Mingyu
茗玉
“The Girl Who Was Never There”
Her Story
She does not exist. In Chapter 39 Grannie Liu, entertaining the household with country talk, describes a girl of seventeen pulling firewood from a haystack in the snow. Pressed by Baoyu for more, she invents the rest: a name, a young lady dead too soon, a shrine kept for her. Baoyu sends Mingyan to find it. He finds a ruined temple with a clay plague-god in it. The Cheng editions print her name as 若玉.
In Xiang Li's Hands
She paints the invention rather than the ruin: a young woman in a scarlet jacket and white skirt, a bound bundle of brushwood raised in one hand, ribbons trailing across a mottled grey ground that reads as falling snow. She is smiling. Nothing here is dead.
The Calligraphy
Inscribed 茗玉, a name improvised on the spot in a story, brushed with the same plainness as any living girl’s.
Connections
- Grannie Liu 刘姥姥 — who invents her, name and shrine and all, to hold an audience.
- Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — who believes the tale and sends men to find the shrine.
- Mingyan 茗烟 — the page sent to look, who comes back with the wrong temple.
Others of the same kind · story-within-story / invented figure Chuluan 雏鸾
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
