Er Yatou
二丫头
“The Spinning Wheel”
Her Story
A farm girl of seventeen or eighteen, met once, on the road.
In Chapter 15 the funeral procession for Qin Keqing leaves the city for Iron Threshold Temple. Wang Xifeng stops to rest at a farmstead; the household’s men clear the villagers out; Baoyu and Qin Zhong are sent off to amuse themselves. Baoyu has never seen a spade, a mattock, a plough. Then in one of the rooms he finds a spinning wheel on the kang and starts turning it for fun.
A girl runs in shouting at him not to break it. The servants move to drive her off; Baoyu apologises. She tells him he doesn’t know how to work it, to stand back, and she will spin for him. Qin Zhong murmurs a leer about her; Baoyu shoves him and says he will hit him if he says another word. She spins. Then an old woman calls from outside — 二丫头, come here — and she drops the wheel and goes.
When the party leaves, Baoyu looks for her among the villagers coming up for their tip, and she is not there. On the road out he sees her walking toward them with her small brother in her arms and a few other girls, talking and laughing. He would have got down and followed her; the carriage is quick, and in a moment she is out of sight.
She is called only 二丫头 — Second Girl, a birth-order name — and she never appears again.
In Xiang Li's Hands
She leans over the great yellow disc of the spinning wheel, a spindle in her right hand, thread running from it in a thin drawn arc, her left hand out to keep the tension. Two more spindles lie at the bottom edge. But the hair is built up in loops with red ornaments, and the skirt is cloud-patterned silk: Xiang Li paints a village girl in the dress of the Garden’s young ladies, and gives her the moment Baoyu watched rather than the moment he lost her.
The Calligraphy
二丫头, three characters upper right — the name a family gives its second daughter when it does not need her to have another.
Connections
- Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — who breaks off her spinning and watches her out of sight
- from the carriage.
- Qin Zhong 秦钟 — who makes a joke about her and is nearly hit for it.
- Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 — whose halt at the farmstead puts them in the same
- courtyard for an hour.
- Qin Keqing 秦可卿 — whose funeral procession is the reason the road is
- travelled at all.
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
