Back to the Classics Challenge #24

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

A classic by a POC author. For the first round of this challenge, I read this 18^th century Chinese magical realist novel in the one-volume abridgement from Anchor. It was so delightful I read it twice, mainly because it took me two reads to get all the characters’ names and kinship relations straight. But I was so beguiled by this story that after I won $50 in a lottery – an obvious intervention by the three lucky gods - I spent half of it on the four-volume translation by the highly respected husband-and-wife translator team Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. The 2500 pages were a joy to read.

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

 This family saga narrates the insensible but real decline of two branches of a seemingly wealthy aristocratic family in 18th century China. It’s a marvelous novel, episodic, sadly funny in the never-ending hassles and calamities the author inflicts on the characters. This Chinese author, like his moralist contemporaries such as Dr. Johnson, has the usual things to say about the vanity of human wishes. But this well-trod ground is made less tedious because the problems of growing up, love, work, conflict and destiny are filtered through Chinese templates as influenced by ancient beliefs and superstitions, Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism.

Chia Pao-yu, the hero of this family saga, is a smart, talented, loving teenage boy, but lazy and too sensitive for his own good. Extremely self-absorbed even for his age. Pao-yu is so besotted with his own feelings and responses that he does not notice the trouble his passivity and impulsive actions will bring down on the vulnerable people around him. Though the heir and the apple of the eye of the Matriarch, he never thinks about his future as head of the family and Confucian officeholder. So he doesn’t study for all-important examinations to enter the bureaucracy. As a dreamy realist myself, I was down with our teenage hero’s reluctance to become just another cog in a corrupt, harsh, and sclerotic bureaucracy.

Chia Pao-yu sometimes evinces bi-curiosity in other boys and he exchanges long looks and talks with the Prince of Peking. But generally he has zero interest in male pursuits such as cock-fighting, dog racing, gambling, drinking, and playing around with singsong girls. He would rather spend time with his affectionate maids and girl cousins his age in a Never-Never Land of visits, parties, drinking games, aesthetic pursuits, and, since they are all teenagers, personal care and fashion.

Just because the Chia family business is feudal does not mean it is exempt from the usual problems of family businesses: abuse of power, conflicts over money, favoritism leading to poor management, over-reliance on only a few talented members, disgruntlement at feeling left out of decision-making, and infighting over the succession of power from one generation to the next. Any reader with experiences involving a family will recognize the predictable testing of the lines, clashes, ambushes, battles, and ceasefires as natural in a family where privacy – as the western world understands it - does not exist. 

Family relationships are also constantly strained by unsuitable sexual attraction, squabbling among concubines and the first wife, and friction between in-laws. The social chasm between first and second wives—who  were usually bought from lower social classes — lead to much conflict and so did the jockeying for promotions and wage boosts among the  domestic servants.

Other curious ethnological topics include:

·         the influence of hierarchal kinship relations on etiquette and polite language;

·         beliefs about propitious days (e.g., best days for travelling, moving, and getting haircuts);

·         celebrations of holidays like the Lantern Festival, Tomb Sweeping Day, and New Year’s;

·         food and more food and gawd so much food: braised eggplant, yam cake with dates, chicken marrow shoots, tofu skin buns, shrimp balls, chicken skin soup, pigeon eggs, ham stewed elbow, pheasant soup, bird's nest porridge, and – yum yum - fried dough fritters, to name only a few of the 200 hundred dishes mentioned in this novel.

·         the use of proverbs in everyday conversation, like the obvious ‘no use crying over rice already cooked’ to the obscure ‘a lean camel is bigger than a horse’ to the very Chinese ‘If the King of Hell tells you to die, who dares to keep you here?’

·         funeral customs of the rich and prestige-seeking.

I’m into the history of medicine and pharmacy so of special note to me, the writer gives examples of the interest pampered people had in shopping for doctors, talking about their ailments, and taking elaborate medications for what ails them.  A doctor gives a diagnosis:

From my diagnosis, your lady is a person, gifted with a preëminently excellent, and intelligent disposition; but an excessive degree of intelligence is the cause of frequent contrarieties; and frequent contrarieties give origin to an excessive amount of anxious cares. This illness arises from the injury done, by worrying and fretting, to the spleen, and from the inordinate vigour of the liver; hence it is that the relief cannot come at the proper time and season.

Such a combination of hard-headed sense and scary dangerous nonsense, like Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1721). Traditional Chinese medicine is filled with humors out of balance and evil spirits, but wisdom and insight too — prolonged anxiety damages health; happiness can be a sure sign of stupidity; smart creative people are more excitable and less likely to be content.

Reading history and cultural anthropology about traditional ways of life provides descriptions and plausible explanations as to what people thought and did. It's important to understand the challenge that the Confucians faced when they sought to balance austere values with warmer values. That is, a benevolent gentleman moderated the emphasis on harmony, hierarchy, continuity of the family, and subordination of the individual to the group with kindness, loyalty, friendship, individual expression, enjoyment of the arts, and the duty of telling truth to power. This novel also breathes life into the strain between Taoism (which teaches love of money, love of fame, love of romantic and erotic desire, love of family will impede enlightenment) and Confucianism (which says men have a duty to contribute to society and build material wealth and good reputation for their family).

But it’s also important to read fiction to get a sense of what it felt like to live in 18^th century China. Young people feel stifled and bored, certain they have a narrow lean future. The sly adults are so irresponsible, willful and incorrigible, such Un-Confucian role models, the reader starts to wonder. Was the author hinting Confucianism under Manchu rule was a dead letter? That it was defunct in theory and ineffectual in practice, a teaching to be taken no more seriously than the prospect of a career in an authoritarian surveillance state, totally dismaying to and unfitting for an intelligent subtle man with any sense of integrity?

Basically, I was enchanted by this novel. I see it as up there with Tale of Genji and Anna Karenin and Dirty Snow as a masterpiece of literature. I look forward to re-reading its entertaining 2800 pages. But I readily admit it’s an acquired taste. Getting the names and family relationships straight takes focus. It may be difficult to picture the scenes if one is unfamiliar with a family compound – rooms, halls, studios, gardens, and, never forget, walls - in traditional China. The moral and ethical foundations for behavior have no familiar basis or if familiar are out of date, laughably archaic, in our post-modern money-mad world.