Recently, I've gone back to reading my favourite novel of all time, Cao Xueqin's The Story of the Stone, aka Dream of the Red Chamber. I've been happy to find the book as engrossing and the characters as alive as they were the first time around, and now that I have the benefit of hindsight, it's much easier for me to remember every one of the extended, copious cast. A bit of a hurdle for first-time readers, but masterfully executed.
I wonder how many other English fans there are of the novel these days? If you're not familiar with the book, I'll try to hook you. The Story of the Stone is one of China's "Four Great Classical Novels," alongside the more famous Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Water Margin. Stone follows the story of Jia Bao Yu, a young, rich boy in Qing dynasty China. Doted on by his grandmother, Bao Yu is raised alongside the girls of the family, and is with them when the family constructs a massive garden (think "private park") in their family compound. The girls and Bao Yu are sent to live there, practically independent of the adults (although constantly supervised by their army of distinctly-characterized servants), and we watch them grow up in this little paradise, as the the family – suffering from corruption, scandal, and financial woes – crumbles around them on all sides. As this is going on, a more supernatural story is weaved in between the lines, especially via a wandering Taoist and Buddhist monk, come to watch the progress of the spirits – the "romantic idiots" – they saw descend to earth and become the characters we see today.
Stone is rightly famous for its characterization and voices, you really can hear every one of them quite clearly after you get to know them. The book's earliest readers (more on this in a second) clearly thought so, too. The strongest voices, of course, belong to Bao Yu and his romantic interests: the practical and intelligent Bao Chai, and the temperamental and ephemeral Dai Yu. This little love triangle is a popular spot for fan debates, and I certainly have my own opinion, though I caution against treating the story as a pure romance, when there are so many other interesting storylines going on around them. I personally find the family's decay more fascinating, and how it relates to the "illusory paradise" of the garden and how that relates to Buddhist philosophy.
But the most fascinating part about Stone overall is also the saddest: the book isn't complete. Cao Xueqin died after writing about two-thirds of the intended novel. The novel was "finished," possibly with the support of Cao's wife (although that's a very complicated story), or possibly as a straight-up forgery, by a man named Gao E, and that ending entrenched itself into the history of the novel. If you bought, say, the Penguin edition of the book today, the first three books would be by Xueqin, and the last two by Gao E. Official or not, Gao E's story has a very different tone and feel to it, and it's up to the individual reader to decide which parts feel like the right continuations and endings, or if they'd rather content themselves with the ghostly end of the incomplete original. Cao Xueqin littered his book with allusions and foreshadowing, a lot of which goes over our heads when we're not reading in the original language, but it's clear that a lot of it went over Gao E's head, too, because his endings didn't always line up!
Then there's the commentaries: some of Xueqin's earliest readers, possibly family or friends, wrote commentaries in the margins of his original drafts that tell us a lot about the story. From them, we know that a lot of the story is Xueqin talking about his own past, and that some of the characters feel as alive as they do because they're based on real people, the commentators always complimenting Xueqin on capturing those voices, many of which seem to be long lost. So the story about illusions and reality also becomes about phantom memories from real life. Then, through no intent of the author's, it also became about a phantom story that was never completed!
That about sums it up (if I got anything wrong, please correct me!). How about you, have you read this classic of Chinese literature? How did you find it? Have you ever read it more than once, despite its size? I'm interested to hear from you!
by blackdrazon