The Naughty Bits
Chances are that you’re pretty surprised by the blatant sexuality in Dream of the Red Chamber.
We saw a bit of it in yesterday’s translation post, where Jia Baoyu’s servant Mingyan was caught with a somewhat anonymous girl named Wang’er:
剛到窗前，聽見屋裡一片喘息之聲。寶玉倒唬了一跳，心想：「美人活了不成？」乃大著膽子，舔破窗紙，向內一看。那軸美人卻不曾活，卻是茗煙按著個女孩子，也幹那警幻所訓之事，正在得趣，故此呻吟。
He had just reached the window when he heard heavy breathing coming from the room. “Has the beautiful woman truly come to life?” thought Baoyu in amazement. Baoyu eventually worked up his courage, licked a hole in the paper of the window, and peeked inside.
It turns out that the beauty in the scroll hadn’t come to life. Instead, Baoyu saw Mingyan on top of a girl, doing the thing that the Goddess had taught Baoyu earlier. The two of them were in a deep passionate moment, and they were moaning loudly.
This isn’t the first example of hanky-panky we’ve seen so far in Dream of the Red Chamber. You might remember this example from the beginning of chapter 6:
襲人本是個聰明女子，年紀又比寶玉大兩歲，近來也漸省人事，今見寶玉如此光景，心中便覺察了一半，不覺把個粉臉羞的飛紅。遂不好再問，仍舊理好衣裳，隨至賈母處來。胡亂吃過晚飯，過這邊來，趁眾奶孃丫鬟不在旁時，另取出一件中衣，與寶玉換上。
寶玉含羞央告道：「好姐姐，千萬別告訴人。」襲人也含著羞悄悄的笑問道：「你為什麼」說到這裡，把眼又往四下裡瞧了瞧，才又問道：「那是那裡流出來的？」寶玉只管紅著臉，不言語，襲人卻只瞅著他笑。遲了一會，寶玉才把夢中之事細說與襲人聽。說到雲雨私情，羞的襲人掩面伏身而笑。寶玉亦素喜襲人柔媚姣俏，遂強拉襲人同領警幻所祕授之事。
Now, Xiren was an intelligent girl to begin with, and was also about two years older than Baoyu. She had recently begun to learn about sexual matters. And so, seeing Baoyu in this state, she guessed what had happened. Instinctively, her cheeks quickly turned red with embarrassment.
And so she thought it would be best not to ask more. Having straightened his clothes properly, she accompanied him to see Grandmother Jia. After he had hurried through his dinner and returned to his room, she waited for a moment when the other maids were not nearby. Then, taking out a fresh pair of underwear, she helped Baoyu change into it.
“Dear sister,” Baoyu said, blushing with shame, “whatever you do, please don’t tell anyone.”
Xiren, also blushing, asked him quietly with a suppressed smile: “Why did you…” At this point, she glanced around cautiously again, and then continued: “Where did that come from?”
Baoyu simply blushed deep red and said nothing. Xiren, however, gazed at him with a smile. After a long pause, Baoyu finally told her the events of his dream in detail.
When Baoyu spoke of the sexual encounter in his dream, Xiren was so overcome with shyness that she covered her face, doubled over, and laughed.
Since Baoyu had always been fond of Xiren for her gentle, charming, and lovely nature, he then insistently shared with Xiren the secret techniques the Goddess taught him.
And, of course, there are all sorts of direct and frank references to homosexuality in chapter 9:
金榮越發得了意，搖頭咂嘴的，口內還說許多閒話。玉愛偏又聽見，兩個人隔座咕咕唧唧的角起口來。金榮只一口咬定，說：「方才明明的撞見他兩個在後院裡親嘴摸屁股，兩個商議定了，一對一肏，撅草根兒抽長短，誰長誰先幹！」
Jin Rong became more and more pleased with himself. He shook his head, clicked his tongue, and began muttering all sorts of things. Yu’ai, who happened to overhear him, started to argue with him through a series of whispers across the seats.
Jin Rong spoke loudly and confidently. “I just caught them in the courtyard,” he said. “They were kissing and grabbing each other’s bottoms. In fact, they had already agreed, and were getting ready to fuck each other. They were pulling up blades of grass to see whose stalk was longer. The one who got the longer one would go first!”
And I could go on.
The truth is that Dream of the Red Chamber follows the pattern set by 金瓶梅, or The Plum in the Golden Vase, which is clearly the most controversial of the classical Chinese novels. The Plum in the Golden Vase is extremely sexually explicit, so much so that I’m not going to quote any passages here. The Plum in the Golden Vase is also notorious for being likely the most banned book in the history of Chinese literature, despite the obvious fact that there is a lot of literary merit and significance to the book.
The Plum in the Golden Vase is somewhat similar to Fanny Hill, the 18th century British erotic novel that wound up striking down obscenity laws throughout the United States and Europe in the 1960s. See, for example, Memoirs v Massachusetts; my understanding is that Fanny Hill played a similar role in numerous European court cases around the same time.
The problem, of course, is that you can’t discount Fanny Hill or The Plum in the Golden Vase as trash or lacking literary merit merely because of the sexual content. And this is even more true of Dream of the Red Chamber, where the naked sexuality is thankfully an occasional sideshow and not the entire plot of the book.