Zhen Baoyu

His Story

He is introduced before he is named. In Chapter 2 Jia Yucun tells Leng Zixing about his time as tutor in the Zhen household of Jinling — 钦差金陵省体仁院总裁. His pupil was impossible. The boy held that 「女儿两个字，极尊贵，极清净的」, and that 「必得两个女儿伴着我读书，我方能认得字」 — he could only learn to read with two girls sitting beside him. Beaten by his father, he called out for his sisters, which he said eased the pain. Yucun resigned. The chapter never gives the boy a name. Everything Baoyu will say in his own person has already been said, in another province, by someone the reader has not met.

Chapter 56. Four stewardesses come up from the Zhen house in Nanjing and mention that their young master is also called Baoyu, thirteen, doted on by his grandmother and always truant. That afternoon Jia Baoyu dreams himself into a garden like his own, is mocked by maids who are not his, and finds a boy on a couch who says he has heard there is a Baoyu in the capital with his own temperament. 「原来你就是宝玉？」 Someone calls that the master wants Baoyu, both boys panic at once, and Xiren shakes him awake.

In Chapter 75 the news reaches Ningguo that the Zhen family have been convicted, their property confiscated — the Jias’ own future, rehearsed.

They meet awake in Chapter 115, after the Zhens are pardoned and Zhen Yingjia brings his son to call. The double has changed sides. He speaks of 言忠言孝 and 「自有一番立身扬名的事业」, and says he has thinned out his boyhood notions. Jia Baoyu decides he is a 禄蠹, a maggot in the salary grain, and when Baochai defends the sentiments says he would sooner give up his own face. The chapter title is the verdict: 证同类宝玉失相知 — finding his own kind, Baoyu loses the one who understood him.

甄 is 真, true; 贾 is 假, false. The true Baoyu grows up into the world and the false one walks out of it.

In Xiang Li's Hands

Painted against Jia Baoyu’s sheet. Same face, round and pale, the girl’s features uncorrected. Same gilt crown with the red bead, same red throat-ribbon, same jade-plaque belt and coral tassels. Everything else is inverted. Jia Baoyu is all wind: hair and cape blown sideways in wet grey ink, mauve and crimson and gold. This figure stands still in cool blue-grey, hair hanging straight, nothing moving. Jia Baoyu holds one yellow chrysanthemum on a hair-thin stem; this one holds an unrolled document, ruled in red columns and covered in script. The flower against the paperwork. Even the inscriptions are mirrored, his right, the other’s left.

The Calligraphy

甄宝玉 in a broad wet running hand down the right margin. Nearly every sheet in this collection gives the personal name alone; this one, like Jia Baoyu’s, adds the clan, and here it has to — the two men share a face, a given name and a childhood creed, and the single character 甄 is the only mark that separates them. The surname is doing all the work on the page that it does in the novel.

Connections

• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — his double, who dreams of him in Chapter 56, meets him in Chapter 115, and calls him a 禄蠹.
• Jia Yucun 贾雨村 — his first tutor, who resigned over him and carried the story north.
• Zhen Yingjia 甄应嘉 — his father, head of the Zhen house of Nanjing, disgraced with it and later pardoned.
• Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 — defends his views in Chapter 115, which is what makes her husband despair.
• Jia Zheng 贾政 — the Zhens’ correspondent in the capital, who receives the visit that brings the two together.

Others of the same kind · Zhen family (Nanjing) Zhen Shiyin 甄士隐 · Feng Shi 封氏 · Feng Su 封肃 · Huo Qi 霍启 · Jiaoxing 娇杏 · Zhen Yingjia 甄应嘉

Named on these pages Zhen Yingjia 甄应嘉 · Zhen Fu Ren 甄夫人 · Zhen Da Xiao Jie 甄大小姐 · Zhen San Xiao Jie 甄三小姐

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