小红

Her Story

Chapter 24 gives her name and her problem in one sentence: 原来这小红本姓林，小名 红玉，只因”玉”字犯了林黛玉、宝玉，便都把这个字隐起来. She was born Lin Hongyu. The 玉 in her name belongs to two of her masters, so it is taken out of her and she becomes 小红 — Little Red. She is sixteen, the daughter of Lin Zhixiao, a steward, and she was assigned to a corner of the Prospect Garden before Baoyu moved into it. She wants to be noticed. The senior maids at Green Delights make sure she is not.

In the same chapter she loses a handkerchief and Jia Yun, the young poor relation newly employed on the garden planting, picks it up. Chapter 26 has him work it back to her through a third maid; the handkerchief goes one way and one of his goes the other, and neither of them has said anything that could be quoted.

Chapter 27 is where she is nearly destroyed and is instead promoted. She is in the Drip-Emerald Pavilion talking through the window about exactly this affair when Baochai, outside, realises she is listening to something dangerous, decides on a 金蝉脱壳 — the cicada slipping its shell — and calls out Daiyu’s name as though chasing her. Xiaohong pushes the window open, sees nobody, and concludes that Lin Daiyu overheard. That afternoon Xifeng, on a slope, needs a message carried, picks Xiaohong out of a group of maids and finds her quick, and takes her into her own service.

In the 120-chapter text she is at Xifeng’s bedside through her decline in Chapter 113, and in Chapter 117, once Xifeng is dead, she takes leave and goes. An early manuscript commentary refers to a lost chapter in which she and another dismissed maid appear at the prison temple — 狱神庙红玉、茜雪一大回文字，惜迷失无稿. What she did there is not known.

In Xiang Li's Hands

She is painted in red on red: a rose-coloured robe with faint spirals, red ties down the front, a red sash across the floor — the name written in pigment before it is written in ink. She holds up a small bright red cloth in both hands and looks down at it, half smiling. Behind her the paper is filled with a huge grey spiral, ripple or web, and at the lower left two birds on a rock have their beaks open. She chooses the handkerchief, then surrounds the private moment with things that carry sound and things that were listening.

The Calligraphy

小红, upper right, two characters — and they are the wrong name, or rather the diminished one. The sheet inscribes her as the household inscribed her, without the surname 林 and without the 玉 she was made to drop, so the painting records the loss instead of correcting it. Of the eight names in this group it is the only one that is not, strictly, the name the character was born with.

Connections

• Jia Yun 贾芸 — the poor Jia relation who kept her handkerchief; the one attachment the novel allows her.
• Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 — spotted her in Chapter 27 and took her into her own service, which was the promotion she had been angling for.
• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — her nominal master at Green Delights, who barely registered she was there.
• Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 — overheard her at the Drip-Emerald Pavilion and deflected the blame onto Lin Daiyu.
• Lin Zhixiao 林之孝 — her father, a Rongguo steward, whose position is why Xifeng knew whose daughter she was.

Others of the same kind · maid – Baoyu (Green Delights / 怡紅院) Qingwen 晴雯 · Xiren 袭人 · Sheyue 麝月 · Qiuwen 秋纹 · Bihen 碧痕 · Tanyun 檀云 · Qixian 绮霰 · Qianxue 茜雪 · Huixiang 蕙香 · Jiahui 佳蕙 · Zhui'er 坠儿 · Liang'er 良儿 · Chunyan 春燕 · Liu Wu'er 柳五儿 and 1 more

Named on these pages Jia Yun 贾芸 · Qianxue 茜雪 · Jiahui 佳蕙 · Zhui'er 坠儿 · Lin Zhixiao jia de 林之孝家的 · Lin Zhixiao 林之孝

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