Lin Daiyu

Her Story

She begins before she is born. In Chapter 1 the novel describes a crimson pearl plant 绛珠仙草 growing on the bank of a river in the immortal realm, kept alive by daily dew from an attendant called the Divine Luminescent Stone-in-Waiting 神瑛侍者. When he decides to go down into the world of dust, she follows him, because she has no water to give back — only tears. That is the contract. Everything Lin Daiyu does for the next hundred and twenty chapters is repayment.

In the human world she is the only child of Lin Ruhai 林如海, a salt commissioner at Yangzhou, and Jia Min 贾敏, the Jia matriarch’s own daughter. Her mother dies in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3 her grandmother sends boats for her, and she enters the Rongguo mansion at about six years old, having decided on the journey to take not one step too many and speak not one word too many, so that nobody will have cause to laugh at her. She never fully stops doing this. That evening she meets Jia Baoyu; he says he has met her before, then tears off his jade and throws it down because she has none. In Chapter 14 her father dies at Yangzhou. From that point she has no home to be sent back to, and everything she possesses — her rooms, her food, her medicine — is on loan from people who love her without owing her anything.

She is ill from birth and has been taking medicine, she says, since she was old enough to eat. She is also the best poet in the book. In Chapter 23 she and Baoyu read The Western Chamber together behind the rockery, a forbidden romance, and he quotes it at her badly and is scolded for it. In Chapter 27 — 埋香冢飞燕泣残红 — she gathers fallen blossoms into a silk bag and buries them in a mound rather than let them wash into the gutter, singing the Flower Burial Song over them: 「花谢花飞花满天，红消香断有谁怜？」 and, at its end, 「一朝春尽红颜老，花落人亡两不知。」 Baoyu hears her from the far side of the hill and collapses.

In Chapter 37 the cousins found the Crab-flower Club, and Tanchun gives her the sobriquet 潇湘妃子 — Consort of the Xiaoxiang. The reasoning is given openly: she lives at the Naiad’s House 潇湘馆 among bamboo, and she weeps, and the speckled bamboo of the Xiang River was speckled by the tears of Ehuang and Nüying 娥皇女英, the two wives of the sage-king Shun, who wept for him and then drowned. It is offered as a joke. It functions as a sentence. In Chapter 38 she takes first place with the chrysanthemum poems. In Chapter 45 she and Xue Baochai — who have circled each other for forty chapters — stop fighting, and she writes 秋窗风雨夕 in the rain. In Chapter 76, matching couplets with Shi Xiangyun over the autumn water at midnight, Xiangyun offers 「寒塘渡鹤影」 and Daiyu answers 「冷月葬花魂」: the cold moon buries the soul of the flowers. Miaoyu, listening, tells them both it is too desolate and makes them stop.

Her prophecy in Chapter 5 is not hers alone. The first page of the Main Register shows two withered trees with a jade belt hanging in them and a heap of snow with a gold hairpin buried in it, and one verse serves for two women: 「可叹停机德，堪怜咏絮才。玉带林中挂，金簪雪里埋。」 The second couplet hides both names — 玉带林 reversed is 林黛玉, and 雪 stands for 薛. Cao Xueqin will not let the reader choose between them.

The end comes fast. In Chapter 96 she learns by accident, from a servant girl talking in the garden, that Baoyu is to be married to Baochai. In Chapter 97 — 林黛玉焚稿断痴情 — she burns her manuscripts and the handkerchiefs Baoyu once sent her, on which she had written poems. In Chapter 98 she dies as the wedding music carries across the garden from the other courtyard. Her last words break off: 「宝玉，宝玉，你好——」. The debt is paid in full.

In Xiang Li's Hands

Two paintings, and they do not agree.

The first is inscribed with the sobriquet, and Xiang Li paints the sobriquet rather than the girl. This Daiyu stands in the regalia of a river goddess: a towering gilt crown with plumes, turquoise beads at both temples, white bead fringes falling in curtains from the shoulder-piece and hips, scarlet streamers flying across an empty ochre wash. Slate-brown and blue robes, heavy and architectural. No hands are visible — both are folded inside the sleeves. The face is small, tilted down, unmoved. She is the Consort of the Xiang, not a cousin in a borrowed bedroom. Nothing in the sheet is sixteen years old.

The second painting strips all of it away. Daiyu in pure profile, wet grey-blue ink, hair coiled with one green ornament and a red ribbon blown back. She holds a single white blossom pinched between the fingers of her raised hand; the other hangs down, loose, three brushstrokes. Below her lie the flower hoe, laid diagonally across the picture, and a basket of red plum sprigs. The ground is bare paper flecked with pink — petals, or nothing.

Here Xiang Li chooses Chapter 27, and then declines the part of Chapter 27 everyone paints. There is no weeping, no silk bag, no mound. The hoe is on the ground and the basket is still full. Daiyu is looking at one flower, calmly, before the digging starts — the burial of the flowers read as an act of care rather than a fit of grief.

Set the two side by side and you have the whole argument about this character: the myth that was hung on her at sixteen, and the girl who has to carry it.

The Calligraphy

The two sheets are inscribed differently, and the difference is the point.

The first reads 潇湘妃子 — the sobriquet Tanchun confers in Chapter 37, when the cousins found their poetry club. The reasoning is given openly: Daiyu lives at the Naiad’s House 潇湘馆 among bamboo, and she weeps, and the speckled bamboo of the Xiang was speckled by the tears of Ehuang and Nüying 娥皇女英, the two wives of the sage-king Shun, who followed him to the river, wept until their tears ran out, and drowned. Daiyu accepts the name without protest and signs her poems with it thereafter. It is offered as a compliment and functions as a sentence — she is already, by Chapter 1, a plant repaying a debt in tears.

One further turn is hiding in it. 潇湘妃子 is singular, and the consorts were two: sisters married to one man, one name covering both. That is the same structure Cao Xueqin uses in Chapter 5, where Daiyu and Baochai are given a single verse and a single page of the Main Register — the 钗黛合一 design, two women who cannot be told apart by fate.

The second sheet reads 黛玉 alone: the personal name without the surname, the form used inside the family and by Baoyu. One sheet addresses the myth; the other addresses the girl.

Connections

• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — her cousin and the whole reason she is in the world; in their previous existence he watered the plant that she was.
• Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 — her rival for Baoyu and, after Chapter 45, her sworn sister; they share one page and one verse in the Main Register.
• Jia Mu 贾母 — her maternal grandmother, who brings her into the house and protects her, and whose protection is not enough.
• Lin Ruhai 林如海 — her father, whose death in Chapter 14 leaves her without a home to return to.
• Zijuan 紫鹃 — the maid given to her by Jia Mu, who tests Baoyu’s feelings in Chapter 57 and is with her when she dies.

Others of the same kind · Lin family Lin Ruhai 林如海

Named on these pages Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 · Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 · Jia Tanchun 贾探春 · Shi Xiangyun 史湘云 · Miaoyu 妙玉 · Jia Mu 贾母 · Xiangling 香菱 · Zijuan 紫鹃 · Li Qi 李绮 · Lin Ruhai 林如海 · Bei Jing Wang 北静王 · Xue Yima 薛姨妈 and 16 more

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