women did not. I follow David Hawkes, the eminent translator of the novel, in believing that the Jia women, as Bondservants with strong cultural connections to the Manchus, did not bind their feet, and thus could enjoy such activities as walks in the Garden and kite flying.

Acknowledgments

My deepest gratitude goes to Leo and Somiya, the sun and the moon, for daily joy and inspiration; and to Dad, Janet, and Stanley, for their love and strength.

Many thanks to Elyse Cheney, Sarah Rainone, and Jordan Pavlin, whose insight helped me realize my vision, especially to Elyse, for being so uncompromising about the quality of the book. Thanks also to Leslie Levine and Hannah Elnan for unfailing patience and professionalism throughout the process. To Sarah Stoll, Qiusha Ma, Sarah Kovner, Howard Huang, and Bill Petersen for years of friendship and support; to Jen Shults and Martha Ferrazza, for making Oberlin feel like home; and to Ben Howe for keeping me afloat with his encouragement and advice when I was sinking. To Andrew Plaks and Yu-Kung Kao for sharing with me their love and knowledge of Chinese literature. To Oberlin College for travel funds and the use of its library. For invaluable assistance and advice at various stages of the draft, I thank Gillian MacKenzie, Claire Messud, Ursula Hegi, Murad Kalam, Tom Downey, Mingmei Yip, Elizabeth Elrod, Sonja Boos, Jeff Bartos, Gary Lowitt, Shannon Jones, Oliver Schirokauer, and Laura Bentz. Thanks also to Dr. Peter E. Schwartz for helping me get a second chance, and to Dr. Shohreh Shahabi, Dr. Mert Ozan Bahtiyar, and the nurses on 9W in Yale–New Haven Hospital for being there in the silent watches of the night.

Although I worked from Cao Xueqin’s original text, the debt I owe to David Hawkes and John Minford’s translation
The Story of the Stone
(London: Penguin, 1973) is immense. In particular, David Hawkes’s monumental work in contextualizing the novel, in finding English equivalents for difficult terms, and in shaping and interpreting the novel in the process of translation, has been a never-ending source of inspiration.

The translations of Tanchun’s and Baochai’s lantern riddles in II.4 and Daiyu’s lantern riddle in II.5 are taken from
The Story of the Stone
, as well
as the definition of a “bamboo wife.” In addition, the translations of the inscription in the reception hall in I.12, and of the line from Zhuangzi in V.2 are also from
The Story of the Stone
.

These passages also borrow language from Hawkes and Minford’s translation: the use of the term “career worm” and the description of the jade in I.11; the description of Baoyu’s clothes in I.4 and of his apartment in the legal terminology used for Pan’s case in I.6 and I.7; Silver’s words in I.14; the description of Pan’s gifts in II.2; the saying about the “beast of a thousand legs” in II.3; the description of the lanterns in II.4; the medical diagnoses in II.5 and II.8; Baochai’s remarks on Silver’s death in III.4; Baochai and Baoyu’s discussion of the “heart of an infant” in VI.3; and the description of preparations for Xifeng’s funeral in VI.6.

The translations of the poems at the beginnings of sections are my own, as is the translation of the quote from Mencius in I.5.

A Note About the Author

After studying classics at Harvard and law at Yale, Pauline Chen completed a doctorate in Chinese literature at Princeton University. She has taught Chinese literature, language, and film at the University of Minnesota and Oberlin College. She is the author of
Peiling and the Chicken-Fried Christmas
, a novel for young readers, and lives in Ohio with her two children.

The Red Chamber

by Pauline A. Chen

Reading Group Guide

About This Guide

The questions, discussion topics, and suggestions for further reading that follow are intended to enrich your discussion of Pauline A. Chen’s
The Red Chamber
.

About the Book

In her magisterial first novel, Pauline A. Chen reimagines Cao Xueqin’s great eighteenth-century Chinese classic
Dream of the Red Chamber
. Chen’s novel compresses the 2,500-page epic to a ferociously paced 400-page journey into the heart of a ducal palace, where the lives of three unforgettable women collide. Dayiu, an impoverished orphan adopted into the household, falls in love with Baoyu, the brilliant, unpredictable heir to the family fortune. Despite his love for Daiyu, the family betrothes him to Baochai, who hides her own passion under a dutiful exterior. Meanwhile, the young matron Xifeng struggles to protect the family from financial ruin, even as her husband spurns her for her inability to bear a child. Linking the three women’s fate is the jade, a mysterious stone said to have been found in Baoyu’s mouth at birth, which seems to foretell a strange and extraordinary destiny for him and the entire family.