Jia Xichun

Her Story

Xichun is the youngest of the four Jia girls and the only one who is not really a Rongguo child. She was born into the senior Ningguo house — daughter of Jia Jing, younger sister of Jia Zhen — and was brought over to be raised at Rongguo under Grandmother Jia while she was still small. Her father has abandoned the family for a Taoist temple outside the city, where he pursues the elixir of immortality and eventually dies of his own alchemy. Her brother runs the Ningguo house, and what he runs it into is the scandal that eventually helps bring the whole clan down. She grows up inside one family while legally belonging to another, and she never stops noticing it.

She is the painter. In the quartet formed by the four sisters’ maids — zither, chess, calligraphy, painting — hers is Ruhua 入画, and the assignment is not decorative. In Chapter 42, after Granny Liu’s tour of the Prospect Garden, Grandmother Jia decides she wants the garden itself set down on silk, with all the people in it, and gives the commission to Xichun. Xichun asks the poetry club for a year’s leave to do it. Baochai then delivers a long and precise lecture on what the job will actually require — the sizing of the silk, the underdrawing, the difference between painting a garden and painting a picture of one, and a list of pigments, brushes and dishes so exhaustive that it becomes a joke at Xichun’s expense. She is the novel’s only working artist, and the novel is quietly funny about how little of the work she has understood.

Her sobriquet, taken in Chapter 37 when the Crab-flower Club is founded, is 藕榭 — Lotus Anchorage — after the pavilion she lives in.

The turn comes in Chapter 74. The Grand View Garden is searched at night, chest by chest, on the pretext of an embroidered purse found in the grass. In Ruhua’s box they find silver ingots and men’s things, sent to her by her brother in service at the Ningguo house. It is a small offence and everyone present treats it as one; Ruhua has been Xichun’s maid since childhood and begs. Xichun will not have her. She insists the girl be taken away, and she goes further: she tells Madam You to her face that she wants no further traffic with the Ningguo house at all, that she will not have its dirt attached to her, and that she would rather be thought heartless than be implicated. The chapter title makes it the equal half of the night’s business — 矢孤介杜绝宁国府, avowing her aloofness, she severs the Ningguo house. She is perhaps fifteen. Nobody in the book has ever spoken to the senior branch like that.

This is usually read as coldness, and it is coldness, but it is also the only accurate risk assessment anyone in the family makes. Xichun has watched three elder sisters used up: Yuanchun sealed in the palace, Yingchun handed to a creditor, Tanchun married away to the far coast. She draws the obvious conclusion — that being a daughter of this house is a fatal condition — and she looks for the one exit that does not involve a husband.

In Chapter 115 she states her intention outright and holds to it against the whole family’s objections. After the raids and confiscations, after Grandmother Jia’s death, after the nun Miaoyu is carried off by bandits from the Green Bower Hermitage, Xichun takes vows and takes, in effect, Miaoyu’s place. Zijuan — Daiyu’s maid, who has nothing left to serve — asks to be assigned to her and goes with her. The girl who cut off her own family ends up attended by another household’s orphan.

Her verse in Chapter 5 sits beneath a picture of an old temple with a beautiful woman inside it, alone, reading a sutra:

勘破三春景不长，缁衣顿改昔年妆。 可怜绣户侯门女，独卧青灯古佛旁。

Seeing through the three springs — her three sisters — she knows the season will not last; the black robe replaces the old finery at a stroke. Pity the girl of the embroidered chamber and the noble gate, lying alone beside a green lamp and an ancient Buddha. The word 顿, “at a stroke,” is the whole character. She does not drift toward renunciation. She decides.

In Xiang Li's Hands

There are two paintings, and they are the same painting twice. In both, Xichun sits half-turned at a black lacquer desk, one hand laid flat along its edge with the fingertips over the drop, the other raised beside her face, fingers loosely curled, empty. On the desk stand a stone brush pot bristling with brushes, rolled scrolls, a dark ink cake. She is the novel’s painter, and Xiang Li puts every tool within reach and then declines to let her use one. She is turned away from the desk, looking out past us, faintly amused.

The versions diverge in temperature. The first is cooler and looser — mint green and cream, a coral sash, one red flower in a plain coil of hair, the hem dissolving into half-abstract blue lotus forms. The second is warmer and far more finished: ochre-yellow over pale green, a broad band of red and blue roundels down the front and across the knees, a crown of pink and yellow blossoms with gold ornament and a beaded drop at the ear. The face is nearly identical in both — young, round, not yet the woman in the black robe.

Two attempts at one idea, and the idea is refusal. Neither painting shows the nun.

The Calligraphy

Both versions are inscribed 惜春 — the personal name alone, no surname, no religious name. That matters more here than for her sisters. The character ends the novel with a tonsure and a Buddhist name, and the calligraphy declines to use it; she is kept as the fourth Jia girl, addressed as the family addressed her.

Connections

• 贾珍 Jia Zhen — her elder brother, master of the Ningguo house, whose household she publicly renounces in Chapter 74.
• 贾敬 Jia Jing — her father, absent in a Taoist temple pursuing immortality, and killed by it.
• 入画 Ruhua — her maid since childhood, dismissed on her own insistence during the night search of the garden.
• 贾母 Grandmother Jia — who raised her at Rongguo and commissioned her painting of the Prospect Garden.
• 妙玉 Miaoyu — the nun of the Green Bower Hermitage, whose place Xichun takes after her abduction.
• 紫鹃 Zijuan — Lin Daiyu’s maid, who asks to follow Xichun into religion and serves her there.

Others of the same kind · Jia clan – founders & Ningguo House Jia Zhen 贾珍 · Jia Jing 贾敬 · Jia Daihua 贾代化 · Jia Fu 贾敷 · Jia Qiang 贾蔷

Named on these pages Zijuan 紫鹃 · Jia Jing 贾敬 · You Shi 尤氏 · Zhenzhu 珍珠 · Ruhua 入画 · Caiping 彩屏 · Cai'er 彩儿 · Zhan Ziliang 詹子亮 · Cai'er niang 彩儿娘

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