The Red Chamber

by Pauline A. Chen

  The thought that it had all been futile, that they might have spared Qiaojie all the suffering and discomfort of the medical treatments, hurts her. If they had known she was destined to die, they would have spent more of her last weeks just holding her and playing with her. “Let’s not talk about it. What’s done is done.” Her voice shakes.

  “That’s easy for you to say, after you’ve gotten us into this fix.”

  “I’ve done the calculations and thought it over again and again. I can’t think of anything to do but borrow the money.”

  “You think it’s so easy to borrow money? Who were you proposing to borrow from?”

  Xifeng answers slowly, “Well, I had thought of asking Cousin Rong.” In fact, she has intended to ask Mrs. Xue to borrow money from Jingui, but does not want to put Mrs. Xue on the spot by making the request before all the others.

  “Cousin Rong! He barely has enough money to keep body and soul together himself.”

  “Well, then, I’ll ask Cousin Yun.”

  “Didn’t you ask him to petition for an appeal on our behalf, but he refused to see you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then why would you think you could borrow from him? There isn’t anyone—”

  “Actually,” Xifeng is forced to admit, “I was thinking of asking Mrs. Xue if she might ask her daughter-in-law for a loan for us.” She looks at Mrs. Xue and catches on her face an unmistakable expression of dismay.

  “Why, yes, I would be happy to ask Jingui, but …” Mrs. Xue trails off.

  Xifeng understands that relations between Mrs. Xue and Pan’s wife are so strained that even in this extremity, she does not feel confident of her ability to get a loan.

  Baochai speaks up, flushing, “When Pan comes back from the south, he’ll be happy to lend you anything you need. Only we’re not quite sure when he’ll be back …”

  “No, that isn’t right,” Lady Jia intervenes suddenly. “We shouldn’t ask our kinsmen to loan us money when we haven’t done everything possible ourselves.”

  “What do you mean we haven’t done everything possible?” Xifeng says. “What else can we do?”

  “The solution’s obvious, isn’t it?” Lady Jia smiles as if pleased by her own cleverness. “We can sell Ping’er, of course.”

  Xifeng recoils. How cruel to think of selling Ping’er at a time like this! “Impossible! She’s Lian’s wife!” She wants to dissuade Lady Jia before Ping’er, who is in the bedroom with Qiaojie’s body, overhears anything to frighten her.

  “She’s only a concubine. Concubines are often resold. Lian certainly has no use for her now.”

  “What will he say when he gets back?”

  “He’ll have no right to complain. What does he expect us to live on while he’s in prison?”

  Xifeng tries another tack. “It’s hardly worth the trouble to sell her. A good maid goes for only forty taels at most.”

  “Why sell her as a maid, when we’d get so much more for her as a concubine or even a principal wife? She’s still young and pretty. I don’t see why we wouldn’t get two hundred taels for her.”

  Even though she knows it is unwise to criticize Lady Jia directly, she cannot help saying, “Don’t you think it’s cruel to ask her to serve a new husband after she has just lost her child?” She wishes she had cut out her tongue before mentioning the idea of borrowing money. She would by far rather forgo Qiaojie’s funeral than lose Ping’er.

  “How is it cruel? Her job is to serve us. Now the best way for her to serve us is to go to another master. Besides, she is one extra mouth to feed, and she barely lifts a finger around here. How can we ask the Xues to borrow money when we have a lazy servant eating us out of our house and home?”

  “She ate more before because she was nursing Qiaojie, and she served us by taking care of your great-granddaughter.” It hurts her the way Lady Jia acts as if Qiaojie were hardly part of the family. How differently she would have behaved if Qiaojie had been a boy. “Now that Qiaojie is gone, she will help out more with the cooking and cleaning.”

  “We don’t need her for that anymore. Besides, she is moping around so much that I doubt we’ll get much work out of her.”

  Xifeng is about to retort when, to her surprise, Baochai says, “You can’t expect her not to grieve for a while, but she will get back to work eventually.”

  It is the first time that Baochai has ever come close to contradicting Lady Jia. Xifeng looks at her with real gratitude. If only Baochai and the other girls side with her, she will be able to save Ping’er.

  Lady Jia pauses, gazing at Baochai, as if giving her words a weight that she no longer gives Xifeng’s. “I think you are forgetting how painful it must be for Ping’er to live here, being reminded of her loss. It will be much better for her to go somewhere new. Perhaps she’ll even have a new baby soon, and that will help her forget.”

  Xifeng cannot speak. She is too disgusted by how Lady Jia feigns concern for Ping’er to support her own selfish ends. She remembers how Lady Jia had forced her to accept Lian and Ping’er’s marriage, in the hopes that Ping’er would give the family an heir. That was barely over a year ago, although it seems another lifetime. Now that Lady Jia has been disappointed in her hope, she is ready to discard Ping’er. Xifeng’s old awe of Lady Jia is gone, replaced by something akin to contempt. Perhaps she would have been more tolerant of Lady Jia if she had made some adjustment to the family’s fall—but she still expects to be waited on hand and foot, eating her fill of the best food without noticing whether there is enough for the others.

  Yet now Xifeng humbles herself, willing to do anything to save Ping’er. She falls to her knees. “Please don’t sell her. She has served me since I was a little girl.”

  Lady Jia looks away, her face like stone. “Don’t bother pleading. My mind is made up.”

  9

  Over four weeks have passed since Baochai’s visit to Daiyu. More than once she has told herself that she must make an effort to see her cousin again, but too many events have intervened. There had been Qiaojie’s death, then New Year’s. They had still been keeping vigil for Qiaojie, and no one had had the heart to arrange even the simplest celebration. After that had been the funeral and burial. Then came weeks of bitterly cold weather when it was hardly possible to venture outside. The last few days there has been a slight thaw. Still Baochai has found herself making excuses not to go, afraid of what she will find.

  At last she tells herself she must go. She has brought Daiyu to this. The least she can do is comfort her if she is still alive, or weep beside her coffin if it is too late. On the fifth day of mild weather, she bundles herself up for her walk to the southern part of the Capital. As she cuts south through the city she thinks about how Ping’er has been debilitated by grief since Qiaojie’s death. She has stopped eating, and spends the whole day sitting listlessly on the kang in the bedroom. Sometimes at night, Baochai is woken by the sound of her weeping. By contrast, although Qiaojie’s death had clearly been a devastating blow to Xifeng as well, Xifeng was still struggling to live. When Xifeng wasn’t comforting Ping’er, she was trying to argue Lady Jia into keeping the maid. Many days she disappeared for hours, trying to borrow money from relatives or old friends, Baochai suspects. Baochai pities Ping’er, but is unwilling to ask Jingui for money to keep her. In the first place, Jingui would refuse. On top of that, practically speaking, selling Ping’er is the best solution to the Jias’ financial problems. Finally, some calculating and pragmatic voice inside her, which she does not entirely like, tells her that the sale of Ping’er, while a loss to Xifeng, is a gain to herself. With the gentle and more tactful Ping’er as her delegate among the servants, Xifeng had enjoyed far greater power and popularity than she might otherwise have. If the Jias ever regain their position, Baochai will be able to establish her precedence over the household more easily with Ping’er gone.

  She feels wetness on her face and looks up. A few large snowflakes drift down from the gray sky, but she thinks n
othing of it, as it almost never snows heavily in the Capital. She has begun to notice this cold-hearted pragmatism in herself more often, most recently in her reaction to Qiaojie’s death. She had felt sorry, of course, but a part of her had been relieved that the family would no longer be squandering resources and money on the little girl. When Xifeng and Ping’er had woken the family with their wails over Qiaojie’s body, Baochai noticed that of all of them, only her own and Lady Jia’s eyes were dry. She had taken out her handkerchief and lowered her face to hide this fact, but it was the first time it had occurred to her that she and Lady Jia were similar in any way.

  Drifts of snow are swirling around her now, and she is having trouble seeing more than five or ten paces ahead. Her feet have grown cold, and it has become difficult to walk. She sees that already more than an inch of snow has accumulated on the ground. The snow makes everything look unfamiliar, and she gazes around, trying to orient herself. She continues walking, the snowflakes cold on her face, hoping for a passerby from whom she can ask directions. Few people are out in the storm, and she must walk half a li before she comes upon a knife sharpener with his heavy round whetstone slung over his bowed shoulders. He tells her that she has overshot Flowers Street and must walk one street north and one to the west. Following his directions, she backtracks, and begins to look for the Zhens’, expecting to be able to see from a distance the smoke issuing from the forge. Looking back and forth up the street, however, she does not see the column of smoke. It occurs to her that Zhen Shiyin cannot work in all the snow, and that the forge is unlit. She must trudge up and down the street herself, in her now sodden slippers, to look for the place. She goes to the end of the street. Nothing looks familiar, everything blanketed by a layer of snow. Then she goes back the way she came and continues to the other end. To her confusion, she sees no sign of the forge, and wonders if the knife sharpener has misdirected her. She goes down the street again, looking for someone to ask. Eventually, she sees a middle-aged man with his legs bound up in rags sweeping the snow before his house.

  “Excuse me, can you tell me whether this is Flowers Street?” she asks.

  He pauses in his sweeping to stare at her, and gives a brief nod.

  “Can you tell me where Zhen Shiyin, the blacksmith, lives?”

  “I don’t know him. I didn’t know a blacksmith lived here.”

  The man’s reply fills her with uneasiness. It seems odd that a person would not notice a blacksmith’s forge on his own street. Now shivering with cold she continues down the street and starts back up again. The snow seems to obliterate everything, leaving her alone in a white, trackless wasteland. At last, she notices a house with a front yard about the size and shape of what she remembered the Zhens’ to be; only there is no forge or anvil there, just a ramshackle chicken coop. She flounders through the snow to the side door and hammers on it. She waits for about a minute, then hammers again. After knocking one more time, she hesitates before pushing on the door. It opens, and she steps through. “Hello? Is anybody home?”

  An old woman, considerably older than Lady Jia, squats on a three-legged stool, fanning the stove with a fan of plaited bamboo leaves. Although the woman appears to be looking directly at Baochai, she evinces no reaction to a stranger entering her house and continues to fan the fire.

  “I’m sorry to intrude on you like this,” Baochai begins, taking a step into the room. “I was wondering whether you could tell me where the Zhens live.”

  The woman makes no reply, but bobs her head vigorously, parting her lips in a gap-toothed smile.

  Baochai realizes the woman is deaf. She steps closer, repeating more loudly with her hands cupped to her mouth, “Can you tell me where the Zhens live?”

  The woman nods and smiles some more. To Baochai’s relief, she says, “The Zhens? They don’t live here anymore.” She speaks in the overly loud, uninflected voice of the very deaf.

  “They used to live here?” Baochai says.

  There is no response. Baochai gestures at the room. “They used to live here?” she shouts. Peering around in the dimness, she thinks she recognizes it as the room where she had visited Daiyu. Because the furniture is different, she did not at first think it familiar, but now she recognizes the narrow kang, the small high window on the far wall, the ledge above the stove. Her heart begins to thump. Where have the Zhens gone, and why have they left? She has heard that poor families move more frequently than rich families, because they are always on the lookout for cheaper quarters, but the Zhens could hardly move with Daiyu in the state she was in. If only she could find Snowgoose and ask her what has happened—but although Snowgoose had mentioned the name of her new mistress, Baochai can no longer remember it.

  “Where did the Zhens go?” She leans down to yell near the old woman’s ear.

  “Down south.”

  “And the young lady?” she persists, miming a bun at the back of the head to suggest Daiyu’s hairstyle.

  “Gone,” the old woman says. For once she does not smile and nod. She shuts the stove with a clang and throws down the fan.

  “Gone?” Baochai echoes. She pauses. “Do you mean—do you mean dead?”

  The old woman nods.

  Baochai stares at her. Surely she is mistaken. It has been barely a month since Baochai saw Daiyu. And yet, deep inside, Baochai had known the last time she saw Daiyu that the end was not far. That was why she had given Zhen Shiyin her gold locket so impulsively; she was afraid that it would soon be too late.

  Though she rarely cries, the tears come to her eyes. The last time she cried was when she had seen Daiyu. Surely that brief, awkward conversation, when Daiyu was scarcely able to veil her hostility at first, could not have been the last time they would ever speak? On her last visit she had mostly been conscious of her own guilt. This time, finding Daiyu gone, she is aware of a haunting sense of loss. Even though the two of them had spoken infrequently since Daiyu returned from Suzhou after her father’s death, in her mind Daiyu has always been the one person to whom she could talk the most freely. Freed from the necessity of maintaining a façade, she has spoken to Daiyu without fear of consequences and has come to know herself through her own words. This was what had happened even in her last conversation with Daiyu. She had spoken of women’s choices, implicitly encouraging Daiyu to make the choice to live rather than die. But hadn’t she also been speaking, without realizing it, of the choice that she herself was making? To accept the imperfections and humiliations of her own situation, to marry Baoyu when he was released from prison, to cultivate her relationship with the Jias in the meantime, to make the best of her life. Still, how much colder and emptier her life seemed without Daiyu! With her mother and Pan, she must always be strong. It was only with Daiyu that she had allowed herself to be weak. She is becoming so hard, she thinks, like a stone, locked in a prison of her own reticence and self-control.

  “When did she die?” she asks, wiping away her tears.

  The woman ignores her.

  Baochai tries again, more loudly. “When did she die?”

  The old woman stares vacantly at a spot on the floor. Baochai turns away. There is nothing more to be said, after all. She thanks the woman and walks slowly out into the snow.

  10

  By the time Xifeng makes it back to the city gates, the snow is well over ankle-deep, and her shoes and socks and trousers are soaked almost to her knees. The shawl that she wears over her head and shoulders has kept her upper body dry during the blizzard, the worst that she ever remembers seeing in the Capital, but her bare hands are freezing. She has trudged almost ten li each way through the snow to the Water Moon Priory in the suburbs. When she saw how heavy and gray the morning sky was, she had not wanted to set out on the long trip. The day before, however, Ping’er had told her that a slave trader had come while Xifeng was out. The slave trader had examined Ping’er closely, even opening her mouth to peer at her teeth. Terrified, Xifeng had forced herself to set out for the Priory to ask the Mother Abbess for a loan.


  She has already gone to almost a dozen people with the same request. Before the confiscation, she had done so many little favors for people. When Jia Qiang, Lian’s cousin, needed a job, she made a position for him buying new trees and shrubs for the Garden. She used Jia connections to help Cousin Yun’s daughter get out of a prior betrothal when a better match offered itself. But now that she is in need, each person has an excuse why he cannot possibly spare even fifty or a hundred taels. People had so little liangxin, sense of decency, these days; they were like the wolf who had been saved from hunters by Mr. Dongguo, who then proposed to eat his benefactor the moment he was hungry. She had reasoned and pleaded until her throat went dry, and still everyone had turned her down.

  Today, she had been hopeful that the Abbess, to whom she had been so generous in the past, would be able to give her something. Because the Abbess continually solicited contributions for the Priory from wealthy families, she almost certainly had a large amount of cash on hand. The Abbess had sat her down and offered her tea cordially enough. She had clucked sympathetically when Xifeng told her about the family’s poverty and Qiaojie’s death. But the moment Xifeng asked for a loan, she exclaimed, “Oh, I wish you had come two weeks sooner!”

  “Why?” Her heart sank, understanding that she was to be put off with some excuse.

  “Didn’t you know? All autumn and winter I’ve been going around getting contributions to build a new wing with a statue of Bodhidharma in it. Just two weeks ago I gave all the money to the workmen.”

  “But it’s the middle of the winter. Surely they can’t start work on it now.”

  “Well, they need the money to buy materials, hire carpenters, and so forth. I am afraid that I really can’t help you. I’m terribly sorry.”