I have a confession to make; I had even more trouble getting through “A Dream Of Red Mansions” than I've had getting through the other classic Chinese fiction on the “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die” list. This may be because it's so long (the online version I read runs to 1811 pages), or because I read it in translation, or for any one of a number of other reasons. You'll have to judge for yourself, so let's get started. Before we begin, though, I must also confess, if anyone was wondering about the title, that I'm not at all sure what it means. There are mansions here, to be sure, and plenty of dreams too, but as near as I can tell the mansions are not red and no one dreams about them in particular. Oh well.
The story begins with a goddess who cuts a number of stone blocks with which to repair the sky. She has one extra, so she tosses it off a mountain top and it slides down into a valley. A Buddhist and a Taoist find it and somehow learn that it would like to be born as a human, so they manage to bring this about. Shortly, a boy is born with a piece of jade in his mouth. He gets the name Baoyu and becomes one of the main characters in this story.
He's far from the only one, however. “A Dream Of Red Mansions” concerns the doings of two related families, each with parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, sons and daughters and cousins and miscellaneous relatives, and highly devoted long-term servants. All told, there are over a thousand named characters here, many of whose names are annoyingly similar to the Western ear – Baoyu, for instance, has a relative named Baochai, who is somewhat confusingly a girl despite the similarity of her name to his. In addition to that, many of the characters are also called by their relationship to the family, such as First Aunt or Third Nephew, and a few have not only the names they were born with but one or more “courtesy names”. This is quite common in Chinese culture, but it doesn't make the characters any easier to identify for people who aren't accustomed to it, like me.
Leaving aside the proliferation of names, the family into which Baoyu is born starts off as pretty wealthy. They live in a compound consisting of two mansions and a number of smaller structures with names like Happy Red Court, surrounded by gardens, trees, and small bodies of water. The family also owns a number of farms, fisheries, and other sources of income, although the novel's action for about the first three quarters of its length takes place in the compound – characters occasionally leave, but the action rarely follows them until much later on in the story. And at the end of just about every chapter, the narrative says something like “If you want to know what happened next, read on.” Which is cute, and maybe another aspect of traditional Chinese literature for all I know, but to a Westerner – duh.
Anyway, what goes on in this compound? All kinds of things – we're barely at the beginning of the story, after all.
When the story proper gets rolling, Baoyu is roughly twelve years old, and so are most of his cousins. He develops into a popular, attractive, and rather lazy boy who loves to hang around with his girl cousins and his various maids (and yes, the narrative implies that not all of his play with these girls is innocent, though it never comes right out and says so). The adults around him tend to worry about this, but they are fond of him and the rest of the children. As you might expect, there being so many people around, the novel doesn't concentrate for long on any certain character, Baoyu or anyone else. One of the results of this is that reading “A Dream Of Red Mansions” gives us a pretty fair idea of what Chinese life was like in the mid-18th century, when the book was issued.
For instance, when people come to visit the compound, they frequently drop in on relatives with whom they have no special business to “pay their respects” (it's not entirely clear to me just what that involves other than saying hello) before they go to the people they actually need to see. Especially when they pay their respects to their elders, they often kowtow, which if memory serves includes getting down on one or both knees and touching one's forehead to the ground. This is evidently a part of a critical Chinese virtue called “filial piety”, which seems more important to display than we find in current Western culture – it can go some way to attracting important government jobs. Many people in this family do in fact have such jobs, although there's not too much detail about exactly what they do. Even the young woman of the family appointed to the position of imperial concubine doesn't describe her actual duties much, although if “concubine” means in China what it means here, we can get a pretty good idea.
Rather than focusing on the outside activity, “A Dream Of Red Mansions” focuses largely on the things the people do within the compound, particularly the women. At one point, Baoyu and his various cousins start a poetry club. In the springtime, one of the girls notices the profusion of flowers in the various gardens. She gathers several of the other girls, and Baoyu, and makes up a few rules for poetry that the participants are to follow. They take it in turns to write verses in which the first line is taken from ancient classical poems. The verses must use particular poetic styles, name a certain flower, adhere to certain philosophical theories, and so on and so forth. If anyone fails to observe these rules, that person must take a good-sized drink of wine. What's more, the person whose verse is judged the worst must similarly drink. By the time the game is over, you can imagine what the group looks like. We get each of the verses, too, so again there's a good deal of Chinese culture to be observed.
That's just one example of the details of Chinese home life to be found. There are loads of others in the work's 1811 pages. You may notice, though, that there's not a whole lot of plot to be seen here. The story gets a bit repetitive as a result. We do get a theme of sorts toward the end, in which the family loses a good deal of status due to imperial disfavor, robbery, and so forth, but at least partly because the novel does not focus on any particular character, it can be difficult for it to retain the interest of someone accustomed to Western types of literature. I'm glad enough to have read it, if only to get some experience with another culture. I'm also glad enough to have finished the thing.
Benshlomo says, it's good to visit other places, and it's good to come home.
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