The Red Chamber Read online

  Her mother waves the pills away, looking at Pan. “Go ahead. Tell your sister the mess that you’ve gotten us into this time.”

  “Don’t, Mama. It isn’t that bad—” Pan protests.

  Baochai cuts him off. “Let Mama take one of her pills before we talk any further.” As Mrs. Xue swallows her medicine, Baochai steels herself. “Now, why don’t you tell me what happened, Pan?”

  “Two days ago I bought a beautiful girl, barely sixteen years old, at the slave market. I paid three hundred taels, and had her sent to my place that afternoon,” Pan begins in an aggrieved tone. “Barely an hour later a man called Zhang Hua turned up claiming that he had already bought her, and had not taken her home because he was arranging a wedding for the following day. A fight broke out.” Avoiding Baochai’s eyes, Pan admits that Zhang had been beaten pretty badly. “And then, early this morning, Zhang’s family went to the magistrate to ask about bringing charges for assault and battery.”

  “How badly did you hurt him?”

  “I told you it wasn’t me. It was the pages.”

  “But still, they were under your orders. How badly was he hurt?”

  Pan looks down. “Two of his teeth were knocked out, and I think he may have broken his arm—”

  Her composure breaks. “A broken arm! How can you stand there telling me—” She cuts herself off, drawing a deep breath. “You must send the girl to Zhang’s house—”

  “What would he want with her? He’s injured. I haven’t even had a chance to touch her—”

  “All the better. Don’t you understand you must show you are sorry for what happened?”

  “But I don’t want to give her up.”

  “You can find another girl easily enough! It’s not worth all this trouble to keep this one.”

  “I’ll keep the girl and give him some money.”

  “It’s too late for that. They have already gone to the magistrate. If they bring a charge, you could be clapped into jail at any moment!”

  Pan looks stricken, as if this has not occurred to him. “All right,” he says sulkily.

  “And then,” she continues, “you must send money, saying that it is for Zhang’s medical expenses. What sort of man is he, anyway?”

  “He’s the son of a small landowner, I think.”

  Pan speaks dismissively, but Baochai is alarmed. As a landowner, Zhang is probably both literate and possessed of significant financial resources.

  “If they are educated, we can’t try to fob them off with some token amount, and expect them to be satisfied.” She looks at her mother, biting her lip. “How much should we send, then? Three hundred?”

  Her mother thinks for a moment, then nods. “We can’t afford not to be generous.”

  “Let’s make it four hundred, to be safe.” Baochai turns back to her brother. “Now go home and attend to this right away. I don’t want to see you until you have returned the girl and sent over the money.”

  Pan looks chastened and a little frightened, as if the severity of the matter has at last sunk in. After he leaves, Baochai feels her mother’s gaze on her, but neither of them speaks. They are all too familiar with Pan’s impulsiveness and ungovernable temper. Thrown out of school when he was ten for fighting, he had since been educated by a tutor at home. He had been so backward that despite all her father’s beatings, there had never been any hope of his passing the Exams. Seven years later, when Mr. Xue died and Pan inherited his position as Imperial Court Purveyor, he had taken to drinking and cockfighting, gambling and chasing women, without any thought of the future. It was, in fact, Pan’s wildness that had forced the Xues to leave Nanjing a year and a half ago and come north to take refuge with the Jias, who were after all only relatives by marriage. Nevertheless, Baochai has thought of her brother as foolish and lacking in self-control, never as violent.

  Her mother, breaking the silence, seems to put Baochai’s thoughts into words. “Somehow, I never thought that Pan would ever really hurt anyone.”

  It suddenly strikes Baochai how old her mother looks. “Maybe he got carried away.” She tries to make light of the affair.

  “He always gets carried away. But maybe even he feels that he went too far this time, and will finally learn a lesson.”

  Mrs. Xue breaks off, as Lady Jia’s body servant Snowgoose comes in.

  “Lady Jia sent me to tell you that breakfast is about to be served.”

  “Oh, yes. We’ll be right over.” Baochai helps her mother to her feet, smiling brightly to conceal her anxiety that Snowgoose has overheard their conversation.

  4

  Even before Daiyu steps off the barge onto the dock of the Grand Canal, the hot wind hits her: dry and dusty, full of grit and sand from the Gobi desert more than a hundred li north of the Capital. The sun even has a different look here in the Capital, glaring and yellow, its light undiffused by shade or greenery. Squinting, she sees a dozen servants with sedan chairs and a wagon waiting on the dock for their arrival. She wonders how long they have been waiting there in the hot afternoon sun. She cranes her neck and sees the Capital in the distance, its gatehouses and towers piercing the sky, its walls stretching as far as she can see. All above the city hangs a faint black cloud, like a smudge in the sky.

  She has barely taken her seat beside Uncle Zheng when the bearers heave the sedan chair to their shoulders and set off at a brisk trot. She clutches the windowsill, pressing her nose to the gauze window. There is nothing to see here, just a few large buildings that look like storehouses and a jumble of ramshackle houses along the canal banks. However, as the sedan crosses the dusty, empty stretch before the city walls, she becomes aware of an unfamiliar stench, compounded of coal smoke, cooking oil, manure, and rotting garbage, all stewing together in the late summer heat. They pass through a massive gatehouse, flanked by a few dozen uniformed guards, the walls more than five paces thick.

  Then they are in the city, the sedan surrounded by a jostling throng of human and animal traffic. There are palanquins, ox carts and donkey carts, peddlers balancing their wares from wooden yokes across their shoulders. The wide avenues, so different from Suzhou, are laid out at right angles, like a chessboard. Her ears are filled with the spine-tingling shriek of a knife sharpener’s whetstone, the clang and hiss of cooking pots, the scrape of wheels and the jangling of harnesses, and above all the clamor of a hundred voices raised in argument and bargaining and gossip. The northern dialect, with its harsh, barking gutturals, grates on her ears. Like a child learning to speak, she silently mouths the new sounds, her teeth and tongue trying out the unfamiliar positions.

  As the sedan slows to get out of the way of a richly dressed man clattering by on horseback, Daiyu looks down the side street towards a lively marketplace. There is a butcher in a bloody apron, cages of squawking fowl, pyramids of peaches and apricots. At the edge of the crowd she notices a woman holding the hand of a little girl, standing as if mesmerized before a pile of gooseneck gourds. The woman, with her sloping shoulders and silky black hair, reminds her of her mother, and as the sedan pulls away she turns and watches the woman as long as she can.

  After about five minutes, she feels the sedan bearers slow to a walk. Uncle Zheng, who has been dozing in the corner of the sedan, opens his eyes. “There’s Rongguo Mansion.”

  She presses her nose against the window in time to see a towering triple gate with crimson pillars, flanked by two massive stone lions. The huge central gate is shut, but the smaller ones on either side are open. Above the central gate hangs a tablet reading:

  RONGGUO MANSION

  FOUNDED AND CONSTRUCTED BY IMPERIAL COMMAND

  She makes out the inscription before they sweep through the left gate. They shoot through a narrow corridor enclosed by high, whitewashed walls, the bearers’ feet jogging in perfect unison on the stone pavement.

  “It’s a strange household,” Uncle Zheng says.

  Daiyu turns away from the window to look at him curiously. All through the long barge journey up the Gra
nd Canal, he had seemed distant and preoccupied, his head buried in stacks of official documents. “What do you mean?”

  He gives a short laugh. “Most people think that Granny Jia runs Rongguo Mansion, but it’s your cousin Baoyu that rules the roost here.” He does not look at her, continuing to gaze out the window, although there is nothing to be seen but high blank walls. “It’s all on account of that jade of his.”

  “He couldn’t help being born with it.”

  “Maybe not. But the way he chooses to flaunt it, the way that he uses it to lord over gullible people …”

  Even though she can tell that her uncle does not relish the topic, she cannot help asking, “Will I get to see him? Will I get to see the jade?”

  “See him? You won’t be able to move without tripping over him. He lives in the Women’s Quarters!”

  Given how strict her uncle appears to be about matters of propriety, it surprises her that a boy, almost a grown-up, is allowed to live among unmarried girls.

  Now he is staring out the window again. “Things would be different if Zhu were still alive.”

  “Zhu?”

  “My eldest son. He died seven years ago, right after passing the Exams.”

  She is about to ask more when she feels the sedan being lowered to the ground. The sedan bearers disappear, and in their place appear four handsome young page boys, only fifteen or sixteen years old. They must be entering the Women’s Quarters, where no full-grown male servants are permitted. The pages carry the sedan through a gatehouse with a hump-backed roof of half-cylinder tiles. As they pass beyond the latticework gates she sees a green mountain springing steeply out of the ground before her, covered with flowering shrubs and mossy crags. It is so tall that she cannot even see its peak. “How can there be a mountain like this right in the middle of a city?”

  “That?” Uncle Zheng says, his gravity momentarily lightened by amusement at her surprise. “We had that built ten years ago for the Imperial Visitation.”

  “How can you build a mountain? And what’s an Imperial Visitation?”

  “We had the dirt and rocks and plants carted here, basket by basket. Your great-aunt—may she rest in peace—was an Imperial Concubine. One year His Highness decreed that all the Palace Ladies might pay a visit to their families at New Year’s. We built the Garden for her.”

  Something about the way her uncle says “the Garden” strikes her, as if it were something known to everyone, like “the Great Wall” or “the Emperor.”

  “What’s the Garden?”

  Uncle Zheng shouts out the window to the bearers. “Go the long way around the mountain, so Miss Lin can see the Garden!”

  The sedan veers onto a path lined with low trees. She catches glimpses of ripening plums amid glossy dark leaves, and hears the rush of water. She looks up to see a small waterfall foaming down a wet black rock face. On her other side is a lake, purplish in the setting sun, with a nine-angled bridge leading to a pavilion. Near a grove of spotted bamboo, a snowy egret balances on one spindly leg and dips its beak into the water. “It’s beautiful, like a fairy kingdom!” she cries.

  Uncle Zheng points to a terra-cotta roof amid pine trees along the shore of the lake. “That’s Baochai’s place. That one near the arched bridge is Tanchun’s—”

  “My cousins live here?”

  “The Imperial Concubine decreed after her Visitation that the girls be allowed to live here so it wouldn’t lie empty. The girls and Baoyu, of course.” His mouth twists wryly. He looks at Daiyu kindly. “Who knows? Perhaps you’ll get to stay here as well. Wouldn’t you like that?”

  She does not answer. Her initial amazement is giving way to a sense of the strangeness of the place. She has visited the famous gardens in Suzhou: exquisite spaces, in which mounds of rock suggest mountains, mossy pools represent lakes, by their art evoking the broader sweep of nature. But this garden, in its attempt to duplicate natural wonders in their true scale, seems incongruous, as if a child’s toy has been enlarged to human size.

  Now the bearers lower the sedan again. This time her uncle steps out and leads her to a small gate with a roof curving upwards at the corners like water buffalo horns. Following him around a white marble screen, she passes into a spacious courtyard. At the far end is a large five-frame building with enameled red pillars. Her attention is caught by the birds. They hang in tiny bamboo cages along all four sides of the courtyard, dozens of them: parrots in every tropical color, cockatoos, “painted eyebrows,” thrushes, and finches. Some sit on perches, others cling to the bars of their cages. She wants to stop and look at them, but her uncle is already hurrying ahead.

  As they cross the courtyard towards the main apartment, a young woman darts out of a side door and intercepts them.

  “Here you are at last! We’ve been expecting you for the last hour. Welcome home, Uncle!” The young woman clasps her hands and bends the upper half of her body in a kowtow, but with a roguish smile, as if no one could seriously expect such formality from her.

  Daiyu stares at her. She has never in her life seen a person so exquisitely dressed, in silks as delicate and fluttering as a butterfly’s wings. She turns to Daiyu, her rouged lips parting in a smile.

  “And here’s my new little cousin.” She puts a beringed hand on Daiyu’s hair. “I’m Wang Xifeng. I’m married to your cousin Lian.” She pulls Daiyu up the steps into the main apartment. “Come in. Everyone is dying to see you.”

  Daiyu’s first impression is of a large, opulently furnished room filled with people, some of them sitting on the kang, some of them standing along the walls, all of them as beautifully dressed as Wang Xifeng. She is wearing her rose-sprigged gown, the last thing her mother made for her before she fell ill. It is her favorite gown, but now she is conscious of how rumpled and stained it is from her journey.

  Her eyes fall first on a boy, about her own age, standing before the kang while an elderly woman adjusts the set of a magnificent cape on his shoulders. The cape is of a type she has never seen before, woven of some sort of silky black feather, shot through with gleams of bronzy green iridescence. The boy’s head, with its sleek braid and brilliant black eyes, rises like the crest of some exotic bird from the collar encrusted with golden embroidery. Three girls on the kang are looking critically at him. The oldest one is holding up a basin-sized West Ocean mirror, and the boy is craning his neck to see his reflection.

  “What do you think?” he says.

  “Very elegant,” the old woman approves.

  The oldest girl puts down the mirror and climbs down from the kang to rub the fabric between her fingers. “It will keep him warm and dry, at any rate.”

  But the youngest girl, who looks to be about fourteen, pipes up. “I think boys look perfectly silly in feathers. Better something simple in red camlet or fur-lined felt, I say.”

  “That shows how much you know, young lady,” the old woman retorts sharply. “This is the best quality ‘peacock gold,’ given to the Prince of Nan’an by the Russian ambassador. It’s what fine gentlemen there wear in the winter. This cape is worth a thousand taels if it’s worth a penny. It’s far more valuable than camlet or fur.”

  The boy appears to be much struck by the youngest girl’s opinion. He stares at her face for a moment, before casting the cape onto the kang. “Xichun’s right. It’s too showy. Give it to someone else,” he says carelessly.

  Before the old woman can remonstrate, Xifeng tugs Daiyu up to her. “Look, Granny. She’s here!”

  The room falls silent as everyone turns to stare at Daiyu. She is seized by shyness, but thinking of her mother’s injunctions, she remembers her manners and falls to her knees. “Grandmother,” she says, pressing her forehead to the floor.

  “Raise her up, Xifeng,” the old woman says. Xifeng tugs Daiyu, not gently, to her feet.

  “So this is Min’s daughter. Let me have a look at you.” Lady Jia pulls Daiyu closer. Daiyu expects her grandmother to ask about her mother, or perhaps embrace her. Instead, Lady Jia sim
ply stares at her. Daiyu stares back, trying unsuccessfully to find some resemblance to her own mother. Whatever pretensions Lady Jia ever had to beauty are long gone. Her iron-gray hair is pulled into a tight knob, and her snub nose and broad jaw give her face a pugnacious look.

  “You look like your father,” Lady Jia says. Her tone leaves no doubt that she does not consider this a merit.

  “I can see something of Min in her,” says Uncle Zheng. He has seated himself on one of the chairs near the door and is drinking a cup of tea.

  “Let me see your hand,” Granny says.

  Unable to think of a reason for refusing, Daiyu puts out her right hand.

  Granny clutches it in her hard, dry grip and draws it a few inches from her eyes. “Hmm, very pretty. Fingers as slender as scallions. Even prettier than yours, eh, Baochai?”

  The oldest girl on the kang, the one who had been holding the mirror, looks up and smiles. “Yes, Granny.” Daiyu is afraid that she will be offended by the comparison, but her placid face shows no sign of displeasure. Unlike Daiyu and the other girls, Baochai’s figure is womanly, with full hips and breasts. Her honey-colored gown, though clearly costly, is drabber than the pinks and greens the other girls wear. Her complexion is beautiful: almost poreless, with the flush of a peach on her rounded cheeks. She gives the impression of distinction, but on closer scrutiny her face is not really pretty. Her mouth is rather tight and thin-lipped for her broad face, and her smallish, single-lidded eyes make her face look expressionless.

  “How’s your father’s health?” Lady Jia asks.

  “Good.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Forty-four.”

  “Your mother gave birth to a son some years ago, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, but he died when he was only three.” Daiyu still winces at the memory of the sweet, delicate little boy.

  “Your father’s getting on. Why didn’t he get himself a concubine then, when your brother died? Now he has no heir, and the Lins are about to die out.”