Jia Zhu
贾珠
“The Brother Who Was Already Dead”
His Story
Jia Zhu is dead before the first chapter and never appears. Everything the novel gives of him is hearsay, and nearly all of it arrives in one sentence. In Chapter 2 the curio dealer Leng Zixing runs through the Rongguo genealogy for Jia Yucun and disposes of the eldest son in nineteen characters: 十四岁进学，不到二十岁就娶 了妻生了子，一病死了 — passed the entrance examination at fourteen, married and fathered a son before he was twenty, took an illness and died. No chapter is given for the death, no cause beyond 一病, an illness, and no scene.
He was the first son of Jia Zheng and Lady Wang, elder brother to Yuanchun and to Baoyu. His widow is Li Wan, still in her twenties when he died, who lives out the rest of the book 如槁木死灰 — withered wood and dead ashes — in a house full of parties. His son is Jia Lan, the boy who at the very end sits the examinations his father was on course to pass.
The novel keeps him as a measure. In Chapter 33 Jia Zheng beats Baoyu with a rod until the household is frightened he will kill him, and Lady Wang throws herself across the boy and calls for the other one: 苦命的儿吓……若有你活着，便死一百个我 也不管了 — if you were alive, a hundred of these could die and I would not care. It is the most brutal sentence any mother speaks in the book, and it is spoken over one living son about a dead one.
Everything later demanded of Baoyu — the examinations, the office, the recovery of the family — was already being supplied by Jia Zhu, and fell on the younger brother the moment he stopped.
In Xiang Li's Hands
She paints the one fact on record. He walks in profile with an open book held out, its pages ruled in vermilion columns; the other hand is lost in the sleeve. The robe is flat slate blue over pale rose, a jade pendant on a red cord at the waist, and his hair — blown back into a cloud of grey ink — is the only turbulence on the sheet. The ground is bare paper, one blue shadow at his hem. The face is downcast and absorbed. No deathbed and no ancestral tablet: he is reading, and alive.
The Calligraphy
The sheet reads 贾珠 — surname and given name, two upright characters set low on the left, level with his knee and close to the seal. He is offered no title and no honorific: 大爷, the form the household would have used, is absent, and so is any posthumous rank, because he lived long enough to earn neither. For a man who exists in the novel only inside other people’s sentences, the bare name is the whole of the record.
Connections
- Jia Zheng 贾政 — his father, whose severity toward Baoyu is measured against the son he lost.
- Wang Furen 王夫人 — his mother, who cries his name over Baoyu’s beaten body in Chapter 33.
- Li Wan 李纨 — his widow, married and left a widow before she was twenty-five.
- Jia Lan 贾兰 — his son, raised by Li Wan and finally successful in the examinations.
- Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — his younger brother, who inherits every expectation Jia Zhu’s death left unmet.
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 Mu 贾母 · Jia Zheng 贾政 · Jia She 贾赦 · Jia Lian 贾琏 · Jia Huan 贾环 · Jia Lan 贾兰 · Jia Daishan 贾代善 · Jia Min 贾敏
Named on these pages Li Wan 李纨 · Jia Lan 贾兰
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
