Shuan'er
栓儿
“The Pheasant”
His Story
A page boy, first attached to Jia Rong of the Ning house and later running errands for Jia Yun and others. He carries messages between the households and the Water Moon convent, and he knows the household’s rules well enough to remind other servants of them. His wife has charge of the lamp oil.
His moment comes in Chapter 102. The Garden has emptied out, and Jia She takes Shuan’er in with him to look the place over. A large cock pheasant bursts out of the undergrowth and flies past them. Shuan’er is badly frightened, decides he has seen a demon, and reports it as one.
Jia She believes him. Daoist priests are brought in, an altar is raised, and a full exorcism is performed on the Prospect Garden — the same garden that held the poetry club and the crab-apple society and the birthday parties. A bird goes up out of a bush, a boy panics, and the household spends real money driving spirits out of the ruin of its own best years.
In Xiang Li's Hands
He is stooped low in a black robe and cap, half-turned, gripping a pole with a huge red lantern and a pale gauze one swinging from it. Behind and around him, sketched in the palest grey and pink wash so they are barely there at all, float five or six demon faces — bulging eyes, bared teeth, one of them upside down. They are ghosts of the paint, not solid. She has drawn exactly what he thinks he sees: the boy fully rendered, the terror translucent.
The Calligraphy
栓儿 at lower left, two characters — a servant’s name, the 儿 diminutive with no surname, brushed small on a sheet where the lantern takes the room.
Connections
- Jia She 贾赦 — takes him into the Garden and believes his report.
- Jia Rong 贾蓉 — his first master in the Ning house.
- Jia Yun 贾芸 — for whom he later runs errands.
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
