Bao Yu Zhi Zi
宝玉之子
“The Last Thing Promised”
His Story
He is never born inside the book.
In Chapter 119 Baoyu makes his farewells, tells Baochai to look after his mother and to wait for his good news, and walks out of the novel. In Chapter 120, when Jia Zheng has come home and is laying down how the household will be run, Lady Wang tells him, among the household business, that Baochai is with child.
The rest is prophecy. In the same chapter Zhen Shiyin tells Jia Yucun that the Rong and Ning houses will see 兰桂齐芳，家道复初 — orchid and cassia in flower together, the family restored to what it was — and that Baoyu 高魁子贵, took the highest place and will be honoured in his son. Yucun works it out aloud: there is already a Jia Lan who has passed the provincial examination, so the orchid is accounted for; 莫非他有遗腹之子 — so Baoyu must have a posthumous son, who will rise. Shiyin will not confirm it. 此系后事，未便预说 — that belongs to what comes after; it is not for telling in advance.
Readers call the boy Jia Gui, after the cassia of that phrase. The novel gives him no name, no birth, no scene. He is the last thing the book promises and the one thing it refuses to show.
In Xiang Li's Hands
A fat toddler on his knees in a scarlet robe far too big for him, one bare leg and both bare feet out of it, hands up at his chin holding the collar closed. On his head, tipped back, a grown man’s black gauze cap with its wings out sideways. His eyes are shut and he is laughing. Everything else is bare paper. She paints the prophecy rather than the child: the official’s hat is the whole of what he is for, and it does not fit him yet.
The Calligraphy
宝玉之子, four characters down the right — “Baoyu’s son”. A relation standing in for a name, because the novel never supplies one.
Connections
- 贾宝玉 Jia Baoyu — his father, gone before he is born.
- 薛宝钗 Xue Baochai — his mother, pregnant at the close of Chapter 120.
- 贾兰 Jia Lan — the orchid of 兰桂齐芳, already a graduate while this one is unborn.
- 甄士隐 Zhen Shiyin · 贾雨村 Jia Yucun — who talk him into existence in the last chapter and then change the subject.
Dream of the Red Chamber
Xiang Li painted all 413 characters of the novel between 1975 and 1985, the first person to complete the entire cast. See the whole collection · Chinese Empresses
