Jia Mu

Her Story

Grandmother Jia is the oldest person in the Rongguo house and the only one nobody argues with. She was born a Shi 史 — a daughter of one of the four great Jinling families — and married Jia Daishan 贾代善, who held the Rongguo title in the second generation. Her sons are Jia She 贾赦 and Jia Zheng 贾政. Her daughter Jia Min 贾敏 married a Lin and died in the south, which is the only reason Lin Daiyu ever comes north. In Chapter 3, when the child is delivered at the gate, it is Grandmother Jia who pulls her in and weeps before anyone has managed a greeting. That embrace fixes Daiyu’s standing in the house for the next ninety chapters.

The novel gives her almost no administrative work. Wang Xifeng handles the money and the servants. Lady Wang keeps the moral accounts. What Grandmother Jia controls is pleasure and marriage, and in a household of this kind those are the two things that decide everyone’s life. She rules on seating, opera troupes, gardens, gifts and matches, and she rules by enjoying herself in a way the whole house has to organise itself around.

Chapter 40 — 史太君两宴大观园 — is the fullest portrait of her. Grannie Liu, a poor countrywoman, has been brought in as an entertainment, and Grandmother Jia takes her through the Grand View Garden over two days of feasting. She is simultaneously the author of the joke and the only person present who treats its subject with real courtesy. The same doubleness runs through Chapter 54, the Lantern Festival night, where she interrupts the storytellers to demolish the whole genre of scholar-and-beauty romance: those plots are written by men who have never been inside a house like this one, and no gentry daughter is ever left alone long enough for such a story to happen. The novel hands its own literary criticism to an illiterate old woman and lets her be right.

She is not always indulgent. In Chapter 46 her elder son Jia She sends word that he wants her maid Yuanyang as a concubine, and she turns on the room with a fury the household rarely sees — striking first, unfairly, at Lady Wang, and only afterwards admitting the mistake. In Chapter 29, at the Qingxu Temple, when the Taoist Zhang floats a marriage proposal for Baoyu, she deflects it: a fortune-teller has said the boy should not marry early. She protects Baoyu’s freedom for as long as she can, and Baoyu is the axis of everything she does.

Chapter 71 opens with the house mounting her 八旬之庆, the great birthday celebration, and the strain underneath the ceremony is already visible. By Chapters 75 and 76 the Mid-Autumn gathering has thinned; she sits on late at the terrace listening to a flute across the water, and she is the one who notices how many people have quietly gone. She has outlived the house’s confidence without losing her own.

Then the fall. In Chapter 105 the Imperial Guard arrives to confiscate the Ningguo house and the family’s protection collapses. In Chapter 106 she prays to heaven, asking that whatever punishment is owed fall on her and not on the young. In Chapter 107 — 散余资贾母明大义 — she opens her own private savings, the hoard of a lifetime, and hands it out to keep the family standing.

Her last authority is exercised over a deception. In Chapter 96 she consents to Wang Xifeng’s substitution scheme: Baoyu will be married under the impression that the bride is Daiyu, and the bride will be Xue Baochai. Daiyu dies in Chapter 98. Grandmother Jia, who had loved her, chose the living grandson over the dying granddaughter. She dies in Chapter 110 at eighty-three, calling Baoyu to her bed and telling him to make something of himself, and telling Xifeng she has been too clever and should start storing up merit. She says she has enjoyed everything there was to enjoy.

She has no verse in Chapter 5. She is not one of the Twelve Beauties; she is the person under whose roof the Twelve are gathered, and she dies before the worst of it.

In Xiang Li's Hands

She stands. That is the first surprise — the fixed image of Grandmother Jia is a woman enthroned on a couch with the household arranged around her, and Xiang Li removes the household entirely and puts her on her feet. She holds a carved staff with a red tassel in her left hand; the right hand rests across her body. The robe is a soft slate-lavender, with a blue collar-band and panels carrying gold roundels of the longevity character. Behind her, a single mass of wet black ink stands in for a tree or a rock — the only heavy black on the sheet. Everything else is bare paper, including the ground she is standing on.

The face is the most worked passage in the painting: real creases, hollowed cheeks, white hair under a lavender cap, and a broad closed-mouth smile that pushes the eyes shut. Xiang Li gives the young women of this collection flat oval faces and holds their expressions in reserve. Here she does the opposite. Age is drawn, not implied, and the picture’s entire warmth is carried by an old woman enjoying herself with nobody in the frame to enjoy it with.

The Calligraphy

贾母 — surname plus “mother”, a kinship position rather than a name. The novel never gives her a personal name and neither does the painting; she is addressed here exactly as the household addresses her, by the seat she occupies. The two characters sit at the lower right, in a heavier and more upright hand than the young women’s sheets receive.

Connections

• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — her grandson and her favourite; she shields him from his father and from early marriage.
• Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 — her granddaughter through her dead daughter Jia Min, taken into her own rooms on arrival.
• Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 — granddaughter-in-law who runs the household and plays to her for approval.
• Jia Zheng 贾政 — her second son, whose severity toward Baoyu she repeatedly overrules.
• Yuanyang 鸳鸯 — her personal maid, who swears never to marry rather than be taken by Jia She.

Others of the same kind · Jia clan – Rongguo House Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 · Jia Yuanchun 贾元春 · Jia Tanchun 贾探春 · Jia Yingchun 贾迎春 · Jia Zheng 贾政 · Jia She 贾赦 · Jia Lian 贾琏 · Jia Huan 贾环 · Jia Lan 贾兰 · Jia Zhu 贾珠 · Jia Daishan 贾代善 · Jia Min 贾敏

Named on these pages Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 · Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 · Jia Yuanchun 贾元春 · Shi Xiangyun 史湘云 · Miaoyu 妙玉 · Jia Xichun 贾惜春 · Qingwen 晴雯 · Xiren 袭人 · Yuanyang 鸳鸯 · Zijuan 紫鹃 · Xue Baoqin 薛宝琴 · Li Wen 李纹 and 42 more

The Speaking Portrait

Xiang Li’s painting, animated and given a voice. Press play.

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