5. When the Author of The Dream of the Red Chamber Gave Up on his Main Character

The author got tired of his alter-ego midway through the novel

(Grandmother Jia and Jia Baoyu - from the 2010 TV version of Dream of the Red Chamber)

Imagine this: you are an author, writing your first (and only) novel. You started out with a great idea: you will write the first true novel in Chinese history! It will be about the brilliant and interesting people you knew when you were young and your family was one of the richest families in all of China - and then the sudden collapse of your family and your own dreams.

Five years into your project, your main character has begun to bore you. He is both you, and yet not you. You realize your main character doesn’t do anything - he is too young and too ignorant about the world. Other people in the story have interesting lives, why not write about them? You still have a good idea where the novel is going but since your book will never be published, why not write about some of the other characters who actually do things?

This is what I think happened to Cao Xue Qin, the author of the Dream of the Red Chamber (DRC) mid-way through his project, which - as I’ve said before - he didn’t actually complete.

The Dream of the Red Chamber starts out focused entirely on one character, Jia Baoyu, the boy born with a piece of jade. At first we see everything through his eyes. Then, as the novel continues, we occasionally see the world from the point of view of another character: Xifeng, his cousin’s wife.

The author started out depicting Xifeng as a moral monster and it seems clear he intended to blame the fall of his family on her bad decisions. She was going to be villain of the novel. But the author had to show Xifeng doing bad things and so she became the second real character of his novel. Then the author started describing the world from Baoyu’s maid’s point of view. By the middle of the book we sometimes see the world from the perspective of Lin Daiyu, the girl Baoyu thinks he loves.

The Turning Point in the Author’s Feelings about Baoyu

As I see it, the turning point in the author’s attitude towards his main character takes place when the author shows his main character flirting with one of his mother’s maid-servants. The girl responds to Baoyu’s suggestive comments with this response: I’ll tell you a secret… if you go to the little courtyard to the east, you will see Huan-ko and the Rainbow. This was apparently a way of saying: You can make love to me later, in a more private setting.

Baoyu’s mother had been dozing but she heard this comment and she understood the maid’s meaning. She slapped the maid, told her she talked like a prostitute, and said she was fired and would never work for the Jia family again. Meanwhile, Baoyu “slipped away and didn’t know what happened to the maid.”

What happened was: the humiliated maid killed herself by throwing herself into a well.

Baoyu had caused the girl’s death by flirting with her in his mother’s presence and by failing to take responsibility for his actions and failing to plead with his mother to spare the girl for responding to his own attempted seduction. After his mother woke up, Baoyu did nothing to help the young girl and so she killed herself. The reader understands that Baoyu didn’t think anything bad would happen to the girl because nothing bad ever happened to him.

From this point on, the author spends more and more time on other people and less time on Baoyu. The author stops telling us what Baoyu is thinking and starts describing other conversations which Baoyu never knew about. In what turns out to be the bridge too far for the author’s relationship to his former main character, Baoyu is turned into a blithering idiot by the words of Daiyu’s maid who tells him: My mistress is going south to Nanjing because her father’s family is arranging a marriage for her.

Baoyu reacts to this like a prize fool. He goes back to his house and refuses to get out of bed or speak. A rational man who loved a young woman would make an effort to learn if her maid was telling him the truth. An educated man would understand that everyone sometimes lies for their own personal reasons. A young man with spirit and agency would make an effort to marry the girl that he loved before she went south to marry someone else. Baoyu does none of these things, instead he acts like a child who can do nothing but cry when balked.

In one of the stupidest scenes of the entire novel, Baoyu points at a model river boat in his room and says “Look! There is the boat which has come to take Lin Daiyu away! Give it to me.” His maid gives him the boat and he says “Now, Daiyu can’t leave.” The reader knows Baoyu is from an educated family, how could he behave like this? It’s embarrassing to read, much less write about such a pathetic character.

For the rest of the novel, Baoyu plays almost no role. He is pushed around by his mother. He does nothing when the family manor is invaded by an Imperial Censor and the houses are ransacked by Imperial guards. He is forced to marry Baochai, and lifts not one finger to help Lin Daiyu while she is dying, broken hearted in the days before his wedding.

Baoyu Losses his Magic Jade Stone

Late in the novel - in the part edited and likely written by Gao E - Baoyu losses his magic jade stone. After this Baoyu takes no actions in the novel and rarely says anything.

For Baoyu to lose the jade stone should not have been possible since we were told at the start of the novel that that Baoyu and the jade stone are effectively one and the same. As I wrote in my essay about the framing story for the DRC, the jade stone is conscious and was allowed to experience the world of man through the efforts of two demi-gods, a Daoist immortal and Bodhisattva. Baoyu is the magic jade given human form - that’s what the author wrote.

Even stranger, at very end of the published novel, Baoyu meets a young man named Zhen Baoyu. Zhen sounds like the Chinese word for True, just as Jia sounds like the Chinese word for False. In the published text, it is stated that Zhen Baoyu was born on the same day as our former main character and looks just like him but his attitudes about the world are completely different since Zhen Baoyu believes studying for the Imperial Exam and living up to the expectations of one’s parents are the only way to behave.

We know from some annotations on the original text made by Red Inkstone (likely the author’s cousin) that this True Baoyu would play a large role in the last section of the novel and he would be the one to return Jia Baoyu’s magic jade - which leaves open the question of how he got possession of the magic jade in the first place.

However, in the published novel, Zhen Baoyu plays no role at all. Instead in the last chapter, a mysterious monk returns Baoyu’s magic jade and when he demands 10,000 taels of silver as a reward, Baoyu talks with the monk for an hour like they were old friends and the mysterious monk departs without any reward at all.

The novel concludes with Baoyu taking the first level of the Imperial Exam, and passing it, along with his young cousin Jia Lan. Baoyu immediately disappears and is only seen once more by his father, in a dream. A fitting ending for a character who both the author and this reader lost interest in many chapters earlier.

For me, the novel benefits from Baoyu’s absence, because the the chapters which are not about Baoyu are the best part of the book.