甄士隐

His Story

姓甄名费，字士隐 — a retired gentleman of Suzhou, living in Renqing Lane off Ten-Li Street inside the Chang Gate, next door to a small temple called the Gourd. Comfortable, not rich, and content to be. A wife, 封氏. One daughter, Yinglian 英莲, three years old.

Chapter 1 gives him a dream first: a lame Taoist and a scabby monk carrying an inscribed stone, and a gate reading 太虚幻境 under the couplet 「假作真时真亦假，无为有处有还无」. He wakes before he can read a word of the stone.

Then the losses, in order, in a few pages. At the Lantern Festival the servant Huo Qi sets the child down for a moment and she is gone. On the fifteenth of the third month a lamp in the Gourd Temple takes the roofs and the whole street burns. He moves to a farm ruined by drought and banditry, sells it, and goes to his father-in-law Feng Su, who cheats him over the land and complains of him to the neighbours. Within a year he is old and thin and walks with a stick.

The Taoist comes back down the street singing the 好了歌 — 「世人都晓神仙好，惟有功名忘不了」. Shiyin does not need it explained. He supplies the annotation on the spot: the roll-call of ruined houses opening 「陋室空堂，当年笏满床」 and ending 「甚荒唐，到头来都是为他人作嫁衣裳」 — sewing wedding clothes, in the end, for someone else. Then he shoulders the Taoist’s satchel and walks off without going back into the house.

He is seen twice more. In Chapter 103 Jia Yucun meets him and understands nothing. In Chapter 120, in a straw hut at 急流津觉迷渡口, he explains the stone, the Land of Illusion and the accounts, and mentions his daughter: she went to the Xue family and finished her karma in childbirth. He says it to the magistrate who tried her case and never told him.

甄士隐 is 真事隐, the true events concealed; 贾雨村 is 假语村言, false words in rustic speech. He opens the novel and closes it, and the two men are the book’s own account of its method.

In Xiang Li's Hands

The only sheet of the eight without colour — ink, and a breath of flesh tone in the face. It is also the only one with no bare paper: grey wash floods it corner to corner, ground and weather one substance. He strides right, head thrown back, eyes closed, topknot, thin beard. The robe is four or five enormous wet strokes, black scraped over white, one sleeve flung out behind in a long dark tongue. A stick or a trailing hem curves at his feet. She paints neither the house, the fire, the child nor the Taoist — only the walking away, and the fact that there is nowhere to stand.

The Calligraphy

甄士隐 low on the right, three characters small against a very large grey field — the only marks on the sheet that hold still while everything else moves. The inscription takes the surname and the style name, not 费, the personal name the novel supplies once and drops. That is the correct choice and also the joke: 士隐 is heard as 事隐, the matter hidden, and the man on the paper is signed with the book’s own alias for its subject.

Connections

• Xiangling 香菱 — born Zhen Yinglian, his daughter, lost at three and traced for him only in Chapter 120.
• Jia Yucun 贾雨村 — the poor scholar he financed in Chapter 1, who later judged his daughter’s case; the two names are a matched pair.
• Feng-shi 封氏 — his wife, left behind at her father’s house when he goes.
• Feng Su 封肃 — his father-in-law, who takes him in, takes his money, and resents him.
• The lame Taoist 跛足道人 — sings the 好了歌 outside his door and takes him away.

Others of the same kind · Zhen family (Nanjing) Zhen Baoyu 甄宝玉 · Feng Shi 封氏 · Feng Su 封肃 · Huo Qi 霍启 · Jiaoxing 娇杏 · Zhen Yingjia 甄应嘉

Named on these pages Xiangling 香菱 · Jia Yucun 贾雨村 · Feng Shi 封氏 · Feng Su 封肃 · Huo Qi 霍启 · Jiaoxing 娇杏 · Bozu Daoren 跛足道人 · Xue Pan Zhi Zi 薛蟠之子 · Yu Cun Zhi Zi 雨村之子 · Kongkong Daoren 空空道人 · Jinghuan Xiangu 警幻仙姑 · Shenying Shizhe 神瑛侍者 and 1 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