Jia Baoyu’s Psychological Struggle
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:
Unfair
Unfair 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.
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.
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.