Jia Yingchun
贾迎春
“The Girl Who Would Not Ask”
Her Story
The four Jia girls are named 元、迎、探、惜 — Yuanchun, Yingchun, Tanchun, Xichun — and read aloud the four syllables make a second sentence: 原应叹息, one should sigh. Yingchun is the second of them, and the one the sentence fits best.
She belongs to the elder branch of the Rongguo house: daughter of Jia She by a concubine, half-sister to Jia Lian, stepdaughter to Lady Xing, who has no use for her. Her mother is dead. She lives in the Prospect Garden at ZhuiJin Tower on the Purple Caltrop Isle 紫菱洲, which is why, when the Crab-flower Club is founded in Chapter 37 and each cousin takes a literary name, hers becomes 菱洲, Caltrop Isle. Each of the four sisters is attended by a maid whose name completes the scholar’s quartet of zither, chess, calligraphy and painting; Yingchun’s is Siqi 司棋, Chess. She plays go, and she plays it slowly.
She is pretty, literate and almost entirely without will. In Chapter 65 the servant Xing’er, describing the household to an outsider, gives her away in one line: 二姑娘的浑名是「二木头」，戳一针也不知嗳哟一声 — “the Second Young Lady’s nickname is Two Sticks of Wood; stick a needle in her and she won’t say ouch.” It is meant affectionately and it is devastating.
Her one chapter as a protagonist is Chapter 73, and in it she does nothing. Her old nurse has stolen her filigree gold phoenix hairpin and pawned it to cover gambling debts. Her maids Siqi and Xiuju argue her case furiously; the nurse’s family blusters; the theft is plain and the property is hers. Yingchun sits through the whole quarrel reading the Taishang Ganying Pian, a Taoist tract on moral retribution, and declines to pursue the matter. The chapter title records it flatly: 懦小姐不问累金凤 — the timid maiden does not inquire after the gold phoenix. She will not spend a word on her own behalf. Her cousins find this admirable, or exasperating, or both.
The novel then demonstrates what such a temperament costs. Jia She owes five thousand taels of silver to Sun Shaozu, a military officer of Datong whose family had once been clients of the Jias. In Chapter 79 he settles the debt by handing over his daughter — 贾迎春误嫁中山狼, “Yingchun is wrongly married to the Zhongshan wolf.” Nobody in the family thinks it is a good match. Nobody stops it. Baoyu wanders past her emptied apartments on the Purple Caltrop Isle and cannot bear the silence there.
In Chapter 80 she comes home on a visit and tells her mother and the maids what the marriage is: Sun Shaozu drinks, gambles, beats her, forces himself on the household’s women in front of her, and tells her to her face that her father sold her for a debt. She weeps through the whole account and is sent back. Within roughly a year she is dead. Chapter 109 records it in the register’s own vocabulary — 还孽债迎女返真元, the debt of a former life discharged, Yingchun returned to the source.
Her verse in the Chapter 5 registers is the bluntest of the twelve. The picture above it shows a wolf running down a beautiful woman, meaning to eat her:
子系中山狼，得志便猖狂。 金闺花柳质，一载赴黄粱。
The wolf of Zhongshan — the graph 子 set beside 系 spells his surname, Sun — turns savage the moment he has his way. A blossom bred in a gilded chamber; in one year she is gone to the millet dream. The prophecy is not a riddle. It gives the husband’s name, the mechanism, and the timetable, and the family reads it, and it happens anyway.
What makes Yingchun hard rather than merely sad is that her passivity is not stupidity. She has seen exactly how the house works. She has concluded that nothing she says will alter it, and she is, in the event, right. The novel does not let her off, and it does not let anyone else off either.
In Xiang Li's Hands
The painting is the opposite of the character. Yingchun is caught mid-turn, one arm flung up so that the wide sleeve opens into a hard angular fan of grey wash, head thrown back and twisted to look up and away over her shoulder. Her hair has come loose — an enormous black mass driven out to the left in wet ink and dry-brush streaks, occupying a third of the sheet, larger than her body’s whole upper half. The palette is cold: lavender-grey robe, turquoise underdress, one orange-vermilion sash knotted at the hip and trailing off the left edge. The face is small and closed, brows drawn, mouth a red mark, eyes fixed on nothing in the frame.
Everything else is bare paper. No wolf, no husband, no room. Whatever moves her comes from outside the picture, and she cannot see it either. The raised hand is the telling detail — open, fingers spread, gripping nothing. Xiang Li declines the register’s wolf and declines the meek girl with her book, and gives the woman who never once resisted the most violent motion in the series, as something done to her rather than by her.
The Calligraphy
迎春 — the personal name alone, without the surname 贾 and without any title. This is how the girls of the house are addressed inside it: by the given name, as a cousin or a granddaughter, never as a wife of the Sun family. The inscription keeps her in the garden.
Connections
- 贾赦 Jia She — her father, who settles a five-thousand-tael debt by marrying her to his creditor.
- 邢夫人 Lady Xing — her stepmother, indifferent to her before the marriage and after it.
- 贾琏 Jia Lian — her half-brother, Jia She’s son, married to Wang Xifeng.
- 司棋 Siqi — her maid, who fights for her mistress’s stolen hairpin, is expelled from the garden in the Chapter 74 search, and later takes her own life.
- 孙绍祖 Sun Shaozu — her husband, the Zhongshan wolf of the prophecy, who destroys her within a year.
- 贾宝玉 Jia Baoyu — her cousin, who grieves over her emptied rooms on the Purple Caltrop Isle.
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 Mu 贾母 · 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 Siqi 司棋 · Xing Xiuyan 邢岫烟 · Jia She 贾赦 · Xing Furen 邢夫人 · Xiuju 绣橘 · Lianhua'r 莲花儿 · Yuzhu'r 玉柱儿 · Sun Shaozu 孙绍祖 · Yingchun Rumu 迎春乳母
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
