Yu Cun Zhi Zi
Sueño en el pabellón rojo / Un personaje fuera del elenco habitual
雨村之子
“One Clause of a Sentence”
His Story
He exists for the length of half a line in Chapter 2. Jiaoxing, the maid who once glanced back at Jia Yucun in the Zhen household at Suzhou, is sent to him as a second wife. Within a year she bore him a son; half a year after that Yucun’s principal wife died suddenly and he raised Jiaoxing to be his wife in her place. The son is the hinge of his mother’s rise and nothing else. He is never named, never speaks, and is never mentioned again in a hundred and nineteen further chapters.
In Xiang Li's Hands
A plump naked toddler stands in shallow water, head thrown back, eyes shut, laughing, both arms up to grip the stem of an enormous black and teal lotus leaf that spreads over him like a roof. A rose-red cloth twists round his hips and unwinds across the paper. Everything else is bare.
This is the New Year print — the child under the lotus, the wish for sons. She gives the most incidental baby in the book the most auspicious composition in the repertoire.
The Calligraphy
雨村之子 — not a name but a possessive, “Yucun’s son”, four characters down the lower left, which is exactly and only what the novel ever calls him.
Connections
- Jia Yucun 贾雨村 — his father, who by then had been dismissed from office once and reinstated.
- Jiaoxing 娇杏 — his mother, whose backward glance and whose son together made her a wife.
- Zhen Shiyin 甄士隐 — in whose household his mother had been a maid.
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
