薛蟠之子

His Story

He exists in a single sentence, and it is not spoken by anyone who has met him. In Chapter 120 Zhen Shiyin, explaining the ledger of fates to Jia Yucun, comes to his own daughter — the child stolen at the Lantern Festival in Chapter 1, sold twice, renamed Xiangling: 今归薛姓，产难完劫，遗一子于薛家以承宗祧. She has gone to the Xue surname, finished her ordeal in a hard labour, and left one son to the Xue family to carry the ancestral line. Xue Pan, out of prison at last, had made her his principal wife. The boy has no name, no age and no scene. He is the whole future of the Xue house and the only thing that outlasts the girl in Chapter 1.

In Xiang Li's Hands

A toddler, painted with more care than most adults in this collection: tufted shaven head, mint robe with a blue patterned collar and hem, an open red-ruled book held out in one hand, a mauve sash trailing. Pale geese and lotus behind; two clay toys — a black tiger, a painted horse — at the lower left. She gives a child who is never shown a whole childhood, and puts a book in his hands.

The Calligraphy

薛蟠之子, “the son of Xue Pan” — a possessive rather than a name, and it credits the father, where the novel’s one sentence about him is really about his mother.

Connections

• Xue Pan 薛蟠 — his father, who made Xiangling his wife only after his own wife had poisoned herself.
• Xiangling 香菱 — his mother, who dies bearing him.
• Zhen Shiyin 甄士隐 — his grandfather, and the only person in the novel to mention him.
• Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 — his aunt, who gave his mother her name.

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