Xiren

Her Story

Her name was Hua Zhenzhu — Pearl, of the Hua (Flower) family. She was Grandmother Jia’s maid, served Shi Xiangyun for some years, and was then given to Baoyu, which is how the old lady disposed of servants she considered reliable. Baoyu, learning that her surname meant flower, took a line of old verse — 花气袭人知昼暖, the scent of flowers assails one, and one knows the day has turned warm — and renamed her Xiren, Assails-Men. The novel explains this in Chapter 3, when Daiyu first arrives. In Chapter 23 Jia Zheng hears the name and asks who was fanciful enough to invent it, guessing correctly that it was his son.

In Chapter 6, immediately after Baoyu wakes from the dream in which Disenchantment instructs him in the affairs of the bedchamber, Xiren notices the state of his clothes, and the two of them quietly become lovers. She is a few years older than he is. Nothing is ever formalised. That single scene governs the rest of her life.

She is the practical one. In Chapter 19 Baoyu visits her family’s house at New Year and finds her mother and her brother Hua Zifang planning to buy her back out of service. She tells them she will not go, then uses the moment on Baoyu, extracting promises: that he stop the wild talk of dying and taking orders, that he behave before his father as though he liked his books, that he give up eating the rouge from girls’ lips. The chapter title calls it 花解语 — the flower that understands speech. She manages him the way one manages weather.

Chapter 28 plants the ending without anyone noticing. Baoyu exchanges sashes with the actor Jiang Yuhan and comes home wearing a scarlet one of foreign silk; that night he ties it round the sleeping Xiren. She wakes, finds her own green sash on him and his red one on her, is annoyed, takes it off and shuts it in a box.

Chapter 34 is her turning point. Baoyu has been beaten half-conscious by his father; Lady Wang sends for a maid who can tell her what her son actually does all day, and Xiren comes. In the course of that conversation she says: could a way not be found to have the young master move out of the garden? She is thinking about propriety, and about the girls he lives among. Lady Wang is shaken by it, and from that day treats Xiren as her own. In Chapter 36 she quietly raises Xiren’s allowance to two taels and a string of cash, paid out of her own monthly stipend — the pay of a concubine, awarded without the title, and deliberately not announced.

That silence matters at the end. It also shadows Chapter 77. The novel does not say that Xiren informed on Qingwen; Lady Wang’s information comes from Wang Shanbao’s wife in Chapter 74. But when Qingwen is dragged out to die, Baoyu asks Xiren aloud how it is that the mistress knows every fault in the room and yet somehow found nothing to fault in her, and she reddens. Cao Xueqin leaves it there. Readers have argued about it for two hundred years, which is precisely what the sentence is designed to do.

She outlives the house. In Chapter 120, after Baoyu has vanished into monkhood, Xiren means to stay a widow to him, and Aunt Xue points out that she cannot: it was never made public, she has no standing, she is legally nobody’s wife. Lady Wang and Baochai marry her to Jiang Yuhan. She intends to kill herself in her brother’s house and does not, because of her brother; in the sedan chair and does not; on arrival and does not — each time she reasons herself out of it for someone else’s sake. Then husband and wife find the two sashes, green and red, and understand what has been arranged over their heads since Chapter 28.

Her page in the Third Register comes directly after Qingwen’s, and where Qingwen’s picture was a page of black cloud, hers is 一簇鲜花，一床破席 — a spray of fresh flowers and a broken sleeping mat. The flowers are her surname; 席 is 袭 by sound. The verse reads 枉自温柔和顺，空云似桂如兰。堪羡优伶有福，谁知公子 无缘。 Gentle and compliant to no purpose; called cassia and orchid, and the words were empty.

The two of them are the only named entries in the register, and they are set as a pair. Qingwen was proud and was killed for it at sixteen. Xiren was careful, was rewarded, and survived into a marriage that by every worldly measure is a good one. The register grades them the same way. 枉自 and 空云 in Xiren’s verse do exactly the work that 寿夭多因毁谤生 does in Qingwen’s: the qualities availed nothing. The novel does not let being sensible count as being saved.

In Xiang Li's Hands

Two versions, and they divide her in half. In the first she stands three-quarter in a jade-green robe under a russet mantle covered in gold cloud-roundels, holding a gold lotus lamp high in her right hand; a pink and yellow halo of lamplight spreads behind it. The paper behind her is filled with large blossoms drawn in pale outline, and inside the blossoms are five or six girls’ faces, tinted mint and blue, watching. Her own face is composed, eyes lowered, entirely untroubled. The second painting takes everything away. She is seen from behind, turning back over her shoulder, shoulders and upper back bare, a coral band across the breast, a heavy grey robe fallen to the elbows, one hand raised to her throat, yellow roses in her hair, and a long coral ribbon streaming off across the lower half of the sheet. The background is nothing at all. The painter gives the first version a full room and the second not one mark of setting: the maid who keeps the lamp lit, and the girl of Chapter 6. Reading that streaming red ribbon against the scarlet sash of Chapter 28 is my interpretation, not something the painting confirms.

The Calligraphy

袭人 on both sheets, in a fast cursive that runs the two characters almost together. It is the name Baoyu gave her, not the name she was born with — her surname 花 is dropped, and Zhenzhu is nowhere. A woman renamed by her master, then signed by that name in a permanent catalogue, is being addressed exactly as the household addressed her. On both sheets the inscription sits at the right with the red seal beneath it.

Connections

• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — her master, who renamed her, took her as his first lover, and left her without any status at all.
• Qingwen 晴雯 — the other named maid of the Third Register and her deliberate opposite; Qingwen mocked her, and Baoyu half-suspected her over Qingwen’s death.
• Lady Wang 王夫人 — Baoyu’s mother, who made her a trusted informant and paid her a concubine’s wage in secret.
• Jiang Yuhan 蒋玉菡 — the actor she is married to in Chapter 120, connected to her by the exchanged sashes of Chapter 28.
• Grandmother Jia 贾母 — her original mistress, who gave her to Baoyu.
• Hua Zifang 花自芳 — her brother, whose family tried to buy her out of service in Chapter 19.

Others of the same kind · maid – Baoyu (Green Delights / 怡紅院) Qingwen 晴雯 · Sheyue 麝月 · Xiaohong 小红 · Qiuwen 秋纹 · Bihen 碧痕 · Tanyun 檀云 · Qixian 绮霰 · Qianxue 茜雪 · Huixiang 蕙香 · Jiahui 佳蕙 · Zhui'er 坠儿 · Liang'er 良儿 · Chunyan 春燕 · Liu Wu'er 柳五儿 and 1 more

Named on these pages Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 · Qingwen 晴雯 · Sheyue 麝月 · Jiang Yuhan 蒋玉菡 · Zhenzhu 珍珠 · Qiuwen 秋纹 · Bihen 碧痕 · Tanyun 檀云 · Huixiang 蕙香 · Li Mama 李嬷嬷 · Hua Zifang 花自芳

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