rough version of it on a stone and spent ten years studying, transcribing and rewriting what he found there, revising it five times before he died, his work uncompleted. Others say he wrote 80 chapters, and the bookseller Gao E got hold of them and wrote the rest, setting the whole in move-able type, then publishing it to great acclaim in 1791.
It’s called the Dream of the Red Chamber.
Interspersed throughout the text are signed commentaries by as many as ten people. In my copy the one who writes the most is Red Inkstone.
Yet some say Red Inkstone is really just another name for Cao Xueqin. Could this be?
Who was the solitary man who wrote day after day about the fate of a neglected stone? Who saw the smoke trees turn red on the hillside, the dust whirl in from the north … Who had not one name, but many. And no clear date of birth (1715? 1724?) or date of death (1762? 1763? 1764?). Who lay on his straw and dreamed of a child who vanishes during the Festival of Lanterns, never to return. Who dreamed of conflagrations, absences, illnesses, betrayals, the corrupt power of the state. Who transformed himself into a novel and the commentary on that novel—a labyrinth, a web, a puzzle. Who insisted he wanted only to bring pleasure, as he ate less and less, and slept on his rough mat, and grew a stranger to the ones who’d known him.
Long after Clerval packs up his reading for the day, slipping the pages back into the slit in the wall where he stores them, I linger over them in my mind, read the working notes he’s left on his table. As if they could bind me to him, myself, anything. Or are they harbors where the ice has finally melted so boats can set sail from them again?
Today he translated this passage:
“When Nu Wa-shi fused the rocks to repair the heavens, she took 36,501 stones of enormous size from Wu Ji Peak among the Da Huang Hills. She used 36,500 of these, and then the one solitary stone which she rejected as useless was thrown to the foot of Qing Geng Peak. Strange to relate, after its ordeal the stone acquired spiritual understanding. It was conscious. It lamented in shame and distress day and night, desolate that it had been rejected. With its magical powers, it could expand or contract, move and change shape, but nothing could heal its sorrow as it lay on the ground no larger than a lady’s fan.”
The stone falls to earth in the form of a boy, Jia Baoyu, who’s born with a piece of clear jade in his mouth. It will suffer and be changed. It will feel human hands on it and kiss human mouths. But what is it, really? Is it a stone, a boy, part of each, or neither? Should I call it “it” or “he”? I think of its solitary fall, how the others were used but it wasn’t used.
Some say that stone is no other than Cao Xueqin who called himself a “useless wretch,” yet wrote of “the waving willows, the bright moon, the fresh breeze of morning,” and said, “these are still mine.” Who, as he turned from the world, still wanted the world. But maybe even that can’t be assumed.
Last light. Clerval finishes his bowl of noodles, washes his dish. Soon he’ll sleep on his straw mat as once I lay on mine, wondering if you’d come back, then knowing you never would.
Cao Xueqin, who were you? Each day I translate your pages. I sleep and dream I’m a stone found in the mouth of a newborn boy. I dream I’m the stolen girl sold into servitude who when asked years later, aren’t you the daughter of ____, can only shake her lowered head and say “I can’t remember.” I’m the young nun from Water Moon Convent, and the maid stirring ashes in her mistress’s hand-stove. And I’m old Gardener Ye, designing acres of artificial mountains and lakes, pavilions, rockeries, balustrades, all for one wealthy family I’m the shamed servant girl who drowns herself in the well.
And I’m none of them. I walk among them in my mind, a stranger, a cipher, a man helpless as a doctor writing prescriptions that don’t work. Often in your book someone is mysteriously ailing, unable to eat, fading for no earthly reason—the pulse weak, but why? A girl crouches among pomegranate petals, crying, scratching at the dirt