Back to the Classics 2021 #10

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.

A classic by a POC author. A five-volume translation exists in Penguin, but quailing at the idea of reading 1300 pages, I read the one-volume abridgement from Anchor. Bawk bawk bawk.

Dream of the Red Chamber - Cao Xueqin a.k.a. Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in

This saga describes an aristocratic family in 18th century China as it insensibly declines due to  uncontrolled spending and internal ethical rot. If decadence is the pig-ignorant inability to see the disaster in front of one's snout and the unwillingness to imagine living any differently, the Chia family is decadent to the core.

The novel focuses on a group of teenage girl cousins and their maids with their center the heir, Chia Pao-yu. Pao-yu is intelligent with charm and artistic gifts but he's very young. His strong emotions send him into tantrums and stupefied states. It doesn’t help either that as the object of envy and malice, he is the target of sorcery that makes him sick. Easily moved and brought to tears, he would rather hang out with girls in pursuits like aimless chat, embroidering, reading, poetry clubs, lute strumming, and the never-ending search for cosmotological perfection. They’re teenagers, after all, and so fashion is really important. And spending days in these idle pursuits is much more enjoyable than studying for examinations that will land him a good place in the Confucian bureaucracy.

The author describes daily life in the family compound, as claustrophobic a setting as the palaces of Tale of Genji. With dozens of different personalities and stations and agenda, there’s bound to be a lot of conflict. The author makes us marvel, however, that despite the strict hierarchy of feudal relationships, an austere system of morality, constant surveillance, and a hodge-podge of religious beliefs and ancient superstitions, people are going to do what people do.

That is, get up to hijinks and monkey-shines and shenanigans and felonies. People whose behavior is bound and restricted will go slow, sabotage, smuggle, shirk, lie, play dumb, and abscond. People who must bottle up emotion to save the face of themselves and others will go off like skyrockets when they finally do let out emotion. People will seek as much power as they can, seek the main chance, and make dirty deals. People will pursue revenge, have bully boys beat people up, get in fistfights and beat enemies up in ambushes. People will lend at usurious rates and abet officials in corruption. People will buy relatives cushy jobs in government. People will steal and rape. People will blackmail and murder.

It all happens in the book. And reading it is sheer pleasure.

The novel can be read as the author’s expression of sympathy and respect for women in a culture where not only the female servants such as cooks, maids, and janitors are oppressed in either indentured servitude or out and out chattel slavery. However, not having any freedom either, the girl cousins and the matriarchs have no privacy as we understand it and their behavior is constantly watched and evaluated and thus circumscribed by the fear of gossip. Their behavior is also constrained by strict Confucian morals. It’s strange because the upper class women manage and oversee a large family with hundreds of members and thousands of employees and retainers.

So the girl cousins – smart, beautiful, bored and stifled. And the boys! The future paragons of the patriarchy gaze into space vacantly, carouse mindlessly, fall in love and lust with other schoolboys and female impersonators, all the while not studying for make-or-break exams to get into the civil service. Our teenage boy-hero prefers hanging out with his young female companions, combing their hair and kissing the rouge off their lips. At 16, he still sits in his mother’s lap, which must have been as weird in 1791 as it is in 2021. He says, “Girls are made of water and boys are made of mud. When I'm with girls I feel fresh and clean but when I'm with boys I feel stupid and nasty.”

With rigid pecking orders, ferocious jealousies, and flexible coalitions based on realities from love to 'what's in it for me,' look how the older generation keeps the younger in line. The olds wield like a club the major Confucian teaching that filial piety is the paramount virtue. So parents will think it meet and prudent to lie shamelessly and pull atrocious tricks on their kids for the kids’ own good. And sneaky decisions done for the best of reasons, the author implies, is simply the way it is and must be accepted as immutable. Visit some Confucian temples and get the feeling it’s an ideology that frowns on defying conventions or wasting time lazing, loafing, and goofing, which is practically an art form for the teenagers in this novel.

Having read the abridgement, I am seriously contemplating reading the multi-volume version now. This is an incredible reading experience, especially for those of us hardcore readers who read for sheer pleasure.