真真国女孩

Her Story

Chapter 52. Xue Baoqin tells the poetry circle that at eight she went with her father to the western sea coast to buy foreign goods, and there met a girl of the country of Zhenzhen, just fifteen — a face like the beauties in Western paintings, yellow hair loose and looped, coral and cat’s-eye and emerald all over her head, gold-thread chain mail under foreign brocade sleeves, a jewel-inlaid Japanese sword at her side. She knew the Five Classics and wrote verse. Baoqin’s father had an interpreter ask her for a poem in her own hand, and Baoqin recites it: “昨夜朱楼梦，今宵水国吟” — last night a dream of the vermilion tower, tonight a chant in the country of water.

She is a girl in a story told in a warm room. Nobody in the novel meets her but Baoqin, and the paper is in a trunk in Nanjing.

In Xiang Li's Hands

Golden hair in waves to the floor, a strand of pearls across the brow with a red rose, a crimson-and-gold breastplate over white, one bare leg out with a small boot — and in her raised hand a sheet of ruled pink paper. The ground is a deep indigo swirl, the only dark sheet in this group. Given the sword and the jewels the passage offers, she paints the poem.

The Calligraphy

真真国女孩 — a country and the word “girl”, brushed down the right against the dark ground: a nationality standing in for a name, which is all the novel has.

Connections

• Xue Baoqin 薛宝琴 — the only person who has seen her, and who recites her poem.
• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — asks at once to see the paper, and is disappointed.
• Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 — accuses Baoqin of hiding it, and is right about her.
• Shi Xiangyun 史湘云 — fetched from her rooms to hear the verse read out.
• Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 — sends for Xiangyun, calling her a foreign beauty come to visit.

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