New Here? This is a companion to Chapter 21 of Dream of the Red Chamber, China's greatest novel, which I'm translating into modern English one scene at a time. Start with the Start Here guide, or meet the family on the Characters page.
Have you ever experienced teenage angst?
I think that most of us have. There are times when you feel utterly incapable of controlling your emotions during your teen years. There are times when the pent-up rage and frustration simply have to come out.
That’s what happened to Jia Baoyu. He’s sitting alone in his room, with only a candle, a pot of tea, and an old philosophy book to accompany him. He’s had two cups of wine after dinner. The girls who usually fill the room with laughter aren’t speaking to him.
So he picks up his brush and rewrites the book. In his version, the four girls closest to him are the trouble with the world. The cure is to burn them, scatter them, wreck their beauty and turn their minds to ash.
Then he goes to bed.
Is that a joke? Or did a little wine let Jia Baoyu say what he really feels?
What he did
If you missed yesterday’s post, Two Cups of Wine and Zhuangzi, here’s the short version. Baoyu’s maids, led by Xiren, have given him the silent treatment. (See The Silent Treatment.) Alone and a little tipsy, he reads a chapter of the Zhuangzi called “Prying Open Trunks.” It’s the one that says the world would be better off if we burned every seal, snapped every scale and glued shut the eyes of the man with the best eyesight in history.
He likes it so much that he writes a continuation. He keeps Zhuangzi’s grammar and Zhuangzi’s verbs, and he swaps in Baochai, Daiyu and his two maids, Xiren and Sheyue.
The novel’s word for what he does is 續 (xù), which means “to continue.” It doesn’t call it a parody, a joke or a confession. And that means that it’s up to us to interpret what kind of “continuation” this is.
Why this book, on this night?
Look at what happens right before he picks it up. He has decided to harden his heart and act as if the girls were dead. And the moment he does, he feels great. In my translation: “he didn’t have a care in the world, and he actually began to feel quite content.”
That state of mind has a home in Chinese literature, and it’s the Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi is the philosopher of not being tied down to anything. That means being tied down to your job, your reputation, your grief, or to anything at all. So Baoyu isn’t grabbing a book at random. He’s reaching for the one that matches the mood he’s trying to talk himself into.
And Zhuangzi has a soft spot for drunks. In the chapter called “Mastering Life” (達生), he points out that a drunk man who falls out of a cart doesn’t get hurt the way a sober man would: 「夫醉者之墜車，雖疾不死……其神全也，乘亦不知也，墜亦不知也。」 He didn’t know he was riding, and he didn’t know he was falling, so the fall didn’t break him.
Hang on to that drunk. We’ll see him again.
The question
So there are two ways to read what Baoyu wrote.
One: it’s a joke. A clever, slightly tipsy boy takes a famous text and swaps in the people who are annoying him, the way Weird Al keeps the tune and changes the words.
Two: it’s a confession. The wine loosened him up, and for one night he wrote down what he really thinks: that the girls he loves are traps, and he’d be better off without them. Chinese has a saying for that concept: 酒後吐真言, or “after wine, the truth comes out.”
I have an answer, and I’ll give it to you. But first I want to show you exactly what he did to Zhuangzi, line by line, because the evidence is in the details, and some of it cuts against me.
Zhuangzi in Five Minutes
To see what Baoyu is making fun of, you have to know what Zhuangzi was making fun of.
“Prying Open Trunks” (胠篋) starts with a picture that everyone in ancient China would recognize. You’re worried about thieves, so you tie up your trunk with rope and lock it tight. That’s what the world calls being smart. Then a big thief comes along, picks up the whole trunk and runs off with it. His only worry is that your ropes and locks might not hold: 「然而巨盜至，則負匱揭篋擔囊而趨，唯恐緘縢扃鐍之不固也。」
Then Zhuangzi scales it up. Tian Chengzi (田成子) killed the ruler of Qi and took over the state. And Zhuangzi asks: was it only the state he stole? No. He stole the laws of the state along with it: 「所盜者豈獨其國邪？並與其聖知之法而盜之。」 The laws that were supposed to protect Qi gave the usurper a respectable government to hide behind. And, yes, this should sound familiar to you if you know anything about either history or current events.
That’s where the chapter’s most famous line comes from: 「彼竊鉤者誅，竊國者為諸侯。」 Steal a belt hook, and they execute you; steal a country, and you become a lord.
So here’s Zhuangzi’s argument. The cure feeds the disease. Every tool we invent to keep people honest, from scales and seals to laws and the great experts everyone looks up to, ends up as a tool for the biggest thieves. Get rid of all of it, and there’s nothing left to steal.
That’s the passage Baoyu was reading. It ends with stopping up the ears of Music Master Kuang, gluing shut the eyes of Li Zhu and breaking the fingers of Chui the Craftsman, the greatest ear, eye and hand in history.
So the book Baoyu picked up is already an argument that the things we prize most are the source of our trouble. Keep that in mind, because it’s exactly the move he makes.
Is Zhuangzi Serious?
Here’s the twist. Nobody agrees on whether Zhuangzi meant this literally either.
Zhuangzi tells us himself that most of his book isn’t meant straight. In the chapter called “Lodged Words” (寓言), he says 「寓言十九」: nine-tenths of it is words put in someone else’s mouth, stories built to carry a point.
On the other hand, “Prying Open Trunks” probably wasn’t written by Zhuangzi at all. It’s in the Outer Chapters, and the British scholar A. C. Graham argued that this chapter and its neighbors (Chapters 8 through 10, and the start of 11) come from a later writer he called “the Primitivist,” angrier and more single-minded than Zhuangzi himself. Even the opening slogan is borrowed. 絕聖棄智, “cut off the sages and throw away wisdom,” comes straight from Chapter 19 of the Daodejing: 「絕聖棄智，民利百倍。」
So you can read the chapter two ways. One camp reads it as a real program: go back to a simple life before civilization, the uncarved block. The other reads it as satire, deliberately outrageous, aimed at the Confucian moralists who thought more rules would make better people.
But notice what neither camp thinks. Nobody reads this chapter and decides the author wanted to go glue somebody’s eyes shut. Li Zhu and Music Master Kuang are legends. They stand for something. The violence is the style.
Hold on to that. It’s going to matter.
Joke, or confession? Let’s look at the evidence.
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