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A little over a hundred years ago, there was a movement to try to push the Chinese language away from the Chinese characters.

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Honestly, when you think about it, you can understand the sentiment. The Chinese written language can be daunting to learn even if you are a native speaker. If you want to achieve full fluency and a complete mastery of every possible character, you’ll be studying for a very long time.

But the problem that the anti-character movement has always had is that Chinese characters are actually a good way to transmit subtle information. And besides, Chinese characters have also historically been the linguistic glue that kept the vast country together.

You can see the influence of those characters to this day, actually - especially if you study dialects. For example, take the Taiwanese Hokkien word siáng, which means “who.” Despite the fact that the word is clearly only a single syllable, the most common way to write it per Taiwan’s Ministry of Education is two characters: 啥人, which literally means “what person.”

You’ll see the same thing if you try to say “yesterday” in Taiwanese Hokkien. The word is pronounced tsa̋ng and is clearly one word; yet the characters are written with two syllables, 昨昏, or literally “yesterday evening.”

You also see the same thing in the 訓讀字 (kunyomi) phenomenon in Japanese. This is where Japanese uses Chinese characters to write native Japanese words. It’s a pretty obvious example of places where the characters themselves contain meaning independent of their sound.

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So, for example, 心 (heart) is pronounced こころ (kokoro) in Japanese, which is a native Japanese pronunication. And yet a compound word such as 心配 (anxiety) is pronounced しんぱい (shinpai), which is clearly a reading that comes from Chinese.

Of course, this becomes even more fun when you have the phrase 心を配る, which means to pay attention to something. Here 心 is prounounced こころ, and 配 is pronounced くば - both native Japanese pronounciations despite the fact that both characters use the Chinese pronunication when paired together.

Anyway, this phenomenon only happens because the Chinese characters themselves do indeed convey meaning. In fact, if you think about it for a little while, you’ll realize that the ability of Chinese characters to convey meaning on their own independent of pronunication makes them quite a bit more interesting than the relatively flat Latin alphabet.

And, of course, this also helps explain why characters themselves can be a form of art independent of their meaning - something we see frequently in Chinese calligraphy:

Anyway, the long story short here is that you really should take the time to study Chinese characters if you’re going to learn the language anyway. It’s very rewarding, and is a lot more insightful and interesting than it seems at first.

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You’ve probably never had a family reunion quite like this one.

Cao Xueqin makes it absolutely clear that Jia Yuanchun’s return home is nothing like a normal family reunion:

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When I first read Dream of the Red Chamber all the way through a few years ago, I was convinced that Lin Daiyu was simply emotionally unstable.

Yesterday’s translation passage is actually a pretty good example of her uncontrollable emotions. Her reaction to Jia Baoyu being forcibly robbed of everything that was on him was really over the top:

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黛玉聽說，走過來一瞧，果然一件沒有，因向寶玉道：「我給你的那個荷包也給他們了？你明兒再想我的東西，可不能夠了！」說畢，生氣回房，將前日寶玉囑咐他沒做完的香袋兒，拿起剪子來就鉸。

Daiyu heard what Xiren said and went over to take a look. Sure enough, every single piece was gone. She turned to Baoyu and asked, “Did you give them the pouch I made for you as well? If you ever want me to make you anything ever again, you can forget about it!”

Daiyu then marched back into her room angrily. She picked up an unfinished fragrant bag that Baoyu had asked her to make a few days earlier, grabbed a pair of scissors, and began cutting it into pieces.

We’re going to see this come up over and over again in this book. However, Lin Daiyu doesn’t act this way because she is emotionally immature or out of control or anything like that.

Rather, the reason Lin Daiyu finds herself so caught up in the moment is because her emotions (the 情 we keep talking about) define her character at the most basic level.

Emotion, or 情, is a concept that comes up over and over again in Dream of the Red Chamber. Most English translators call 情 something like “lust” or “passion,” but the truth is that it’s a much more basic concept in this book than those nouns would indicate. Both Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu are defined by their emotions, and both characters seem completely incapable of suppressing the way that they feel in favor of the way that they need to act in any given situation.

Emotion, of course, is a significant part of this book going back to the very beginning, as I mentioned a little over a year ago:

And the interesting thing is that this emotion is never really defined as a “good thing” or a “bad thing” in this story. Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it’s so bad that it’s blamed for the entire downfall of the family, as I noted here:

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In fact, this concept of emotion (情) is also one of the most important things that the famous commentary of Zhiyanzhai (脂硯齋) teaches us:

But, in yesterday’s small translation snippet, we actually see emotion at work. Rather than telling us that Lin Daiyu is emotional, Cao Xueqin does a masterful job of showing us just how strong her emotional response can be.

It’s not out of the question for a girl to feel jealous or frustrated or upset at her boyfriend, like Lin Daiyu did yesterday. However, it is at least a little bit over the top for her to decide to suddenly destroy precious things she has been painstakingly creating just to express her emotions. You’ve got to wonder why she couldn’t just write a poem or go for a walk or sing a song or punch a pillow instead.

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I was wrong yesterday when I said that Jia Baoyu’s statement didn’t have any literary precedent.

Well, I suppose I was sort of wrong. Let me know what you think about this poetic example.

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Jia Baoyu tells us something in the section we read yesterday that I think is actually lost on a lot of scholars of Dream of the Red Chamber.

The key is the identity of the origin of the so-called 女兒棠, which translates into something like “maiden crabapples” or “girl crabapples.”

The scholars who surround Jia Zheng all the time seem convinced that it has something to do with the fictional 女人國 (or 女兒國, as they call it in this book), or “the Kingdom of Women:”

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As is usually the case, there are a few points that I didn’t have time to make in this week’s video.

There’s a big temptation to buy into the marketing out there about language learning. In fact, there’s a kind of frightening combination of the fear of missing out, artificial scarcity, and this idea that there’s some sort of secret that will turn you into the ultimate language learner if you manage to buy into the right program.

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I can assure you that none of that marketing is true. And I know it’s not true because I’ve experienced it for myself.

If you’re really serious about learning a foreign language, the thing you absolutely must do is take control of your own language learning experience.

That’s not easy, of course. It means that you have to move away from the comfort of a textbook or a computerized course and start taking steps into the dark.

It means doing things like making friends with native speakers of your target language, or even spending money on language tutors. After all, the point of learning a language is to actually speak it with somebody else, not to complete arbitrary video game tasks or to reach a high score on some random app or whatever.

This is particularly true when it comes to learning difficult things, such as classical Chinese poetry. As much fun as it might be to try to tackle this sort of thing on your own, or to rely on the assistance of artificial intelligence, the truth is that you’ll make the most progress and will have the most success when you have somebody you can actually talk with about what you’ve been reading and learning.

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We’ve seen a lot of poetic allusions here in chapter 17 of Dream of the Red Chamber. The truth is that you can find the “right answer” to the puzzle of what in the world is going on and what all of this means if you do a bit of searching on Google, Baidu, Bing, or other search engines. And, if you’re not interested in searching for yourself and would rather have the answer given to you, you can always ask AI chatbots to do the searching for you.

However, to really get a feel for what the poems mean and what the chapter is actually about, you need to talk with someone. It’s only when you’re able to bounce ideas off of somebody else that you’ll start understanding what all this stuff really means, and why certain poems are seen as beautiful while others are seen as so-so.

And that’s the sort of thing that no language learning app can teach you.

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In yesterday’s translation post, we saw a term that is certainly quite confusing for all readers:

賈政道：「此處書以何文？」眾人道：「必是『蓬萊仙境』方妙。」賈政搖頭不語。

“What inscription should we write here?” asked Jia Zheng.

“Surely ‘Penglai Fairyland’ would be perfect!” came the response.

Jia Zheng shook his head without saying anything.

Even if your native language is Chinese, chances are that this reference to Penglai (蓬萊) and Jia Zheng’s response to it is going to be confusing.

So what’s going on?

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Since I’ve found myself slightly deficient on time this morning, I’m going to keep this post pretty short and simple.

A few days ago I mentioned that the poetry in this section of chapter 17 actually reveals a lot about Jia Baoyu’s relationship with his father, Jia Zheng:

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Now, if you’re a scholar of Dream of the Red Chamber, or if you’ve been bamboozled by the endless array of scholarly works that are out there, you probably have convinced yourself that the purpose of these poems is some sort of foreshadowing.

To be honest, there is some foreshadowing going on in the background. The somewhat oddly described residences we’ve seen so far are the future places for our favorite characters to reside. And, as you probably guessed, the reasons why these poems are so dense and difficult to understand is precisely because they tell us the fate of each of those characters, in a direct echo of chapter 5.

I’m sure that Cao Xueqin did this on purpose. Part of me feels like he was trying to prank us as readers - to give us something really confusing and difficult to deal with just because he could.

But, at the same time, Cao Xueqin does a masterful job of revealing that relationship between Jia Baoyu and Jia Zheng.

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If you read the passages closely, you’ll notice that Jia Zheng actually seems quite impressed with Jia Baoyu. He never shows it, of course. He never praises his son, and can only scold him and criticize him. But the way Jia Zheng reacts to the other scholars indicates that he is actually quite proud and impressed with his son, and that he seems to enjoy hearing all the accolades.

But the problem is that Jia Baoyu doesn’t see any of this.

This is why Jia Baoyu seems so timid to share his success and his thoughts. He worries a lot about the praise of other people. And the fact that his father is so quick to criticize and scold him causes him to retreat into himself.

I seriously believe that Jia Baoyu’s character has a lot to do with the fractured relationship with his father. And, of course, this is quite modern and advanced for a novel that was originally published in 1791.

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I’m not going to quote yesterday’s translation post. It was kind of a pain, and required looking up a bunch of extremely obscure plant related words that frankly aren’t really worth learning.

All of this begs the most obvious question of all. What in the world is the point?

Well, believe it or not, the point of this passage, and of this chapter in general, is not to show how intelligent Jia Baoyu is. It’s also not to poke fun at Jia Zheng and the sort of person his character represents.

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The passage I translated yesterday was honestly pretty hard to wrap my head around. As usual, it’s not really the language or the words that create a problem. Rather, the problem is trying to figure out what in the world is actually going on.

And it doesn’t help to run into articles that talk around the actual point rather than pointing out the obvious.

The real purpose behind yesterday’s passage is not to make some subtle or hidden political commentary. There might be some foreshadowing here, of course; however, we’ve already seen so much foreshadowing in Dream of the Red Chamber that it’s not even noteworthy by this point.

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I’ll keep this short and sweet and will just point to the video:

The key to understanding these difficult poems is to take your time and pay attention. In particular, you want to look for things that seem odd or strange. Usually there’s a reason why certain descriptions aren’t what you expect them to be.

We’ve got a lot more poems like this coming up soon!

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You’d probably think that there isn’t much interesting going on in segments like the one in yesterday’s translation post.

There really wasn’t too much to it. Jia Zheng asked Jia Zhen how many things are ready. Jia Zhen gave one of those answers that made it clear that he didn’t know any actual details. Jia Zheng asked Jia Lian to come over and give more information. Jia Lian came over, read from a piece of paper, and that was that.

So why do we have this strange interlude? Why stop all of Jia Baoyu’s poetry to tell us this?

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Let’s talk about poetry.

I know that a lot of you are actually interested in why Jia Baoyu hung his head after Jia Zheng addressed him in yesterday’s post:

While Jia Baoyu’s psychological response to his father is interesting, I honestly feel that the poem Jia Baoyu composed is a lot more interesting.

The thing about the poetry in Dream of the Red Chamber is that it tends to have deeper meanings than what you see on the surface. The poems also tend to be predictive in nature. However, as we’ll see in a second, sometimes the poems have multiple possible and contradictory interpretations.

If you take it at face value, the poem Jia Baoyu composed at the end of yesterday’s post is about Jia Yuanchun’s coming visit back home:

寶鼎茶閒煙尚綠，幽窗棋罷指猶涼。

In the precious kettle, the tea sits idle, and the steam is green;

By the quiet window, the chess game is abandoned, and the fingers are cold.

Now, if you’re familiar with Chinese idioms (and it’s okay if you’re not), this poem should remind you of a fairly well known idiom.

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Among all the excitement of yesterday’s post, there’s a gem in here that you might not have noticed.

Cao Xueqin created this small section of Dream of the Red Chamber by using a technique that makes the whole thing feel cinematic.

We start off by entering into a stone cave or grotto, after which things open up slowly:

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If you’re like me and you didn’t grow up in a Chinese speaking environment, passages like yesterday’s can be a bit difficult to understand:

The problem here is the classic problem of trying to understand poetry in a foreign language. Because we are foreign students of the language, we don’t have the same background in the linguistic environment. We also generally lack cultural context, which makes certain aspects of the story surrounding the poetry a bit confusing.

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In modern language learning communities, the biggest trend these days is focused on what they call “comprehensible input.”

The idea here is that the best way to learn a language is to make gradual progress from one level of sentence to another. It’s sort of like learning how to swim by gradually moving deeper and deeper into the pool instead of jumping in all at once.

It’s an interesting idea, and I have some sympathy with the idea. However, I don’t think it’s great.

In my experience, the best way to achieve fluency in a foreign language is to work on truly immersing yourself. And, as I describe above in today’s video, mining sentences from native content is an extremely effective way to simulate that kind of lingustic immersion.

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There’s unfortunately no substitute for using the language on a daily basis in an environment where you simply have to speak the language. For example, I was able to naturally achieve a relatively high level of fluency in German as a missionary in only two years. This happened in large part because I spent an extensive amount of time every single day speaking German with native German speakers in German speaking countries.

If you can’t move, the next best thing is to find native speakers of your target language who live closer to you, make friends with them, and speak your target language with them. And, if that part doesn’t work, your next best option is to consume native level media in your target language.

Of course, there’s always a worry that you’re not going to be able to understand much, especially at first. I know that worry well; in fact, I go through the same anxiety every single time I start to learn a new foreign language.

However, I can assure you that the pain of beginning does not last long, and will actually be easier to stand if you start deliberately spending time interacting directly with the foreign language at a native pace. As nice as textbooks are, there really is no substitute for listening to the pace and rhythm of a language authentically spoken by native speakers in an authentic setting.

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When I studied Korean at the Foreign Service Institute about 15 years ago, I considered myself somehow intellectually above watching Korean dramas and truly immersing myself in the language. I thought that reading textbooks and messing around with dictionaries would be good enough. And, as an unfortunate result, my stubborn adherence to doing things the “right way” did nothing but delay my development in Korean.

The truth is that there’s no reason to wait until you’ve reached a certain level to do what you want to do in the target language. In fact, I’ve learned this as I’ve jumped into the deep end of Dream of the Red Chamber. The best way to read a difficult novel like this is to simply read the novel, even if it’s difficult. After all, there’s nothing that can prepare yourself for a certain book quite as well as actually reading it.

Languages are the same way. Instead of reading and talking about how you might learn a language, just go straight for it. There’s no need to delay.

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We’ve now seen two major deaths in Dream of the Red Chamber, and we’re not even a fourth of the way into the novel.

Qin Keqing’s death was the first, of course. And her demise was memorable, to say the least. In fact, scenes involving her death and funeral take up the better part of two chapters. This is probably the most notable translation post on the subject:

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If you haven’t read it yet, you really need to read my translation post yesterday, where we saw Qin Zhong battle against the bureaucracy of the underworld:

Now, if you’re familiar with the great Chinese classic novels, you know that it wasn’t unusual for the afterlife to be described as a complex government system that mirrored the system of the Chinese empire. In fact, Journey to the West (西遊記) probably exemplifies this fact better than any other Chinese novel.

But this passage in Dream of the Red Chamber is simply impossible to put down. In fact, I was almost late to my day job the other day because I was so wrapped up in translating that passage.

Anyway, here are a few scattered thoughts that have come to my mind as I’ve been reflecting on this:

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Everybody wants to put the blame on emotions. Remember that Jia Baoyu is told by the servant Li Gui to stop crying, and is warned that his friend Qin Zhong would somehow become weaker if Jia Baoyu expressed his emotions.

This is bizarre logic, of course, and was likely as strange to readers back in the late 18th century as it is today. Jia Baoyu’s emotional expression has absolutely nothing to do with Qin Zhong’s physical state. And yet Jia Baoyu forces himself to suppress his sobs and keep a straight face as he constantly tells his dying friend that he is here.

Of course, if we were forced at gunpoint (or by an overzealous literature teacher) to find some cause for Qin Zhong’s terminal illness, we’d probably blame Qin Zhong himself. After all, he’s the one who was shamelessly running around with the young nun Zhineng. But, on the other hand, it’s likely that his sickness is just one of those things that happens.

But putting the blame on Jia Baoyu for expressing any emotion just feels harsh and cruel.

The underworld judge is scared of Jia Baoyu. There really isn’t much of a logical reason given for the judge’s sudden reaction upon hearing the name Jia Baoyu:

那判官聽了，先就唬的慌張起來，忙喝罵那些小鬼道：「我說你們放了他回去走走罷，你們不依我的話；如今鬧的請出個運旺時盛的人來了，怎麼好？」眾鬼見都判如此，也都忙了手腳，一面又抱怨道：「你老人家先是那麼雷霆火炮，原來見不得『寶玉』二字！依我們想來：他是陽間，我們是陰間，怕他亦無益。」那都判越發著急，吆喝起來。

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When the presiding judge heard this, he was struck with a sense of panic. He began to berate the lesser ghosts, saying, “I told you to let him go back for a while, but you wouldn’t listen to me! Now you’ve stirred things up until you’ve summoned a person in the midst of prosperity and fortune. What are we going to do?”

When the ghosts saw the judge in this state, they were also confused. At the same time, however, they complained among themselves. “Sir, you were all thunder and lightning just now,” they said, “and it turns out that you can’t even bear the thought of the name ‘Baoyu!’ As we see it, he belongs to the world of the living, and we belong to the world of the dead. What do we have to fear from him?”

This only made the chief judge more frantic, and he began to shout even louder.

As I noted yesterday, David Hawkes seems to think that this is because of Jia Baoyu’s jade, or because of some talisman that he had or something like this.

However, I side with the person who left a comment on yesterday’s post speculating that the demonic judge was scared of the power of Jia Baoyu’s emotion. In other words, it’s possible that the pure emotional sentiment that Jia Baoyu felt is strong enough to cause the demons of the underworld to shake and tremble.

This feels almost Biblical in a way.

This passage is simply awesome. My final thought for now is to simply geek out over how fantastically written the underworld scene really is.

Cao Xueqin’s writing is incredible deliberate and careful. Jia Baoyu is “暢快” (happy) that his father is too preoccupied to worry about whether he’s studying or not. However, the fact that his best friend is seriously ill means that he can’t actually be “快樂” (happy).

This sort of distinction between two very similar adjectives will drive you nuts if you’re trying to translate this book into another language. However, if you have an appreciation for the beauty of the Chinese language, you’ll slowly realize that the writing is just pure genius.

And the fact that the mere mention of Jia Baoyu is enough to cause even the leaders of hell to turn around and denounce everything they were just saying is even better. I guess it goes to show that anything really is possible in China.

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As usual, the aiuthor’s commentary in chapter 16 of Dream of the Red Chamber is pretty subtle. Cao Xueqin doesn’t usually come out and say what he thinks about the way his characters are acting. Instead, he will hint at or allude to underlying problems that only become apparently when you think carefully.

For example, there’s this business of the leading men in the Jia family paying no attention to their responsibilities as they construct the massive garden.

Jia Zheng is a pretty good example of this:

賈政不慣於俗務，只憑賈赦、賈珍、賈璉、賴大、賴升、林之孝、吳新登、詹光、程日興等幾人安插擺佈。

Jia Zheng wasn’t accustomed to handling worldly affairs. And so he left everything to Jia She, Jia Zhen, Jia Lian, Lai Da, Lai Sheng, Lin Zhixiao, Wu Xindeng, Zhan Guang, Cheng Rixing, and a few others, letting them handle things as they saw fit.

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I’ve written over and over again about how important the Chinese word 情 is in Dream of the Red Chamber.

It’s a difficult word to translate, and the problem is that it comes up all the time. Most English translations render 情 as something like “passion” or “romance.”

While there certainly is passion and romance in the concept of 情, it seems that its meaning in the book is actually a lot more broad than that. And, as a result, it is incorrect to think of Dream of the Red Chamber as simply a book about a playboy who likes to spend his time with beautiful women.

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