Keren
可人
“A Name in a List of the Dead”
Her Story
Keren is already dead the first time the novel says her name, and it never says it again.
The line falls in Chapter 74, in the middle of the night search of the Garden. Yuanyang speaks in passing of 死了的可人和金钏 — “Keren and Jinchuan, who are dead.” That is the whole of it: one clause, two names, one of them belonging to a girl the reader has never met.
Jinchuan we know. Her humiliation and her suicide are given scenes, and the household spends chapters absorbing them. Keren gets the other half of a sentence. No mistress, no scene, no line of dialogue, no cause of death — even which household she served is genuinely unknown.
What survives is the name. 可人 — “pleasing”, “one who suits” — belongs to the same literary register as 袭人 and 晴雯, the register a mistress with taste used when renaming a girl she had bought. Scholars have heard in it Qin Guan’s line 夏木阴阴正可人. Someone chose it with care, and then the book lost her.
Most entries in this catalogue reconstruct a life from scattered scenes. This one has nothing to reconstruct, and inventing one would be a lie about a permanent record. The absence is the entry.
In Xiang Li's Hands
She paints her alive. A young woman in a blue-grey robe with enormous falling sleeves, an ochre sash knotted at the waist and its ends flying loose, a pale skirt pooling past her feet. Her hair is down — a black stream of it blown out to the right, the drybrush going to smoke at the tips — with red blossoms pinned above the brow. She looks up and away, lips parted. Behind her there is nothing at all: bare paper. Given a character with no scene, she refuses to supply one, and puts every bit of movement into hair and cloth.
The Calligraphy
可人, two characters at the upper right, well clear of the figure. The personal name alone — no surname, no diminutive, no mark of rank or household, because the novel supplies none. It is the only form of address she ever receives, and the sheet claims no more than the book does.
Connections
- Jinchuan 金钏 — named in the same breath, in the same list of the dead.
- Yuanyang 鸳鸯 — the one who speaks the line, in Chapter 74, that is the only trace of her.
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
