Hei'er
黑儿
“Accused of Nothing”
His Story
A small boy who lives in the Prospect Garden because his grandmother is employed there, guarding the flowers and fruit. He appears in Chapter 90, in Gao E’s continuation, and he never speaks.
Xing Xiuyan, the poorest of the girls lodging in the Garden, loses an old padded jacket from her rooms. Hei’er had been in there playing the day before, so one of the maids asks a passing question about him. It is barely an accusation. His grandmother takes it as one, and makes a scene loud enough to reach Wang Xifeng, who is furious — not at the boy, but at a servant speaking to a young lady of the house that way, and moves to have the old woman beaten and dismissed. It is Xiuyan, the person actually wronged, who intercedes until Xifeng relents and lets her off with a scolding.
The jacket is never really the point. A child too young to be responsible sits at the centre of a quarrel about rank, and the only person who defends anyone is the one with the least standing to lose.
In Xiang Li's Hands
He kneels among white chrysanthemums with a black puppy in his lap, one hand loose and open, an egg or a white pebble held in the other. His head is shaved but for a single dark tuft, and there is a red dot on his brow. He is smiling with his eyes shut. Nothing in the sheet knows he was ever questioned about a theft — she paints the boy at play in the garden he was accused of stealing from, and gives him the flowers as a background rather than a scene.
The Calligraphy
黑儿, two characters upper right — a child’s name, the 儿 suffix that goes to the young and the small, with no surname because a servant’s grandson does not carry one into the record.
Connections
- Xing Xiuyan 邢岫烟 — from whose rooms the jacket goes missing, and who talks Xifeng out of punishing his grandmother.
- Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 — hears the commotion and moves to have the old woman beaten and turned out.
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
