Above is a scene from the 1986 TV version of The Story of a Stone or The Dream of the Red Chamber. The character above is Bao-yu's beloved (and cousin), Lin-yu.The Story of a Stone is an extremely popular novel from eighteenth-century China. Initially, its author was not known, and the manuscript was not published until 1791. Our anthology contains only a small part of the original novel; the full English translation is in five volumes. I currently have volumes 1 and 5.
The Story of a Stone follows the life of a wealthy young man, Jia Bao-yu, from the beginning of his life as his grandmother's pet to his romance with the delicate Lin-yu to his marriage (to another cousin, Bao-chai, a woman who is thought to be more suited to him because of her temperament--and a gold trinket that she was born with) to his entry into monastic life after the birth of his son. Bao-yu, Lin-yu, and the rest of their family live in a estate in the country; however, the family is going into a decline, perhaps epitomized by Bao-yu's reluctance to study and his preference for the company of women. (Lin-yu, on the other hand, is more scholarly although she is also a delicate young lady of sensibility. We will see her and Bao-yu burying flower petals rather than letting them float downstream into polluted waters.) At one point, Bao-yu's father, Jia Zheng, a more conventional man, challenges his son to come up with names for various features in a garden built for Bao-yu's older sister, an Imperial Concubine. The Story of a Stone also contains elements of magic realism in its opening frame story and Bao-yu's dreams. After Lin-yu's death, for example, he tries to bring her back from the afterlife, but he fails.
Eileen Chang's "Stale Mate," on the other hand, is a twentieth-century short story set at about the time of Raise the Red Lantern. Whereas Su Tong's novella and Zhang Yimou's film date from the 1990s, Eileen Chang's story was written during the 1950s after she had immigrated to the US. This story is also set in a more Westernized although not urban setting (whereas Raise the Red Lantern is set in rural Northern China--although we see mostly Chen's compound). In "Stale Mate," Luo, a high school teacher, pursues Miss Fan, a student, even though he is married to a woman who lives at his family's farm. Luo divorces his wife despite his family's protests, but the divorce does not come through quickly enough for him to marry Miss Fan--or so he thinks. Out of pique, Miss Fan pursues a marriage that her family is arranging for her (she is after all in her mid-twenties
), and Luo marries Miss Wang. Miss Fan's marriage falls through, and a few years later she meets Luo again. Luo then divorces his second wife to marry Miss Fan. However, as it turns out, he is convinced to ask his two ex-wives to live with him and his current wife...and so, despite his desires to be modern, he is more or less in the same situation as Master Chen in his compound! Interestingly, he and the former Miss Fan have less money than his ex-wives do.Below are an undated picture of the author Eileen Chang and a picture of a current stage show that is intended to evoke 1930s Shanghai:
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