The Story of the Stone (part three)

Since I'm not able to find a large enough picture of the cover to Volume 3, I will post this picture of a couple in the Grand View Garden from www.beijingguide2008.com.  It looks like this couple may be actors dressed as Bai-yu and Lin-yu. 

However, this picture is idyllic and belies the overall tone of this volume, "The Warning Voice."  At the end of the volume, Bai-yu is still living in the garden with *most* of the young people who were there at the beginning, and he and his father have begun to be reconciled to each other, but it is clear that things have begun to fall apart for the family.  Throughout the end of Vol. 2 and the whole of Vol. 3, the adult women (especially Wang Xifeng and Lady Wang but also Bao-chai) are concerned about its financial situation.  Xifeng herself is bedridden at the beginning of the volume after giving birth to a stillborn son.  Bai-yu's half-sister Tan-chun and his sister-in-law Li Wan have taken on Xifeng's duties, and they are constantly struggling to manage the family complex and its servants.  Much of the volume is taken up with the servants' jostling for power, prestige, and stolen goods as well as the family's efforts to discipline them for their thefts, gambling, and drunkenness. Moreover, the family is in mourning for Sir Jia Jing, its nominal head, and the Dowager Consort of the late Emperor.  She is not related to the family, but their social position requires that they enter mourning for her.

Below are 19th century painter Xu Baozhuan's depictions of two of Bai-yu's senior maids.  The first is Skybright, a skilled seamstress with a sharp tongue.  She will be one of the servants fired by Lady Wang, and she will die shortly after she is sent to live with her cousin and his vicious wife.  The second is Aroma, Bao-yu's chief maid and "chamber wife."





In addition, soon after her stillbirth, Wang Xifeng's husband Jia Lian marries another woman secretly and sets up a household with her outside the family's compound.  (As you may know from Raise the Red Lantern, men were permitted to have multiple wives.  However, Jia Lian is afraid how his wife and family will respond to his taking a second wife, and, as I have mentioned above, the family is in mourning.)  Once Xifeng finds out about her husband's secret marriage to You Er-jie, she brings her back to the family compound only to make her life miserable.  Er-jie, by the way, commits suicide after this mistreatment that includes the miscarriage of a son.  This miscarriage was induced by the incompetent doctor whom Xifeng hires for her. 

Jia Zheng's return to the family comes as a relief to them and even the reader.  (Remember that he nearly killed Bao-yu in Volume 2.)  Before his father's return, Bao-yu scurries around to complete all the tasks that his father has set him.  In fact, he has to ask his female cousins to help him compile enough calligraphy.  Nevertheless, father and son reconcile.  Jia Zheng even commissions his son to write a poem on a historical figure, the Winsome Colonel, a woman who goes to war to avenge the death of Prince Heng. 

Below is a picture of Mu Guiyung, another of China's woman warriors.


At the end of the third volume, Bao-yu's companions are beginning to move out of the garden.  Bao-chai chooses to move back in with her mother.  The maid Caltrop must move back in with her master Xue Pan once he returns from a long journey.  He soon marries a cruel and capricious woman who torments Caltrop.  Another companion, Ying-chun, marries, and others will soon follow.

I'll finish with a more desolate picture from the Grand View Garden in Beijing.

The Story of the Stone (part one)

In EN 202, we've read a few scenes from The Story of the Stone, a classic Chinese novel from the 1700s, but I would like to give you a fuller picture of this novel.  After all, the English translation is in five volumes, and the Longman Anthology's excerpts are mainly from the first and the second volumes.

The Story of the Stone follows Bao-yu, a wealthy, spoiled, but idealized young man from before his birth (there is a frame story) through his childhood and adolescence to his decision to become a Daoist monk.  In his early years, his family flourishes, and admittedly, it is easy to lose track of the members of his extended family and their servants who people the novel.  However, Bao-yu will fall on hard times as we will see in the later volumes.  Translator David Hawkes mentions that Bao-yu's story may be a fictionalized version of his author, Cao Xuequin,'s life.  Like Bao-yu, Cao Xuequin came from a wealthy family that lost favor with the Emperor.

That was the short version of The Story of the Stone.   The pictures and text make up the long version of my summary of Volume 1.

Below is a picture of a jade pendant to evoke the pendant that Bao-yu wore around his neck.  (As we learn in the frame story, he had been a jade cornerstone in a previous life.  Curiously, he was the stone that a goddess rejected and a Daoist monk rescued.)


Rescued by the monk, the future Bao-yu meets a flower that will become Dai-yu, his childhood companion and first love.  Below is a picture of the couple.  This appears to be a scene from the end of Volume 1 or perhaps Volume 2.



In 1987, CCTV, China's major television network, broadcast a miniseries version of The Story of the Stone.  (The miniseries, though, is titled The Dream of the Red Chamber, an alternate title for the novel.)  Here is a scene from that series.  In this version, Bao-yu is played by a man, but this role has been performed by a woman in the Shaw Brothers' version  from 1977.
(The Shaw Brothers were based in Hong Kong, which was a British colony and *not* part of China in those days.)

For a little more information, here is a link to a page on the TV series:

http://www.china-guide.com/entertainment/dream.html

I will also post a link to the trailer of the recent TV series:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHUGdUH-3fI



Or you may prefer Bukit Panjang Hokkien Konguay Opera Troupe's rendition of this scene:


If you would like to hear what an operatic version is like, see this video of Dai-yu burying the flowers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwBGFUiK0Bo


I also want to include some pictures that show you how opulent Bao-yu's lifestyle was as well as how beautiful his family's gardens were.  Below is a scene from the recent remake of The Story of the Stone!  In the first volume, Bao-yu's grandmother (Grandmother Jia) is often depicted holding court over her family's meals, so I imagine that this scene might be one of those occasions.


Bao-yu's life, though, is not all pleasure even though he is his grandmother's favorite.  His father, on the other hand, feels contempt for him because he prefers the company of women and dislikes studying.  (Jia Zheng, the father, is a Confucian scholar and civil servant, so he represents a more conventional adult masculinity.)  In one of the scenes that we may read for EN 202, Jia Zheng forces Bao-yu to come up with names and brief poems for the various highlights of the garden he has built for his daughter's visit.  The father appears to despise his son's contributions, but in the end he accepts them.  In another scene that we will not read, Baochai's brother Xue Pan tricks Bao-yu by claiming that his father is looking for him.  Bao-yu's fear of his father is that well-known. 


Below is another scene from this recent remake.  This depicts Dai-yu as a young girl who has just come to live with her relatives (Bao-yu's extended family).  We see Dai-yu's precociousness and pensiveness in this picture.  (She studies in secret and is an accomplished poet as well as a skilled needleworker who destroys her work out of spite.)  However, we do not see her prickliness, but this, too, is a strong element in her character.  As an adolescent, she is constantly bickering and battling with Bao-yu.  She is also jealous of Bao-chai, a more conventional young lady who has also come to live with the family and will marry Bao-yu. 



Here is a picture of Baochai from that same miniseries.  However, this picture depicts her as a teenager.  While Dai-yu is always bickering or brooding, Baochai has a much calmer, friendlier demeanor, and she is particularly noted for her kindness to servants.  As a poet and needleworker, she is talented but not as talented as Dai-yu is.   According to David Hawkes, Baochai and Dai-yu are two variants on the ideal woman. 



The picture below depicts Bao-yu and Dai-yu together in the garden near their houses.  (Yes, as adolescents, each of the young people in the family had his or her own house in the garden.  Previously they had lived with Grandmother Jia.)  This picture is quite fantastic, but it gives you an idea of how stunning the garden is.  (It was built as a venue for a one-day visit by Bao-yu's older sister, one of the Emperor's concubines.)


Here is a more realistic picture of what the garden may have looked like.  In fact, after the filming of the 1987 miniseries, the Chinese government recreated the novel's Grand View Garden.


For more information about this site, see the links below:

http://english.sina.com/p/2008/0806/176446.html

http://www.beijingguide2008.com/grand_view_garden_beijing/grand_view_garden_beijing.html

Finally, the picture below from www.culturalchina.com shows just how crowded with family members and servants The Story of the Stone is!  For example, when Jia Zheng quizzes his son in the new garden, a number of male family members and other "literary gentlemen" accompany them.  Moreover, quite a bit of the latter part of Volume 1 is devoted to the rivalries between the family's servants as well as those between members of the family.  At one point a concubine has a spell cast on both Bao-yu and Wang Xi-Feng because she feels that the family bullies her son.  Bao-yu is the first wife's son, but the bustling Wang Xi-Feng happens to be the young family member who manages the household.  Bao-yu's jade, by the way, breaks the spell once a Daoist monk repurifies the stone.

Study Guide for Final (Spring 2008) -- part 3 (novel & short story)

  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: