迎春乳母

Her Story

The woman who nursed Jia Yingchun, and who has traded on it ever since.

In Chapter 73, with Wang Xifeng ill and the Garden slack, Tanchun reports to Grandmother Jia that the servants have stopped playing for pennies and opened a proper gambling bank — stakes of thirty, fifty, three hundred strings, and a fight half a month back. Grandmother Jia orders an inquiry. Eleven bankers are found; of the three principals, one is Yingchun’s nurse. She is given forty strokes and turned out of the Garden for good.

Baochai, Daiyu and Tanchun get up and ask for her, on Yingchun’s account. Grandmother Jia will not have it: these nurses, she says, trade on having suckled a young master or mistress, and make more trouble than anyone — she wanted one to make an example of, and here is one.

The rest comes out at once. Yingchun’s 攒珠累丝金凤, a filigree gold phoenix strung with pearls, has been gone for some time; the nurse pawned it to cover her losses. The maid Xiuju wants to report the theft. Yingchun forbids it, would rather lose the piece than make a fuss, and picks up a copy of the 《太上感应篇》 to read while the argument goes on around her. The nurse’s daughter-in-law then arrives to beg Yingchun to plead for the old woman, and when refused, starts totting up what the household has supposedly spent on her. It takes Tanchun to end it.

Yingchun is scolded by Lady Xing the same day for not controlling her own nurse. She answers that the woman fed her, so the woman may scold her and not the reverse.

In Xiang Li's Hands

She stands mid-argument in black, blue and lavender, one hand up palm-out, mouth open, the other caught at her sash. Jade earrings, a jade bangle, a string of beads at the throat — the ornaments of a servant who has done well. Her feet are planted on nothing; there is no room, no Garden, no one to answer her. The painting gives her the gesture and removes the audience.

The Calligraphy

迎春乳母, four characters down the upper right: not a name but a relation — she is identified by whose milk she was, which is exactly the claim Grandmother Jia says such women live off.

Connections

• Jia Yingchun 贾迎春 — whom she nursed, and whose gold phoenix she pawns.
• Grandmother Jia 贾母 — who has her flogged and expelled, and refuses to
• reconsider.
• Xiuju 绣桔 — Yingchun’s maid, who wants the theft reported and is talked down.
• Jia Tanchun 贾探春 — who exposes the gambling bank, and who ends the quarrel
• over the hairpiece.
• Lady Xing 邢夫人 — who blames Yingchun for the scandal rather than the nurse.

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