《红楼梦》到底讲了什么？

English (for the teacher)

In the Qing dynasty, a saying went round Beijing: “Talk without mentioning Dream of the Red Chamber, and all your reading of poems and books is wasted.” In other words, if you chat with people and never bring up the novel, it doesn’t matter how many books you’ve read. More than two hundred years later, the novel still holds that place in China. So what is it actually about?

The story begins with a stone. Legend says that when the goddess Nüwa mended the sky she forged a great many stones, and in the end one was left over, never used. This stone came alive with a spirit of its own and longed to go and see the human world. Later it became a fine piece of jade and was born together with a baby boy. The boy came into the world with the jade in his mouth, and so he was named Baoyu, “precious jade”.

Baoyu was born into the Jia household. The Jias were a rich and famous family in the capital, and when one of their daughters entered the palace as an imperial consort, the whole household rose even higher. To welcome her home on a visit to her family, the Jias built a great garden especially for her, the Grand View Garden. Later Baoyu and the girls of the family all moved into the garden, and most of the novel’s loveliest and liveliest scenes happen there.

The person Baoyu cares about most is his cousin, a girl surnamed Lin, named Daiyu. Daiyu is clever and sensitive and writes poetry, but she is in poor health, often ill and often in tears. The novel says that in a former life she was a fairy plant, and Baoyu, in his former life, watered her every day, so in this life she must repay him with a lifetime of tears. Another key figure is his cousin Xue Baochai, gentle and gracious and good at getting along with people, and the elders of the family all like her.

Baoyu loves Daiyu, but the grown-ups prefer Baochai. In the ending most people know today, the elders tell Baoyu his bride is Daiyu and marry him to Baochai instead, and on the very day of the wedding Daiyu dies of her illness. Meanwhile the Jia household declines step by step, until the emperor confiscates its property and all its old splendour is gone. Baoyu turns his back on the world and becomes a monk.

The book’s author was Cao Xueqin. His own family had once been rich and grand too, and later its property was confiscated in the same way, so many people believe the novel carries a shadow of his own life. Sadly, Cao Xueqin never finished the book; what he left is only about the first eighty chapters. The version in common use today has a hundred and twenty chapters, and the last forty are generally thought to have been written by others after him; whether they match what Cao Xueqin intended is argued over to this day.

The novel has hundreds of characters, from noble young ladies to maids and servants, and every one has a personality and fate of their own. There is even a name for the scholarship devoted to this one book: Redology. At the start of the book Cao Xueqin wrote: “Pages full of absurd words, a handful of bitter tears.” Perhaps that is exactly why generation after generation of readers find themselves in this book.