You Laoniang
尤老娘
“The Mother Who Slept Through It”
Her Story
She is the widow of the late Mr You and the stepmother of You-shi, Jia Zhen’s wife. The two young women the novel calls You Erjie and You Sanjie are her own daughters by an earlier marriage; they carry the You surname without carrying You blood. She has no money, no standing, and daughters to place.
Chapter 63. Jia Jing dies at his Taoist temple, the Ningguo house goes into mourning, and You-shi, managing it alone, sends for her stepmother and the two girls to keep her company. In that house Jia Zhen and his son Jia Rong treat the sisters as amusements, and the novel keeps noting, without comment, that the old woman is asleep.
Chapters 64 and 65. Jia Lian takes You Erjie as a secret second wife and sets her up in a rented house in Little Flowering Branch Lane. Her mother moves in with her and accepts the arrangement, and the money, without an objection on record.
Chapter 66. You Sanjie has sworn she will marry Liu Xianglian and no one else. When he comes to ask for his sword back, she draws it and cuts her own throat in front of them.
Chapter 68. Wang Xifeng arrives at the little house, is sweetness itself, and carries You Erjie into the Rong mansion. Chapter 69: You Erjie finds a lump of raw gold and swallows it.
After that the novel simply stops mentioning her. Both daughters are dead within a few chapters of each other, and for the mother there is no death scene, no departure, no further word. She is one of the few adults in the book to be dropped rather than finished.
In Xiang Li's Hands
An old woman leaning forward from the waist, in a black-grey jacket over heavy oatmeal robes with a mint under-collar and a black false bun pinned above her white hair. Her hands are folded in her lap around a long rosary of amber beads, one jade bead, and a red tassel that falls the rest of the way down the paper — the strongest colour on the sheet. The face gets the full wrinkle treatment; the eyes look out and away, not down at the beads. Bare paper but for a few ink rocks at lower left. She is given a prayer object and not shown praying.
The Calligraphy
The sheet reads 尤老安人 — four characters, not the 尤老娘 by which the novel actually calls her. 安人 is a formal style: in Qing usage the title of the wife of a sixth-rank official, and in vernacular fiction a general courtesy for the mistress of a respectable household. She has no claim to it in either sense. The inscription hands her the dignity the book withholds, brushed heavily down the top left in a broader, more upright hand than the young women’s sheets receive.
Connections
- You Erjie 尤二姐 — her elder daughter, taken as Jia Lian’s secret second wife and dead by her own hand.
- You Sanjie 尤三姐 — her younger daughter, who cut her throat in Chapter 66.
- You-shi 尤氏 — her stepdaughter, Jia Zhen’s wife, who brought her into the Ningguo house in Chapter 63.
- Jia Zhen 贾珍 — head of the Ningguo house, whose treatment of her daughters she did not interrupt.
- Jia Lian 贾琏 — who set her elder daughter up in a house outside, and her with it.
Others of the same kind · Jia household – wives, concubines, in-laws Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 · Li Wan 李纨 · 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 and 11 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
