Li Qi
李绮
“The Firefly Was Grass Once”
Her Story
She is the younger of Li Wan’s two cousins, and she comes into the novel in Chapter 49 in the same boatload of relatives as her sister: their widowed mother, travelling to the capital, falls in with Xing Xiuyan’s parents and Wang Ren at a mooring halfway and completes the journey with them. Grandmother Jia refuses to let them lodge anywhere else. Mother and daughters take rooms at Sweet Rice Village 稻香村 with Li Wan.
The garden is at its fullest in these chapters and Li Qi is one of the reasons. Baoyu, counting the new faces, decides he has been a frog at the bottom of a well; the servants say the girls stand together like four spring onions in a bunch. When the poetry club’s membership is totted up she is one of the five who are 不算外 — not counted as outsiders.
Chapter 50 is her chapter. At Reed Snow Cottage, in the linked verse composed in the snow, her contribution is 年稔府粱饶. Then, at the lantern riddles in Warm Fragrance Burrow, she offers a single character — 萤, firefly — to stand for another character. Nobody can get it. Daiyu solves it and explains: 萤可不是草化的? Is a firefly not made out of grass? The answer is 花, flower, which is written as grass over transformation. It is the wittiest riddle of the evening and it belongs to a girl the novel barely names elsewhere.
In Chapter 81 she is one of the four young women fishing at the Smartweed Bank, and she catches hers quickly. That is the last of her. No verse in Chapter 5, no register page, no ending.
In Xiang Li's Hands
The fishing sheet, and the season has turned. She sits low on a bank in a white robe scrolled with pale green, pink and yellow linings breaking out at sleeve and hem, one pale shoe showing; roses and pearls in the hair. A fine black line runs off the top edge of the paper, and she holds the butt of it up beside her chin, the other hand closed further down. Behind her the whole sheet is a hanging curtain of willow in grey-green vertical strokes. No sky, no water — just the willows and the thread.
The Calligraphy
李绮 sits at the upper right, surname and given name, brushed fast with the second character running. The house style across this collection is the personal name alone; keeping 李 on both sisters marks them as visitors rather than daughters. It also keeps them a pair — the two sheets are inscribed identically except for the last character.
Connections
- Li Wan 李纨 — her cousin, and the reason her family is admitted to the Jia compound at all.
- Li Wen 李纹 — her elder sister, arriving, writing and fishing alongside her throughout.
- Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 — the only one at the lantern party who solves her riddle, and who explains it for her.
- Jia Mu 贾母 — insisted the Li women stay in the house rather than lodge elsewhere.
- Xing Xiuyan 邢岫烟 — fellow traveller in the same convoy and fellow angler at the Smartweed Bank.
Others of the same kind · Jia household – wives, concubines, in-laws Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 · Li Wan 李纨 · Qin Keqing 秦可卿 · Wang Furen 王夫人 · You Erjie 尤二姐 · You Sanjie 尤三姐 · Xue Baoqin 薛宝琴 · Xing Xiuyan 邢岫烟 · Li Wen 李纹 · Xing Furen 邢夫人 · You Shi 尤氏 · Xue Yima 薛姨妈 · Zhao Yiniang 赵姨娘 · Zhou Yiniang 周姨娘 and 11 more
Named on these pages Li Wen 李纹 · Li Shenniang 李婶娘
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
