You Erjie

Her Story

She is You-shi’s stepsister, brought into the Ning household along with her mother and her younger sister when the old master dies and the family needs someone to mind the empty rooms. She has already been contracted once, as a child, to a man called Zhang Hua; her mother took ten taels to break it off, and Zhang Hua does not know.

Jia Lian sees her during the mourning and wants her. In Chapter 65 he marries her secretly, sets her up in a house outside the walls, and tells nobody. She is gentle and accommodating, and she believes she is a wife.

Chapter 68 is the trap. Wang Xifeng, having learned everything, arrives at the outside house alone, calls her sister, weeps, blames herself for keeping the household so ill-run that Jia Lian felt he had to hide her, and asks her to come home where she belongs. You Erjie goes. Inside the compound the food stops arriving hot, the servants stop answering, and Xifeng puts up Zhang Hua to sue Jia Lian in open court for stealing another man’s betrothed during a period of mourning. Then she installs a new concubine, Qiutong, in the next room, and lets her do the shouting.

You Erjie is carrying a son. A doctor called Hu Junrong is fetched, misreads the pulse, and prescribes wrongly; by midnight she has aborted a fully formed male child and cannot stop bleeding. In Chapter 69 she works out that the illness will not end and the humiliation will not either, opens her box, finds a lump of raw gold, and swallows it — 恨命含泪便吞入口中，几次狠命直脖，方咽了下去. She then dresses and does her hair properly and lies down. The chapter title calls it 觉大限吞生金自逝.

In Xiang Li's Hands

She is off the ground. There is no floor line: the figure floats, hair streaming out to the right, skirts and ribbons unwinding into long calligraphic loops, over a sheet spattered edge to edge with soft pink and green blooms of colour. In both hands she holds a round silk fan up in front of her chest — the autumn fan, the oldest emblem in Chinese poetry for the woman who has been put away. Her face is composed and slightly smiling. Alone among these eight sheets, this one carries the artist’s own signature and a cyclical date beneath the name.

The Calligraphy

尤二姐 runs down the upper left in three heavy characters, and it is not a name at all — it is surname plus birth order plus 姐, “the You family’s second girl.” She has no given name in the novel and none is invented for her here. She is inscribed as a position in someone else’s family, which is precisely what she was bought, hidden and killed for being.

Connections

• Jia Lian 贾琏 — took her as a secret second wife in Chapter 65 and could not protect her afterwards.
• Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 — Jia Lian’s principal wife, who brought her inside the walls in Chapter 68 in order to finish her.
• You Sanjie 尤三姐 — her younger sister, dead by her own hand before her.
• You-shi 尤氏 — her stepsister, wife of Jia Zhen, through whom the You women entered the Ning mansion.
• Qiutong 秋桐 — the concubine Xifeng installed next door and used as the voice of the campaign.

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 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 · Zhou Yiniang 周姨娘 and 11 more

Named on these pages Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 · Ping'er 平儿 · You Sanjie 尤三姐 · Jia Lian 贾琏 · You Shi 尤氏 · You Laoniang 尤老娘 · Qiutong 秋桐 · Shanjie 善姐 · Xing'er 兴儿 · Xi'er 喜儿 · Wang Xin 王信 · Laiwang 来旺 and 2 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