Li Wan

Her Story

Li Wan is introduced in Chapter 4, in a single cool paragraph, before the reader has met her. Her father was Li Shouzhong, Libationer of the Imperial College at Jinling — head of the empire’s highest school — and his principle for daughters was 女子无才便有德, a woman without talent is thereby virtuous. So she was not properly educated. She was given three or four books, the Four Books for Women, the Lives of Exemplary Women, the Collection of Worthy Ladies, enough to recognise some characters and remember how a few virtuous women of former dynasties had behaved. Spinning and the kitchen were to be her business. Her name says so twice: 纨 is fine white silk, and her courtesy name 宫裁 means palace-cut cloth. She was named after textiles.

She married Jia Zhu, eldest son of Jia Zheng and Lady Wang, the boy on whom the family’s academic hopes rested. He passed his first examination at fourteen and was dead before he was twenty. She was left with an infant son, Jia Lan. The novel’s phrase for what she became after that is 如槁木死灰一般 — like withered wood, like dead ash — 一概不闻不问，惟知侍亲养子: she hears nothing and asks nothing, and knows only how to serve her elders and raise her son.

Being a widow in a house full of unmarried girls gives her a use. She is the one adult woman of their generation who can chaperone them without competing with them. When the Prospect Garden is opened to the young people in Chapter 23 she takes 稻香村, Sweet-rice Village — the mock farm, with its mud wall and its two hundred apricot trees and its vegetable beds and its paper-covered lattice, the one compound in the whole garden built to look poor. Baoyu had already objected to it on the inspection tour in Chapter 17 as forced and contrived, a farm with no countryside around it. Li Wan is the person who lives there.

Then the novel does something unexpected with the dead ash. In Chapter 37 Tanchun proposes a poetry club; Li Wan walks in, takes it over, and claims her name first — 我是定了「稻香老农」，再无人占的, I have settled on Old Farmer of Sweet-rice Village and nobody else may have it. She declines to compete. She will be host and judge. And she judges without flinching: in the white crab-apple contest of Chapter 37 she places Baochai first and Baoyu last; in the chrysanthemum contest of Chapter 38 she gives it to Daiyu. In Chapter 45 she leads the poets in a body to Wang Xifeng to extract funds for the club, and receives in return Xifeng’s dazzling, merciless itemisation of exactly what Li Wan’s widowhood is worth per year in allowance, garden rents and New Year shares. Li Wan takes the whole performance laughing.

In Chapters 55–56, with Xifeng ill after a miscarriage, Lady Wang hands the household to Li Wan, Tanchun and Baochai together. It is Tanchun who cuts and reforms and makes enemies. Li Wan is the one who cannot bring herself to be hard on anybody, and the servants find this out immediately.

Her page is the tenth of the Main Register. The picture is a pot of orchid in full leaf, and beside it a beautiful woman in a phoenix coronet and an embroidered cape — the costume of a woman with an official rank of her own.

桃李春风结子完，到头谁似一盆兰。 如冰水好空相妒，枉与他人作笑谈。

Peach and plum in the spring wind set their fruit and are finished — and 完 is her name, 纨. In the end, who is like that one pot of orchid? — and 兰, orchid, is her son, Jia Lan. The third line, on ice and water, is among the most disputed in the book and has no settled reading. The fourth is plain enough: 枉与他人作笑谈, for nothing she becomes other people’s talk and laughter.

Her song, 《晚韶华》, “Splendour Come Late”, is blunter: 只这带珠冠，披凤袄，也抵不了无常性命 — the pearl coronet, the phoenix jacket, and neither of them will buy off death when it comes.

In Chapter 119 Jia Lan sits the provincial examination and passes one hundred and thirtieth. Baoyu, sitting beside him, passes seventh and walks out of the world. The rank is coming, and with it the coronet the register showed her wearing. The novel as we have it does not show her put it on, and does not show her die. The song has already priced it.

It is one of the coldest verses in Chapter 5, and readers have argued for two centuries over whom that last line blames — Li Wan for the life she gave up, or the family that took it. What the register does not permit is admiration. Everyone else in the Jia house treats her as the model widow. The prophecy calls the model a joke.

In Xiang Li's Hands

Two sheets, the same idea stripped down between them. Both seat her three-quarters on, both lay an open manuscript across her lap — white leaves ruled in vermilion columns, filled with a fast illegible cursive, the right leaf curling up — and in both her right hand comes bare out of the sleeve and hovers above the page without touching it. That hovering hand is the whole reading: she does not write, she adjudicates.

The first version crowds her. Ink plum branches cross the paper on both sides and behind her; the coiffure carries a pearl net and a yellow blossom; the robe is mauve over brown with green-and-gold floral borders; a doubled jade bangle sits at the wrist. The second version deletes every branch. The ground is bare paper, the palette cools to grey-green over taupe, teal and gold roundels on the skirt, the bangle goes, and the hair is a plain low bun with nothing in it. The face turns further toward us and smiles more openly. The plainer sheet is the warmer one.

Neither painting includes the orchid of the Chapter 5 prophecy, and neither gives her the phoenix coronet. She gets the book instead.

The Calligraphy

Both sheets read 李纨 at the upper left, surname and personal name in two characters. Not her courtesy name 宫裁, not 稻香老农, the sobriquet she chose for herself in Chapter 37, and not 珠大奶奶 — “Zhu’s wife” — which is what the household actually calls her. Naming her Li Wan returns her to her own family and her own name, rather than to a dead husband’s place in the seating order.

Connections

• Jia Zhu 贾珠 — her husband, dead before twenty, and the reason for everything the novel says about her.
• Jia Lan 贾兰 — her son, the orchid of the prophecy, who passes the provincial examination in Chapter 119.
• Wang Furen 王夫人 — her mother-in-law, who hands her the household jointly with Tanchun and Baochai in Chapter 55.
• Jia Tanchun 贾探春 — founder of the poetry club Li Wan appoints herself to preside over in Chapter 37.
• Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 — her sister-in-law, who prices her widowhood aloud to her face in Chapter 45.

Others of the same kind · Jia household – wives, concubines, in-laws Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 · 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 · Li Qi 李绮 · 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 Qi 李绮 · Jia Lan 贾兰 · Jia Zhu 贾珠 · Li Shenniang 李婶娘 · Suyun 素云 · Biyue 碧月 · Tian Ma 田妈

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