Chang Xiao Qu De
唱小曲的
“Hired for the Evening”
Her Story
A trade, not a person: the one engaged to sing short popular songs at a drinking party. No individual is named on the sheet.
The novel shows the trade twice, both times in men’s company. In Chapter 26 Xue Pan lures Baoyu to his study with an account of four rare presents sent for his birthday and adds that the singers have just come; inside, they are sitting about with the hangers-on Zhan Guang, Cheng Rixing, Hu Silai and Shan Pinren. In Chapter 28, at Feng Ziying’s, the room already holds the singing boys, the young-female-role actor Jiang Yuhan, and Yun’er of the Brocade Fragrance Court; the host has the singers come round to press wine before he has Yun’er do the same. In both places the text calls them 唱曲儿的小厮 — singing pages, hired in, counted like the wine.
Inside the household nobody is hired. The women sing for each other by forfeit: in Chapter 63, at Baoyu’s midnight birthday party, they play finger-guessing and the loser sings a little song, and it goes on until the fourth watch and the jar is empty. In Chapter 117, in the ruined house, it is Wang Ren and Lady Xing’s brother guessing fingers and calling for songs from whoever loses.
In Xiang Li's Hands
She stands with one wide sleeve lifted and held out, the other arm dropped, in a crimson jacket worked with gold cloud roundels over a pale green skirt with green medallions, a yellow scarf at the throat, coral drops at the ears, hair under a dark headdress packed with pink and blue silk flowers. The background is left as bare grey outline — leaves, a fan, unpainted — as if the room were never finished. The raised sleeve is the gesture of someone in the middle of a phrase.
Note that the sheet gives a woman in stage dress, where the two parties the novel actually stages are served by boys.
The Calligraphy
唱小曲的, four characters down the upper right — a job written out as a phrase, “the one who sings the little songs”, with no name because none was ever asked for.
Connections
- Xue Pan 薛蟠 — who has them in for the afternoon in Chapter 26.
- Feng Ziying 冯紫英 — whose party in Chapter 28 has them pressing wine on the guests.
- Yun’er 云儿 — the one singer at that party who is given a name.
- Jiang Yuhan 蒋玉菡 — the professional actor at the same table, and the only performer there with a future in the book.
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
