Why This Book Is So Addictive

On the surface, Dream of the Red Chamber is a pretty simple story. It's about a boy, Jia Baoyu, who lives his life surrounded by beautiful women. He falls in love with a girl named Lin Dayu, an orphan who has a gift for literature. At the same time, he also falls in love with Xue Baochai, a talented girl who seems to be a natural fit for him. Most of the book is an exploration of this inner conflict, as he is forced to choose between the two girls. And that would make this book a love story, right? Or, I guess, a romance novel. But it's a little bit deeper than that. Now, a lot of people, including my wife, have asked me over the years why I'm so obsessed with this novel. It's not easy to give a concise answer to that question, but today I'll give you a little taste of just how deep this stuff goes. First, we've got to look at the politics of Jia Baoyu's family. Jia Baoyu's family is wealthy, sure. However, its hold on his wealth is anything but certain. So, Jia Baoyu's family fortune in this book goes back a few generations, to a man named Rongguo Gong. We usually call him the Duke of Rongguo. Rongguo Gong and his brother Ningguo Gong both had high governmental ranks, ranks that were hereditary. What hereditary means is that the household would remain on the official payroll for a couple of generations, maybe three or four as I understand it. But by the time Jia Baoyu comes around, that tie is pretty weak. Anyway, Rongguo Gong had two grandsons, Jia She and Jia Zheng. Jia Zheng is Jia Baoyu's father. Jia Zheng is also a very stern man and a strict disciplinarian, and he's extremely Confucian. Meanwhile, Jia Zheng's older brother Jia She has basically given up on caring about the affairs of the family. This is something that we see again and again in the novel. At this time in Chinese history, the men are technically supposed to be the ones who are managing things and governing their own households. However, in this book, the men are all out on wild and useless adventures. It's the women who wind up in charge of everything. In fact, the only current imperial tie that the Jia family and Rongguo mansion has is through one of the girls. This is Jia Yuanchun. She is Jia Baoyu's older sister and happens to be an imperial concubine. In other words, the internal politics of the imperial bedroom are directly tied to the Jia family's fortunes. Now, the oldest woman in the household is grandmother Jia, who is the mother of Jia She and Jia Zheng. She's also the grandmother of both Jia Baoyu and Lin Dayu. So, Lin Dayu's mother was named Jiaming. She dies before the story really begins. Now, that's going to seem pretty disgusting to us in modern cultural terms, you know, because Lin Dayu and Jia Baoyu are technically cousins. At the time, though, because the family connection between Jia Baoyu and Lin Dayu went through Lin Dayu's maternal line, it wasn't much of a problem. Xue Baochai also has a somewhat close familial relationship to Jia Baoyu. Remember, she's basically the niece of his mother, though it's technically a little bit further removed according to the logic of the day. Well, next in importance is Wang Furen or Lady Wang. She is Jia Zheng's wife. She's basically in charge of all the household affairs, though she has given most of the responsibility over to her niece. Her niece is Wang Xifeng, who most people who read this book think of as the villain of the novel. Wang Xifeng is sharp-witted and smart, but she's also pretty corrupt. And Wang Xifeng is married to Jia Lian, the son of Jia She. And this is where the genealogy and the family ties actually become really important. You see, the kind of novel The Dream of the Red Chamber is patterned after was deliberately crafted not to include these really complex family ties. Dream of the Red Chamber can be very complex and very confusing, but it was written that way for a reason. So, the traditional Caizhe, Jia Ren Chinese romance novels usually were written in a way to avoid complicated family ties. In those books, usually one or both of the lovers were either orphaned or had lost a father and a mother early in life. This was done to make it easier to describe the courtship between the man and the woman without having to worry about introducing a bunch of family members and family politics. Now, Dream of the Red Chamber does a little bit of this. Lin Dayu's mother dies before we meet her, for example. Lin Dayu's father, Lin Ruhai, passes away relatively early in the book, which leaves her an orphan. Meanwhile, Xue Baochai's father also passes away when she's young. In a sense, Dream of the Red Chamber is written so that the reader doesn't know who Jia Baoyu will end up with in the end. But when you understand the family dynamics, you'll understand why it's basically impossible for Lin Dayu to wind up with Jia Baoyu in the end. The problem is Wang Xifeng, of course. So, like I said, Wang Xifeng's aunt is Lady Wang, Jia Baoyu's mother, who is in theory the most powerful woman in the household. Wang Xifeng is in charge of the family finances, which is largely where her power comes from. And Xue Baochai's mother just so happens to be related to both Lady Wang and Wang Xifeng. This means that the political power in the family has a major incentive to want Xue Baochai to marry Jia Baoyu in the end. So, modern readers like you and I probably wonder why Jia Baoyu can't just marry whoever he wants to marry. And actually, Jia Baoyu would probably ask us the same question. You see, the heart of Jia Baoyu's internal conflict is not just his love of both girls. No, it's really a conflict between his sense of duty and his love of poetry and romanticism. And once again, this really only makes sense if you understand the Zai Zi Jiaren tradition of Chinese romance books. All right, in the old Zai Zi Jiaren tradition, the male protagonist, or the Zai Zi, is always a diligent student who hopes to pass the imperial examinations. The story usually goes that the scholar faces opposition from his would-be bride's parents because he hasn't been successful in the exams yet. After hard work and study, he succeeds in both passing the test and winning over his new bride's family. Now, as I explained a moment ago, Jia Baoyu's incredibly rich family only is tied to imperial fortune through his older sister. Jia Yunchun can only hold the family's fortunes together if she is in favor with the emperor, and there's nothing anybody can do about that. The problem, of course, is that Jia Zheng, Jia Baoyu's father, has no official position. His older brother, Jia She, is so preoccupied with useless things that he doesn't stand a chance. And most of the men in the Jia household are running around on silly quests or having affairs. Nobody's actually doing any work. As the book goes along, the reader slowly realizes that the entire future of the family basically rests on Jia Baoyu's shoulders. And there's the conflict. Jia Baoyu has this huge responsibility, and it's a responsibility that he seriously does not want to have. It's not that he's a bad student or a rebel or he's incorrigible or stupid or anything like that. It's that he does not want to be the one who has the responsibility of saving the whole family. So there's this scene early in chapter 3 that demonstrates this fact. The legend of the story has it that Jia Baoyu was born with a piece of jade in his mouth. He always has a piece of jade around his neck as a necklace in memory of that event. There's this huge bit of mythology at the beginning of the book that explains all of this. Basically, Jia Baoyu was the piece of jade, or the stone, before he was born. Now, the cool part here is that you can either take that at face value, or you can treat it as a myth and just sort of ignore it. The book works either way. And the really interesting thing is that Jia Baoyu himself doesn't know if the story is true or not. When Jia Baoyu meets Lin Dayu, he falls in love with her at first sight. To him, it's almost like he has seen her before. So he asks her if she also has a piece of jade. She tells him that she doesn't. That gets him really upset, so he yanks the jade off and throws it onto the ground. Everybody around him freaks out and tries to calm him down. And famously, he says that the jade can't be a great thing if none of the women in his life have one. Sure, there's this obvious allusion here to gender differences. But it's not really Jia Baoyu's manhood that the jade represents. Remember that there are other men in this household as well, and they're certainly as virile as Jia Baoyu, if not more so. It's also not that Jia Baoyu has some sort of gender dysphoria, though you could read the book and interpret it that way if you want to. But at least I believe the reason why Jia Baoyu doesn't like the jade is because it represents the duty that his family has thrust upon him. So you see, Jia Baoyu originally had an older brother named Jia Zhu. Jia Zhu unfortunately passed away when he was young before he could take the imperial exams. Now Jia Zhu's wife is Li Wan, and the two of them have a son together. Now normally, this would elevate Li Wan to a high position in the family. However, the close familial ties between Lady Wang and Wang Shifeng prevent this from happening. And so Li Wan winds up being thrust to the side in a subservient role. And in the end, all of this means that the family's hopes are squarely focused on Jia Baoyu. That jade around Jia Baoyu's neck represents the hope that his family has in him. He's supposed to be the one who will pass the examinations and prevent the family from sliding into poverty. And that makes him resent studying even more. And maybe now you can understand why this book is no simple love story. It's about more than just the triangle romance between Jia Baoyu, Lin Dayu, and Xue Baocai. There's a really strong psychological element to this book, and that's one that most readers completely miss, especially if you're only reading it in English. Lin Dayu represents the romantic side of Jia Baoyu. She's all about composing poetry and enjoying the beautiful things in life. Xue Baocai represents the loyal side of Jia Baoyu. She's all about Confucian ethics and doing the right thing. There are textual reasons to believe that Lin Dayu and Xue Baocai are two parts of the perfect woman. The famous sinologist David Hawks wrote quite a bit about this in his translation of Dream of the Red Chamber. And it seems that he got at least some of his theories from the famous Juryan Zhai commentary to the handwritten manuscripts of the book. But personally, I still don't believe it. Both Lin Dayu and Xue Baocai are individual characters with good points and with flaws. They don't really represent some idealized form of the perfect woman. In fact, that would be at odds with the extremely realistic way that the author writes about women. Now, I really think that they symbolize the internal struggle that Jia Baoyu faces. This is the struggle between what he really wants to do with his life and what his family and his duty is forcing him to do. And in the end, his hopes and his desires and his dreams are all dashed, but the family falls apart anyway. Now, if you read this book from, say, a feminist point of view, you'll see some pretty fascinating things. For example, the strongest characters in Dream of the Red Chamber are the women. The men are absent during the most critical moments of the story, and they certainly aren't doing anything much to keep the household going. Wang Shifeng actually is not a villain. She's a young woman at the start of the novel, a woman tasked with trying to keep the bills paid in an enormous household. If anything, the real villains are men like Jia Zheng. Jia Zheng takes his frustration at his personal failings out on his son, which causes Jia Baoyu to feel only more resentful. I guess you could consider that to be like a Freudian reading of this novel as well. There's a lot of interesting behavior here that could easily be seen as Jia Baoyu lashing out in frustration against his own father. And of course, there are also obvious Marxist interpretations of the book. Jia Baoyu's fight against the duty that is forced on him looks a lot like a fight against feudal values. And in the same sense, you could consider Lin Daoyu to be a spiritual warrior against feudal society. So maybe that communist approach is right, but personally, I don't think the Marxist lens is the right way to look at this book. But, you know, it's conversations like this that make Dream of the Red Chamber so relevant even after decades or centuries. You see, the reason why this book is so addicting and so fascinating is because there are so many different ways to read it. The truth is that the struggle that Jia Baoyu faces is one that all of us face, even those of us living hundreds of years later. And that's the reason why it's such a great classic.