Hu Shi
胡氏
“What the Free Schooling Costs”
Her Story
The widowed mother of Jin Rong, the poor-relation boy at the Jia clan school. The chapter title of Chapter 10 calls her 金寡妇 — the Widow Jin — and the rest of it calls her by her own surname alone.
Her son comes home from the schoolroom brawl of Chapter 9 still muttering. She cuts him off with an account book. His aunt begged for months to get him that seat; without it they could never afford a tutor; the school feeds him tea and meals and saves the household its keep, and the money saved goes on his good clothes. And he would never have met Xue Pan, who has given them seventy or eighty taels these two years. Make trouble there and you will not find another place — harder than climbing to heaven. Jin Rong swallows it and goes back the next day.
Then she makes her one mistake: she repeats the story to her sister-in-law, who takes fire and sets off for the Ning mansion to demand satisfaction. The mother, terrified, begs her not to go, and is ignored.
In Xiang Li's Hands
She stands stooped forward with her head tilted down and away, in a long slate blue outer robe over a dark jacket flecked with red, a red band across her hair, black shoes just showing at the hem. Behind her the paper is filled with loose loops of pale gold and green — ribbon, or nothing at all. There is no son and no room. She paints the posture of a woman about to apologise for something she did not do.
The Calligraphy
胡氏, two characters at the top right — the surname and the bare marker 氏 that a woman receives in a family record when nobody has troubled to write down her name.
Connections
- Jin Rong 金荣 — her son, whose place at the clan school is the family’s whole advantage.
- Huang Da Nainai 璜大奶奶 — her sister-in-law, who obtained the place and then nearly loses it in temper.
- Xue Pan 薛蟠 — whose gifts of silver keep the household afloat.
- Qin Zhong 秦钟 — the boy her son quarrelled with, and the reason the quarrel could not be safely pursued.
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
