Hung Lou Meng, Or, the Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese Novel, Book II
Hung Lou Meng, Or, the Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese Novel, Book II
Translated by H. Bencraft Joly
The Dream of the Red Chamber is not merely a novel; it is an act of remembrance for a world that was already vanishing when Cao Xueqin set pen to paper in 18th-century China. Book II plunges deeper into the labyrinthine Jia household, where the privileged youth Paoyu wanders through gardens and grief, caught between the women who love him and a destiny he cannot escape. The beautiful Lin Taiyu, sharp-tongued and consumptive, and the graceful Xue Baochai, pragmatic and poised, each hold a piece of his fractured heart. Meanwhile, the household itself becomes a stage for rivalries, ambitions, and the slow creep of decay that no festival or fortune can stave off. What elevates this beyond melodrama is Cao's radical compassion: his understanding that every character, from the matriarch to the lowliest maid, is trapped by circumstance yet capable of moments of transcendent feeling. The novel's Buddhist undertow grows stronger here, its meditation on impermanence less an abstraction than a wound that each character touches and retouches. This is literature as mirror, as elegy, as the closest thing the premodern world produced to a psychological novel.
