鸳鸯

Her Story

Yuanyang ran Grandmother Jia’s apartments. She held the keys, knew the contents of every box, and had the old lady’s ear — which in that household is a form of power, and in Chapter 40 the novel gives her a chapter title of her own, 金鸳鸯三宣牙牌令, calling the dominoes three times as mistress of the drinking game.

Chapter 46 is the chapter she exists for. Jia She — the elder master of the house, and Grandmother Jia’s own son — decides to take her as a concubine, and the household is set to work persuading her. She refuses everyone. Then she comes before Grandmother Jia and the assembled family with her hair down and says she will not have him, and while she is speaking she puts her hand up into her hair and cuts: 回手打开头发就铰. The women around her grab her arm, but half a lock is already off. She swears with heaven and earth for witness that if she is forced she will die or take vows, and asks that her throat rot if she is lying. Grandmother Jia, furious, keeps her.

Chapter 71: crossing the garden at night she comes on two people behind a rock — Siqi and a man, whom Siqi identifies as her cousin. Yuanyang tells nobody, and the secret holds until the search of the garden three chapters later.

Chapter 111: Grandmother Jia dies, and the protection dies with her. Yuanyang opens her dressing box, takes out the lock of hair she had cut off that year, tucks it into her breast, unties the sash from her waist, ties it at the place she has been shown, and kicks the stool away. 可怜咽喉气绝，香魂出窍 — the novel treats it as loyalty rather than despair.

In Xiang Li's Hands

She kneels back on her heels, a rust-red robe spilling over a blue-grey underskirt, and her hair is down — one heavy black fall drawn forward across her shoulder to her knees. Her left hand holds the hank of it; her right holds an open pair of scissors against the hair, blades apart. The face is calm and frontal. Behind her the whole sheet is a grey and blue storm-wash flecked with white; there is no room, no Grandmother Jia, no Jia She. She is painted at the instant before the blades close, with no audience — which is the one thing that scene in the novel actually had.

The Calligraphy

鸳鸯 — mandarin ducks, the standard emblem of a married pair, given as a name to the woman who cut her hair to refuse a marriage; the novel itself plays on the irony in the Chapter 46 title. The inscription takes the personal name alone, not the fuller 金鸳鸯 with the family surname that Chapter 40 uses. It is set vertically at the upper left, brushed straight into the storm.

Connections

• Grandmother Jia 贾母 — her mistress, whom she served and followed into death.
• Jia She 贾赦 — the elder master, whose demand she refused in Chapter 46.
• Siqi 司棋 — whose tryst in the garden she stumbled on and did not report.
• Qin Keqing 秦可卿 — the dead woman whose apparition shows her where to tie the sash.

Others of the same kind · maid – Grandmother Jia's apartments Hupo 琥珀 · Feicui 翡翠 · Boli 玻璃 · Zhenzhu 珍珠 · Yingwu 鹦鹉 · Yingge 鹦哥 · Cailuan 彩鸾 · Xiuluan 绣鸾 · Xiufeng 绣凤 · Wenguan 文官

Named on these pages Jia Mu 贾母 · Siqi 司棋 · Jia She 贾赦 · Xing Furen 邢夫人 · Yanhong 嫣红 · Hupo 琥珀 · Feicui 翡翠 · Boli 玻璃 · Yingwu 鹦鹉 · Jin Wenxiang xifu 金文翔媳妇 · Jin Cai 金彩 · Jin Wenxiang 金文翔 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