Xue Yima

Her Story

Widow of the head of the Xue house of Nanjing — 「丰年好大雪，珍珠如土金如铁」, fourth name on the 护官符 — and sister to Lady Wang. Two children: Xue Pan, and Baochai.

The family comes north in Chapter 4, for the same reason Jia Yucun rises: Xue Pan has had a man beaten to death in Nanjing over the purchase of a girl. Aunt Xue installs the household in the Pear Fragrance Court inside the Rongguo compound and stays for years, past any stated reason to.

She is easy to like. In Chapter 7 she sends twelve palace flowers round to the girls. In Chapter 8 Baoyu and Daiyu come to her rooms and she feeds them, lets Baoyu have the wine his nurse is trying to take away, and takes nobody’s side. The gold locket her daughter wears is said to match the jade Baoyu was born with — 金玉良缘 — and she neither presses nor denies it.

Chapter 57 is her set piece and her indictment — 慈姨妈爱语慰痴颦, the kind aunt comforts the fretting girl with loving words. She tells Daiyu, ill and without a relative in the world, that she loves her more than her own daughter — 「你不厌我，就认了才好」. Then she says it outright: 「不如竟把你林妹妹定与他，岂不四角俱全？」 — promise your Lin cousin to him and everything is square. Zijuan asks the obvious question: why not go and say so to Lady Wang? Aunt Xue turns it into a joke about the maid wanting a husband of her own, and never raises it again with anyone who could act. In Chapters 96 to 98 the household marries Baochai to Baoyu under a veil while Daiyu dies across the garden.

The rest is her son. Xue Pan marries Xia Jingui in Chapter 79 and the woman takes the household apart; Aunt Xue can do nothing about her, or about what is done to Xiangling. In Chapter 85 he kills again and goes to prison, and his mother spends the family’s money on the case for years.

She is genuinely kind. Kindness is also the entire use she makes of her power.

In Xiang Li's Hands

Olive-gold robe with soft blue cloud scrolls, a blue collar band, large oval gilt buttons down the front. A jewelled headband with a long blue tasselled pendant swinging past her cheek, a red flower in the hair, green earrings. She is smiling — the warmest face of these eight — and both hands are lifted at her chest, cradling a small pale-green jade. A blue sash streams away right across empty paper. Set beside Lady Xing’s sheet: the same generation, the same format, and one gets a fan, a curtain and a lifetime of lines while this one gets colour and a smile.

The Calligraphy

薛姨妈 — surname plus 姨妈, maternal aunt, in a loose comfortable hand down the right. Not 薛夫人, which would be her standing, and not a personal name, which the novel never gives her. In a collection that mostly inscribes personal names she is one of the few named by a relationship, and the relationship is not her own children’s but the Jia cousins’.

Connections

• Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 — her daughter, and the marriage she does not argue against.
• Xue Pan 薛蟠 — her son, whose two killings shape the family’s whole course.
• Wang Furen 王夫人 — her sister, in whose house she settles indefinitely from Chapter 4.
• Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 — comforted by her in Chapter 57 with a proposal she never carries to anyone.
• Xiangling 香菱 — the girl bought at the cost of a man’s life, kept in her household and abused in 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 · Zhao Yiniang 赵姨娘 · Zhou Yiniang 周姨娘 and 11 more

Named on these pages Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 · Xue Baoqin 薛宝琴 · Xue Pan 薛蟠 · Tongxi 同喜 · Tonggui 同贵 · Zhang Dehui 张德辉 · Wang Zi Teng Zhi Nv 王子腾之女

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