The F Word
Please note: today’s passage is not for the squeamish. If you’re opposed to frank depictions of human sexuality, you might want to skip over this post. However, in order to figure out what in the world is happening in chapter 9 of Dream of the Red Chamber, we really need to get this stuff out of the way.
By this time, you’re probably wondering if it was normal for so much vulgarity to be used in a classic Chinese novel.
The truth is that words like 肏 really weren’t used all that common in literature from the old days.
That’s not to say that people didn’t swear back then. People have always uttered curse words. There’s no human society in the history of the world that has been entirely free of coarse language. And, yes, that means the stories I heard when I was a kid about how the Japanese don’t really swear or whatever were utterly false.
I did a brief search on The Chinese Text Project for the word 肏. Now, you should know that this website contains over 30,000 different works and well over 5 billion characters between them. In other words, if this word is common, we should be inundated with results.
The only examples of it in any sort of use come from Dream of the Red Chamber and its even more vulgar predecessor, The Plum in the Golden Vase (金瓶梅). And, even then, the Dream of the Red Chamber usage is almost entirely confined to chapter 9.
Here are a few examples of the word 肏 in use from 金瓶梅:
