Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“The Dream of the Red Chamber is a peculiar novel to write a review for. I’ve been reading it on-and-off over the course of the last three months, and I’ve had to reread my favorite sections to really collect my thoughts. In reflecting, I’ve come to the conclusion that the novel is pretty worthwhile.

For the uninitiated, The Dream of the Red Chamber is an 18th-century Qing Chinese novel, among the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. In the frame narrative, a humble primordial stone begs a Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest to help him experience the pleasures of the mortal “red dust.” The stone is thus incarnated as the pampered heir Jia Baoyu, who cultivates a doomed love for his cousin Lin Daiyu in the pleasurable Daguanyuan garden and navigates the declining fortunes of four aristocratic families. Due to my limited knowledge of Chinese, I elected to read Chi-chen Wang’s translation using the Wade-Giles romanization (I will refer to the characters in pinyin). Although Wang ultimately abridged the 120-chapter novel into 40 chapters and removed much of the poetry and nuance introduced by Cao, I found his adaptation to be suitable for a first read-through where those details would have been inevitably glossed over anyways.

The story reads in an almost episodic fashion, with various courtly vignettes informing an overall metanarrative of societal decline. Due to this structure, most of the characters in this novel are static, and as the novel progressed, quickly made themselves unlikeable to me, either through their actions or ignorance. Baoyu, our protagonist, was a prime example. His petulance, passivity, lust, and hedonism deeply frustrated me as the troubles of his family became clearer. In fact, at times he literally sits and stares catatonic as events unfold around him. Don’t mistake this for a negative, though — his inability to take responsibility enhanced for me the message that all pleasure regresses into dust, and a certain turning point in the middle of the book made me feel really sorry for him. The only characters I could truly root for were the truly innocent who underwent horrible psychological and physical abuse at the hands of others, usually female servants victimized by either Baoyu’s ignorance or the Macchiavellian antiheroine Wang Xifeng.

My main criticism is with the pacing. Perhaps it is a consequence of Wang’s effort to compress 120 chapters into 40, but I found myself incredibly confused as to who was who. It took me a solid few minutes with a family tree online to truly understand the complex relationships between the four families. I’d sometimes start reading a chapter and give up halfway through because I didn’t know who any of the characters were, which really hurt the episodic nature of the text and made it harder to connect with the characters. It wasn’t a huge issue, though. In my opinion, all that means is that this text will take extra effort to digest.

I want to end this review by talking about the ending (in a spoiler-free way). The thing is, it completely contradicts everything that’s been established about the characters, and subverts the overarching narrative Cao was building up. Yet it contained some of the most beautiful literature I had the pleasure of reading in the book. Puzzled, I sleuthed online and learned quickly that the last 40 chapters of the original 120 had been written by an unknown author with completely different intentions from Cao. In other words, for the last third of the book, I too was a captive of the “red dust,” too blinded by the feel-good writing to question its authenticity. Yet I maintain that the ending is beautiful, and I think its dubious authorship enhances its value. Is Baoyu’s happy conclusion illusory by necessity? This is a question I hope to revisit upon future examinations of this text later in life. The truth is that we will never know, and accepting that fact is our first step to abjuring the red dust.”

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