After talking about Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin—well, not exactly Water Margin, mostly just Ximen Qing and Pan Jinlian—it would feel a little incomplete not to get to Dream of the Red Chamber. Those people who insist on sightseeing in mountain gullies where flash floods can break out at any second may, if one is determined to force the point, be counted as part of Journey to the West, since that whole crowd of death-seeking idiots has basically gone west already. So today it has to be Dream of the Red Chamber.
I have only read Dream of the Red Chamber once, and not even with any great care. Its pleasure is strangely similar to the pleasure of Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness fiction. Woolf writes, “The curtain was blue,” and literature lovers immediately start trembling with excitement: “In setting the curtain as blue, Woolf is invoking melancholy; therefore, at this moment, her inner world is depressed and sorrowful.” If Woolf were still alive, she would probably point at their noses and yell, “It was fucking blue.”
That is exactly the fun of Dream of the Red Chamber: different readers can come away with completely different interpretations. The novel itself is delicate, patient, full of minute shifts in expression hidden between the lines. Its meaning can also shift in tiny ways, like early spring rain before it has formed a definite streambed; at first it can flow anywhere, until the trickles eventually gather into a current. That is probably why there are still so many specialists studying the book.
How many people do you see obsessing over whether Sun Wukong’s slight frown before fighting the White Bone Demon reveals, in that instant, a Buddhist compassion and mercy rising in his heart? There are indeed many people who study Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but their methods often resemble the kind of dinner-table strategist who, belly out and beer bottle in hand, explains domestic and international affairs and insists he could conquer that place in three days. Their discussions lean heavily on strategy and counterfactuals: if Cao Cao had not trusted Jiang Gan, if he had not fallen for Zhou Yu’s scheme of estrangement, would he still have lost at Red Cliffs? As for Water Margin, there is not that much to analyze in the same way. What becomes interesting is when its love, hatred, resentment, and desire are pulled out from beneath the grand banner of righteousness. Ask people which character in Water Margin left the deepest impression, and Pan Jinlian may very well come first.
The reason Dream of the Red Chamber invites endless study is that it is hard to be wrong about it. It does not operate on a simple rule that monsters are monsters and demons are demons forever. Nor is it just a board of loyal ministers and great traitors scheming against each other. Because there is no final “right” and “wrong,” anyone can stand up and say a few words. Someone may think Lin Daiyu is a manipulative little green-tea type; I may think Xue Baochai is a master at detecting exactly that kind of person. Both readings can exist. Over the years I have read all kinds of analysis, shallow and deep, internal and external, until I sometimes have to ask myself: when I read that passage, was that really what the damn thing said?
But there is one character whose interpretations, no matter how I turn them over, always seem to make some kind of sense. Cao Xueqin cannot rise from the grave to point at everyone’s noses and curse them out, so what a character is and how that character lives becomes a game played by later generations. This character is not like Lin Daiyu, Jia Baoyu, or Xue Baochai, whose thin streams have long since merged into channels that later readers can follow. She seems almost dispensable. Whether one analyzes her or not does not greatly affect the entire structure of the novel. Naturally, I like this sort of marginal figure. It is the same reason I like Cao Cao more than most people do: when everyone follows the crowd and calls him treacherous, it only proves that the openly strategic parts of him are the parts people do not like.
The only character in Dream of the Red Chamber I have ever seriously thought about is Miaoyu.
Miaoyu was originally the daughter of an official family. After her family declined, she became a Buddhist nun, though she kept her hair and practiced within Green Lattice Nunnery in the Grand View Garden of the Jia household. Because she came from a cultured official background, she was accomplished in antiques, refined objects, poetry, painting, and tea. Many scholars of the novel argue that such an aloof, unsociable figure could not have been placed inside the Jia family’s Grand View Garden without a particular purpose. The fact that Miaoyu appears in the judgment verses also suggests that she has a function in the book.
Her judgment is unusually direct:
Wishing to be pure, yet never pure;
Speaking of emptiness, yet not empty.
Alas, a nature fine as gold and jade
Finally sinks into mud and mire.
This nun who practices while still keeping her hair cannot achieve either purity or emptiness, and so she is destined to fall into the mire. Later interpreters often explain her failure to be “pure” and “empty” as a forbidden feeling for Jia Baoyu. I agree with this to a point. She uses tea brewed with snow collected from plum blossoms the previous year as an excuse to invite Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai to drink tea. Jia Baoyu then arrives uninvited. When there is no cup for him, Miaoyu gives him the green jade cup she has just used herself. Lin Daiyu notices this tiny gesture. By contrast, when Granny Liu visits the Grand View Garden and drinks from a cup, Miaoyu does not even look at it before ordering a servant to throw it away. Jia Baoyu assumes Miaoyu simply has a mania for cleanliness. Of course, many readers have seen precisely in this contrast her feeling for him.
I do not think that is the whole story.
Inviting Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai for tea is easy to understand. Miaoyu is certain Jia Baoyu will come looking for them. She cannot directly invite the young nobleman of the Jia family, so she borrows the presence of others—especially the two women Baoyu circles around every day and cares about most. Since the invitation is ostensibly for tea, the excuse must also be elegant enough. Winter plum snow, summer lotus dew, rootless spring rain, a thin frost on autumn persimmons—only such excessively refined things could bring in Lin Daiyu, the master performer of tea, and Xue Baochai, the master appraiser of that performance.
The matter of throwing away the cup Granny Liu used is also not hard to understand. When Granny Liu enters the Jia household, she is treated as a performing monkey. The gap in knowledge and experience between the upper class and the poor can make money, and it can also entertain people. Granny Liu does not understand the life of the rich, and the resulting mismatch produces joke after joke. But the ones laughing are the members of the great household. They do not say outright, “We are mocking her,” yet they keep handing her things designed to produce more mockery.
When Miaoyu throws away the cup, she has already failed the Buddhist principle that all living beings are equal. Beyond that, she is choosing a position within the amusement built out of class difference. Everyone in the Jia household takes pleasure in Granny Liu. If, at that moment, someone refused to enjoy the joke or stood up to stop the mockery, would that not amount to placing oneself on Granny Liu’s level? So clinging to dragons and attaching oneself to phoenixes is, in the end, a way to survive.
To cling to Jia Baoyu as the dragon and attach herself to Grandmother Jia as the phoenix is not simply right or wrong. It is Miaoyu’s method of living inside the Jia household. It is also the basic reason she can never cleanse herself of worldly attachments. Winter plum snow, summer lotus dew, rootless spring rain, autumn persimmon frost: tea brewed from these things does not truly divide itself into strong and weak by some absolute standard. But if Miaoyu says the flavor is different, says its meaning is inexhaustible, then it becomes different and inexhaustible. In that small nunnery that appears cut off from the world, tea tasting is already a sign, a culture, a code. To drink a cup of tea with her naturally marks one as a person who understands tea.
The person drinking the tea may understand nothing, but the person brewing it can speak about the relationship between the universe and humanity. So just drink. Whether you taste strength or lightness depends on how far the two of you intend to perform. The person brewing the tea may not taste the difference either, but strength and lightness are not decided by water and leaves; they are decided by who sits across from you. So just drink. Whether the flavor is strong or faint depends on what purpose you have in letting the person intoxicate you more than the tea.
In Gao E’s continuation of Dream of the Red Chamber, Miaoyu is given an interesting episode. One night she hears wild cats mating, is stirred by desire, and because of her secret love for Jia Baoyu, has an erotic dream. This plot has been cursed thoroughly by readers who think Gao E defiled the Miaoyu that Cao Xueqin had so carefully created. I am not sure that is fair. From beginning to end, no matter how solitary, proud, ascetic, or detached Miaoyu appears, she cannot escape the ending written in her judgment.
If anything, the readers are the ones too easily excited. They impose on Miaoyu a kind of rule, as though the fact that she practices as a nun with unshorn hair automatically creates a set of prohibitions around her. But can that kind of rule truly sever a person from desire, from good and evil?
Tea may be light or strong, and its meanings cannot be exhausted. Once people are locked into fixed categories of good and evil, tea loses its strength and lightness too.