甄夫人

Her Story

Wife of Zhen Yingjia of Jinling and mother of Zhen Baoyu. She belongs to the novel’s mirror family — the Zhen (“true”) house that doubles the Jia (“false”) one down to the name of the favourite son.

Chapter 57: Wang Furen takes Baoyu to pay a call on her. The Zhen establishment turns out to be barely distinguishable from the Rong and Ning mansions, one or two things in it grander, and there is indeed a Baoyu in it. She keeps them to dinner and they come home at dusk; Baoyu finally believes it. Wang Furen returns the hospitality with a first-rate banquet and a named opera troupe for the lady and her daughter, and two days later mother and daughter go back to the post without a formal leave-taking.

Chapter 115, after the family’s rank has been restored and her husband has gone to the coast on the Emperor’s business, she comes to the Jia house with her son. The two Baoyus meet and cannot stand each other. She asks Wang Furen to keep an eye out for a match; Wang Furen offers Li Wan’s cousin, the third young lady. Her reply is the flattest sentence anyone speaks in the chapter: what does our family have left now — I only fear people will think us poor.

In Xiang Li's Hands

Midwinter. She stands among bare grey branches in a heavy dark robe stroked through with fur-black shadow, a jewelled headband with a gold ornament, holding a bundle of lit incense sticks with one thread of white smoke rising off it. A large pale yellow disc glows behind her shoulder. Her head is bowed and her eyes are lowered.

Neither of her two scenes involves incense, a winter, or a moon. She declines the banquet and the marriage bargaining and paints her making an offering instead — the woman of the true house, in the cold, with a blank behind her.

The Calligraphy

甄夫人 — surname and 夫人, the address for a wife of official rank, brushed down the lower right. Not the 甄太太 the servants and Wang Furen use, and no personal name, which she does not have.

Connections

• Zhen Baoyu 甄宝玉 — her son, and Jia Baoyu’s double in face, name and boyhood temperament.
• Zhen Yingjia 甄应嘉 — her husband, dismissed, restored, and sent to pacify the coast.
• Wang Furen 王夫人 — her hostess in Chapter 57, and the go-between she asks for in Chapter 115.
• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — brought to call on her as a boy, and disappointed by her son as a man.
• Zhen San Xiaojie 甄三小姐 — the daughter she brings to the capital with her.

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