62 pages • 2 hours read
Dream of the Red Chamber, Volume 1
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Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
The chapter begins with the mythic story of the origin of a magic stone, which a goddess discarded during a cosmic building project. In finding the stone, the monk Impervioso and Taoist Mysterioso saw its powers and decided to give it a new lease on life. Impervioso and Mysterioso bring the stone to the fairy Disenchantment, who is incarnating many magical objects to give them the opportunity to experience human life and romance. Impervioso and Mysterioso decide to bring the magic stone and return themselves to the land of mortals, to do good and to bring men to enlightenment.
A monk named Vanitas finds the stone after its human life many eons later. After discovering the meaning of the stone’s story to be “love,” he renames himself the “Passionate Monk” and transcribes the story to publish. Many monks retell the story, but the narrator relays the original transcription. The story is about a man named Shi-yin, who lives near Bottlegourd Temple. He dreams of a monk and Taoist bringing a stone to find life on Earth. He wakes to two eccentric men wandering the streets, and the monk tells him that his daughter, Zhen Ying-lian, will bring his family pain:
The monk pointed his finger at him, roared with laughter, and then proceeded to intone [...] Fond man, your pampered child to cherish so [...] Beware the high feast of the fifteenth day, When all in smoke and fire shall pass away (36).
He ignores the warnings, and instead meets with his neighbor and friend Yu-cun, a once wealthy boy who now works as a poor copyist in the Bottlegourd Temple. Yu-cun is a skilled poet, and he writes poems about his love with Shi-yin’s maid. Shi-yin hears these poems and sends Yu-cun to the capitol to show his skills.
After Yu-cun departs, Shi-yin’s daughter Ying-lian disappears, and the family is devastated. A fire starts in Bottlegourd Temple, and their home burns to rubble. Shi-yin sells the family farm, which can’t become the family’s new home because brigands have overtaken it. The Zhen family moves in with Shi-yin’s wife and Feng-shi’s father, Feng-su. More sadness and poverty are here, and eventually an eccentric Taoist visits Shi-yin in his new, ramshackle cottage. Shi-yin bonds with the man over Confucian sayings and wanders with him into the countryside, without saying goodbye to his wife. This leaves Feng-shi and her two maids from their city home alone when a mandarin arrives from the capitol and asks to see a member of the Zhen family.
Chapter 2 Summary
The mandarin from the previous chapter is Yu-cun, who used his skills for poetry recitation to become a magistrate thanks to Shi-yin’s funding of his trip to the capitol. He has returned and asks for Lucky the maid’s hand in marriage—she will be his second wife. Although Shi-yin is gone, Feng-su and Feng-shi make the decision to hand the maid over to Yu-cun to bring honor on the family. Soon after the marriage, Yu-cun’s first wife dies, and Lucky becomes the “lady of the house,” a position of high honor.
Eventually, some of Yu-cun’s decisions and his ego rub some of the magistrates the wrong way, and he is dismissed from his post. Yu-cun decides to install his wife and child in a comfortable home and travel the country, seeing the sights. He eventually comes upon work as a tutor, and he begins to travel between tutoring jobs, using his education to train wealthy children. Between two of these jobs, Yu-cun finds himself taking a walk in the countryside, where he sees a blind, deaf monk in a temple. It startles him that the man cannot hear or see him, and he decides to drink some wine at a small inn before returning home.
In the inn, Yu-cun discovers an old friend, an antiques dealer from the capitol who still does business there. Yu-cun and the antiques dealer Zi-xing begin to talk about some prominent members of the Jia family, who are distant relatives of Yu-cun. During this conversation, the men talk about “humors” or “cosmic fluid” (77), after Yu-cun hears the remarkable story of Bao-yu, the boy from the Jia family who was born with a piece of inscribed jade in his mouth. Yu-cun lectures Zi-xing on the nature of humors, and how some children are born with entirely good or entirely bad humors, while most people are a mix of the two. As the men leave to return to the city, a voice calls to Yu-cun, claiming to have good news.
Chapter 3 Summary
A friend of Yu-cun’s, whom the ministry has also dismissed, tells him many ministers are going to be reinstated. Yu-cun asks his patron Ru-hai to talk to Jia Zheng, his brother-in-law, about helping him resume his post. He travels with Dai-yu, Ru-hai’s now motherless daughter, to the capitol and is promptly reinstated. The narrative shifts to the story of Dai-yu at the Rong mansion in the capitol.
Dai-yu meets her cousins, aunts, and kindly Grandmother Jia. The author goes into lengthy descriptions of the palace and the gardens. Dai-yu is careful with her manners, as she is unaccustomed to this environment. Dai-yu talks a bit about her illness and about the monk who assessed her condition and requested she become a nun. She denied going with the monk, but he told her that she would continue to be sickly if she remained outside the monastery.
Later, Dai-yu spends time with her grandmother, her cousins, and Lady Wang, who all attend to her needs and make her feel as comfortable as possible. Dai-yu learns that she is much more schooled than her other female cousins, who can barely read or write. After dinner, Bao-yu arrives. Dai-yu is immediately struck by him; she believes she has met him before: “How strange! How very strange! It was as though she had seen him somewhere before” (101). Bao-yu, when he sits down to inspect his young cousin, also believes she is familiar. Bao-yu wears an elaborate outfit and his jade on a string around his neck; he becomes upset and throws a tantrum when Dai-yu says she was not born with jade, as he sees it as a bad omen. Lady Wang had warned Dai-yu of her son’s outbursts, but the violence still startles Dai-yu. Later that night, she is troubled that she so deeply upset her cousin. She and Bao-yu share a bedroom underneath an outdoor canopy, and Dai-yu’s assigned maids comfort her as she cries over Bao-yu’s behavior once she comes to her bedroom.
The chapter ends when Dai-yu wakes the next morning and comes into Lady Wang’s chambers to find her deep in discussion with the other women of the house. A letter has arrived stating that a cousin in Nanking named Xue Pan has taken another man’s life, and the family is requesting he come to the capitol to help smooth over the situation.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Cosmic interference with daily life is a prominent theme in the early chapters of The Story of the Stone—the mythic beginning of the book, which tells a fable of a godly stone inscribed with messages, sets the scene for the cosmic happenings and fated encounters that define later chapters. The stone’s early introduction is marked by the appearance of “a monk and a Taoist [...] each of them remarkable for certain eccentricities of manner and appearance” (47). The monk and the Taoist will repeatedly appear as symbols of the stone’s cosmic origins. Their appearance in the story notes a fated encounter, or the special nature of a character—Dai-yu is marked in this way, for example, when she says to her family in the capitol in the third chapter, “Once, when I was only three, I can remember a scabby-headed old monk came and said he wanted to take me away and have me brought up as a nun” (90).
In Chapter 2, Yu-cun gives a lengthy explanation of the cosmic intensity of some people, saying they have a special blend of “humors.” He describes the main character of the novel, Bao-yu, as one of the souls who this fate has marked. The jade—a small, inscribed stone—appeared in Bao-yu’s mouth at birth, and he wears the stone on a “woven cord of coloured silks” (101) around his neck. This calls back to the heavenly stone of the first chapter and is assumed to be a smaller, reincarnation of that same stone. The jade is a symbol of fate and cosmic interference and marks Bao-yu as a wild-tempered, romantic boy, destined for a special kind of life. Wherever the jade goes, there is trouble.
Finally, these early chapters establish the setting of the novel as well as the customs and social structures that define Chinese society of the period. Dai-yu’s experience in the Rong mansion is the most obvious indication of these customs. Dai-yu reflects at various moments on differences in customs based on class and wealth, saying, “However, she could see that many of the rules of this household were different from the ones she had been used to at home” (99). It is clear here—and in other moments when Dai-yu is anxious about offending her wealthy relatives by sitting in the wrong chair at dinner or in the reception halls—that social customs play an enormous role in perceptions of self and reputation. Despite the occasional awkwardness of maintaining these customs, family and hospitality are important facets of Chinese culture. This is evident from the events of these early chapters, when wealthier relatives take in family members in need, and favors from close friends and family members allow down-on-their luck characters, like Yu-cun, to become prominent members of the ministry.
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