Jia Jun
贾菌
“The Boy Who Threw the Book-Box”
His Story
The smallest boy at the clan school and the angriest. The novel brings him in during the schoolroom brawl of Chapter 9: a near descendant of the Rong house, his father dead, his mother a young widow who kept him. He shares a desk with Jia Lan. When a flying inkstone smashes on that desk, Jia Lan holds his arm down — this is nothing to do with us. Jia Jun will not be held. He hurls a book-box, misses the boys he aimed at, and brings down the crockery on Baoyu and Qin Zhong’s table instead.
In Xiang Li's Hands
She paints him mid-stride, looking back over one shoulder with his chin out — a small boy in a grown man’s brown robe over pale green, red ribbon at the throat, a red bead on his little cap, freckles across the nose. Behind him a carved stone frieze and ghost-grey beasts. No inkstone, no fight.
The Calligraphy
贾菌, stacked at the upper left: surname and personal name in full, the whole formal name a schoolmaster would use, and the whole of what the novel gives him.
Connections
- Jia Lan 贾兰 — his desk-mate, who tried to hold him out of the fight.
- Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — schoolfellow, on whose table the thrown book-box landed.
- Qin Zhong 秦钟 — seated with Baoyu, and the reason the brawl began at all.
Others of the same kind · Jia clan – collateral branches Jia Rui 贾瑞 · Jia Dairu 贾代儒 · Jia Qiong 贾琼 · Jia Chang 贾菖 · Jia Ling 贾菱 · Jia Ping 贾萍 · Jia Yun 贾芸 · Jia Qin 贾芹 · Jia Xing 贾荇 · Xiluan 喜鸾 · Sijie'r 四姐儿
Named on these pages Lou Shi 娄氏
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
