The Family
I found myself extremely confused when creating yesterday’s translation post.
In particular, the fact that Jia Baoyu referred to Jia Zhen as “大哥哥” (big older brother) struck me as odd.
Now, Jia Zhen is far from a major character in the book. He’s part of Ningguo Mansion, which is the house across the street. He’s also not Jia Baoyu’s “older brother” or “cousin” or anything like that, though the relationship is often translated that way.
It’s pretty complex and requires some explanation. I figured that anything I found difficult to understand would likely also be difficult for others to understand. And so I kept yesterday’s post short and decided to provide a somewhat in-depth explanation of this part of the family tree here.
If you read Dream of the Red Chamber in Chinese, you’ll discover that the best Chinese versions of the book have a diagram of the family tree. It looks something like this:
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