The Red Chamber

by Pauline A. Chen

  In a strange way, the same experience had been repeated in his arrest and imprisonment. When he had been arrested, he had thought he would never be able to hold his head up again. He had barely been able to look his prison guards in the eye for fear of what they must think of him. Again, he had been patient, and he had not only been pardoned and released, but had also returned to his former position, where his colleagues treated him with the same, if not more, respect than before. This is the wisdom that he wants to impart to Baoyu, what he has learned from the sum of his fifty-odd years, but he does not quite know how to express it.

  He squeezes Baoyu’s shoulders. “Everything is not won or lost in a single day. Even if you fail this year, you will pass eventually, and then you’ll be surprised at how different things will look. You won’t have to study all the time. You will like being an official. Some of the work is tedious, of course, but you’ll also get to make decisions, even if it is over small things. And, maybe, one day, you’ll have a family of your own—”

  Baoyu wrenches himself violently from under Jia Zheng’s arm. “I’m not interested in anything like that.”

  Jia Zheng had hoped time was helping Baoyu forget Daiyu. He has noticed how solicitously Baochai always treats Baoyu, and how the two of them never seem to argue, as Xifeng and Lian had, even in their newlywed days. He has allowed himself to believe that the new couple was growing together, but now he sees from the suppressed misery on Baoyu’s face that he has deceived himself.

  Baoyu seems to control himself with an effort. He says, after a moment, “Are you satisfied with me, Father? Have I done all you wanted?”

  At this reminder that Baoyu had acted against his own wishes for the good of the family, Jia Zheng feels a pang of remorse. “Yes, of course,” he says, taking Baoyu’s hands. “You’ve done more than enough. I know that it has been hard for you—”

  Baoyu pulls away, apparently uninterested in Jia Zheng’s attempt to comfort him. “Then there is something I want to say to you.”

  “What is it?”

  Baoyu draws himself up and speaks almost ceremoniously. “I would like to thank you.”

  “For what?” Jia Zheng says, taken aback.

  “I would like to thank you for all the care that you have given me over the years, all your teaching, and patience, and concern.”

  This stilted little speech, after the heightened emotions of the earlier conversation, almost makes Jia Zheng laugh. “You don’t need to thank me.”

  “But I do,” says Baoyu. “If it hadn’t been for you, who knows what would have become of me? As it is, I’ve learned little enough—”

  “Hush!” Jia Zheng says, half embarrassed, half amused. “You’d better be quiet, or you’ll end up making a fool of yourself!”

  Baoyu stops, pulled up short, and looks discomfited. “At least let me take leave of you properly.”

  “Take leave of me! What next? You’ll be gone for only three days—”

  Before Jia Zheng can stop him, Baoyu kneels on the floor. He touches his head to Jia Zheng’s feet. Jia Zheng tries to raise him up, but again and again he presses his forehead and hands to his father’s shoes. For the second time that morning, Jia Zheng feels the tears sting in his eyes. This time, however, he is unable to control himself, and his tears spill over as he raises Baoyu from the floor.

  5

  Xifeng forces her heavy eyes open and squints at the clock. She had let herself lie down after lunch, intending to rest for ten or fifteen minutes, and here it is after four o’clock. She jerks herself upright and swings her legs off the kang. The sudden change of position makes her vision go black. She bends over, clutching her mouth, overcome by a sudden need to vomit. Shutting her eyes, she puts her head down, and breathes slowly and deeply to stave off the bout of nausea.

  When the nausea recedes, she stands up, supporting herself against the table. Baoyu and Huan are coming home from the Exams this afternoon. The others will wonder if she is not there to greet them. The nausea rises again, but she thrusts herself from the table and stumbles towards the wardrobe. She vomits on the floor near the corner. Leaning against the door of the wardrobe, she glances down at what has come up from her stomach. There isn’t much of it. She hardly eats a thing these days.

  She drags herself to fetch the bucket of water. She sloshes its contents onto the vomit, and manages to sweep the mess out of the door. Then she goes to the wardrobe and lowers her pants. The cotton rag she has pinned to her underwear is soaked through with blood. After months and months of not having her period, she has started to bleed again, heavily. How long has it been? A week? Ten days? If it does not stop in a day or two, she will ask Baochai to send for the doctor again. When Baochai sent for him three weeks ago, he had said that all he could do was modify her prescription. She has taken the new prescription twice a day, but it seems no more effective than the old one.

  She replaces the soiled rag with a clean one. When she pulls her trousers up, she has to stretch the waistband to its utmost, to ease it over her swollen belly. Her whole body is getting skinny, like a monkey’s. Only her belly keeps growing, bigger and bigger, and is flabby to boot. She would have thought she was pregnant, except, of course, for the fact that she hasn’t been touched by a man in over two years. She smooths her gown over her hips to hide her bulging belly.

  On her way to the door, she catches a glimpse of herself in the dressing table mirror. Her hair is uncombed, and her makeup has been rubbed off by sleep. Without the covering of powder, her complexion is chalky. Her cheekbones and teeth, with their receding gums, seem unnaturally prominent. She drags a comb through her hair and smears two streaks of rouge onto her cheeks.

  When she is crossing Lady Jia’s courtyard, she notices that there are no sounds of conversation or laughter coming from the front room. Baoyu and Huan must not be home yet. Relieved, she pushes through the door curtain, crying, “Where are our successful Examination candidates?” trying to distract from her lateness with a show of gaiety.

  She expects laughter, retorts. Instead, everyone in the room, Lady Jia, Baochai and Mrs. Xue, and the Two Springs, turns towards her with tense expressions, and then turn away in silent disappointment when they see it is only her.

  “What’s the matter?” she cries.

  It is Tanchun who answers. “They really should be home by now.” Her eyes shift uneasily to the clock on the wall. “The Examination papers should have been collected at noon, and then”—she counts on her fingers—“an hour to get their things together, an hour to get out of the Examination Hall, an hour to get home. That’s assuming everything took much longer than it should have.”

  “Didn’t Lian and Uncle go to meet them?” Xifeng asks.

  This time Baochai answers. “Yes,” she says shortly, barely opening her lips.

  “Well,” Xifeng says. “It’s not so hard to guess what happened. There must be thousands of people there. They must be wandering around in the crowd looking for each other.”

  “They were supposed to meet in front of the Examination Hall,” Baochai says.

  “Yes, but the place is huge, and imagine how many other people have arranged to meet there, too—”

  Baochai turns on her. “Do you think we’re stupid? Do you think we haven’t thought of that ourselves?”

  Xifeng has never seen Baochai lose control of her temper like this. After a moment, she shrugs and says mildly, “Then why are you so worried?”

  No one answers.

  Xifeng gives a little laugh. “Baoyu’s not a child who can’t find his way home by himself.”

  Still no one replies. Xifeng looks at Baochai. She is sitting on her heels beside Lady Jia, her eyes on her lap, her fingers kneading and twisting her handkerchief. Her face is pale, but Xifeng sees blood on her bottom lip where she has bitten it raw. Xifeng climbs onto the kang, careful not to make herself dizzy again. Beside her, Lady Jia slouches against her backrest, with her eyes fixed on the door. Surreptitiously, Xifeng stuffs a cushion behind he
r back. She feels self-conscious about trying to make herself more comfortable when the others seem to be in such suspense. She feels alone, bewildered by the others’ anxiety. She cannot imagine why they are acting this way, what they sense and fear that she does not. A maid comes in with tea and snacks. Baochai orders her away, although Xifeng would have liked some tea. Half an hour drags by. She begins to slump against her cushion. She fights to keep her eyes open.

  Lian bursts into the room, disheveled and out of breath. “We can’t find Baoyu anywhere.”

  “Oh, my God!” Baochai bursts into tears.

  “What about Huan?” Tanchun asks.

  “We found him. He’s back at the Examination Hall, looking for Baoyu with Uncle,” Lian says.

  Xifeng jerks herself upright. “Then what are you doing here? Go back and look for him, too!”

  Ignoring her, Jia Lian climbs up on the kang and speaks to Baochai and Granny, his voice broken by gasps. “Uncle and I got there early, a little after noon. We stood right outside the exit. Close to about one o’clock, the candidates began to come out, one by one at first, then in little groups, and then in big crowds. Huan came out in one of the big groups, but he said he hadn’t seen Baoyu. We just kept waiting, thinking he’d come out any minute.

  “By three o’clock, people stopped coming out, and we still hadn’t seen him.” He pauses to wipe a trickle of sweat off his temple. Xifeng is surprised at how agitated he seems.

  “Yes?” Baochai says. She had stopped crying as soon as he began to speak, and stares at him with her handkerchief pressed against her mouth.

  “We got permission to go into the Examination Hall,” Lian continues. “Sure enough, it was totally empty. We went up to the officials, and asked if anyone had seen him. At first, they said they couldn’t possibly keep track of everyone who had taken the Exams. Then when we begged them to check, they went through the pile of Exams to see if he had handed anything in.”

  “And had he?”

  “When they looked through the papers, they saw that he had been the very first, out of hundreds of candidates, to hand his Exam in. It was at the very bottom of the pile. Then one of them said that he remembered: Baoyu had actually tried to hand his paper in early, but when they told him it wasn’t permitted, he had gone back to his place and got his things together, so that he was able to hand it in and leave the Examination Hall at the stroke of twelve—”

  “And was it completed?” Baochai cries, leaning forward to grip Jia Lian’s arm. “His Exam, I mean.” Xifeng, noticing the look of unbearable suspense on Baochai’s face, wonders whether she is more concerned about Baoyu’s passing the Exams or his whereabouts.

  “Yes. When he tried to hand it in early, they’d looked it over to see if it was done,” Lian reassures her. “They said the essays looked complete.

  “But the point is,” he continues, “Baoyu must have been the first to leave the Examination Hall. That’s why we missed him. Then we looked for him everywhere outside. We thought we were simply missing him, but then the crowds began to thin, and we still couldn’t find him. That’s why I came home, to see if he was here.”

  “Well, you can see he isn’t here, can’t you?” Xifeng says. “Why don’t you take some servants and go back and search some more?” She has barely been able to contain her impatience during his lengthy recital.

  Again, Lian ignores her. He pauses to wipe another trickle of sweat off his brow. “Then, as I was riding away from the Hall, I saw Sweeper, Baoyu’s new page.”

  Baochai’s face, already haggard, seems to lose all its color. “Without Baoyu?” she says hoarsely.

  “He was alone, nearly crazy with worry and fear. He said that when they came out of the Hall, Baoyu told him to watch the luggage while he stepped away to relieve himself. Baoyu went around the corner into an alley, but then he never came back. Sweeper spent the next four hours searching for him. I think if I hadn’t bumped into him, he would never have come home, he was so afraid we would blame him for losing Baoyu—”

  “It’s no use looking,” Baochai interrupts. “He’s gone.” She starts to sob again.

  Xifeng stares at Baochai. Why is everyone acting so strangely? Getting so worked up because they’d missed Baoyu in a crowd. “What on earth do you mean, ‘gone’? He’ll show up by himself in an hour or two.”

  “No, he won’t,” Baochai says. “He’s run away.”

  “Run away!” exclaims Xifeng, barely able to comprehend what she might mean. “From whom? From what?”

  “From us. From me,” Baochai weeps. She tries to control herself, pressing her handkerchief to her mouth again, but her tears continue to flow. “He said good-bye to me in such a queer way when he left, as if—as if we would never see each other again. I knew that something was wrong, but I never guessed—”

  “But why on earth would he run away?” Xifeng cuts in, out of patience.

  Baochai gropes for the right words. “Because he didn’t care for anything anymore.”

  Xifeng is silent, beginning to understand. She remembers how Baoyu had wanted to marry Daiyu before the confiscation, and how distraught he had been about her death. Uncle Zheng must have strong-armed him into marrying Baochai. Now he has rebelled by running away. A part of her is envious: a woman could never escape like that. Another part of her thinks how crazy he is to run away just when he is about to achieve the success for which he has striven so long. She thinks of Yucun. Climbing the bureaucratic ladder had provided him with status and money, but not freedom. Perhaps Baoyu, with his uncanny intuitions, had realized the truth beforehand. She has never believed something as strange as the jade’s appearance in Baoyu’s mouth could be mere chance, just as she has felt that Baoyu, with his quicksilver sensitivity, never seemed to belong to the Jias. Surely the jade, and Baoyu’s coming and disappearance, must be part of some larger, fateful design.

  “And so all the love I lavished on him, for all these years, is wasted,” Lady Jia says. She speaks impassively, but Xifeng can see, at the corners of her dry, old person’s eyes, two tiny tears glistening in the papery folds.

  “But it wasn’t wasted,” Tanchun says. “He still took the Exams, and who knows but what he’ll pass, and bring honor to the family.”

  “Honor!” Baochai cries. “What does that matter when he himself is gone?”

  Xifeng looks at Baochai, struggling to understand her reactions. Despite her intelligence, Baochai has always struck Xifeng as someone who never thinks for herself, content to follow the dictates of “duty” and “filiality” unquestioningly. That was why she had married Baoyu, even though it was obvious that he was still pining for Daiyu. But today, it almost seems to Xifeng that Baochai does care for him after all. Of course, Xifeng thinks cynically, given that Baochai will be unable to remarry, it is no wonder that she is terrified that her husband appears to be deserting her at age twenty-one. She watches Baochai, pressing her handkerchief to her mouth and struggling to keep back her tears, revealing more of her emotions in this one afternoon than she has in all the five years she has lived with the Jias. It was her composure and inscrutability that has always kept Xifeng away from her. She has always suspected that Baochai knew of her affair with Yucun. While Xifeng had at first been grateful for her silence, as the years passed, Xifeng had expected Baochai to hint of her knowledge by a word or a glance. Instead, Baochai has always pretended so perfectly that nothing was amiss, that everything was exactly as it seemed, that a wall of silence had grown between them that has never been broken.

  Xifeng struggles off the kang to her feet. “Why are we wasting time talking? Why don’t we organize a search party?”

  “What good do you think that will do?” Lian says unpleasantly. “Don’t you think that Uncle and I have searched thoroughly?”

  “But he could be anywhere. He could have bumped into a friend. He could have gotten sick and collapsed somewhere. Why don’t you call together all the servants—”

  “What servants?” he says nastily. “We’ve
got only a couple of page boys and a porter. Do you really think that they’ll be able to fan out all over the city?”

  A wave of anger and helplessness washes over her. Even at a time like this, he cannot let an opportunity go by without trying to discredit her in front of everyone. “For Heaven’s sake, surely you can make the maids go out and look for him this once—”

  She feels a terrible cramping and burning in her belly. She feels as if her innards are being eaten away. It takes all her strength not to double over and clutch her stomach. She turns her face away, pressing her hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she manages to say. “I’m not feeling very well. I must lie down.”

  She staggers out the door and into the courtyard. She half hopes and half fears that someone will come after her, but as she lurches out of Granny’s front gate, she hears no footsteps or concerned questions behind her. She almost runs down the path, knowing that if she does not hurry she will never have the strength to make it to her own apartments. She feels a burning sensation in her vagina, and a sudden hot gush. It reminds her of her miscarriage all those years ago, but the pain is even worse. She doubles over, and sees that the inseam of her trousers beneath her gown is stained scarlet with fresh blood. She is filled with an indescribable shame. There are drops of blood on the white pebbles that pave the path. She has to fight the impulse to try to clean them or cover them up before anyone else sees them. Instead, she forces herself to keep on walking, still doubled over. It is only about fifty yards to her apartments; and once in her own courtyard, no one will see her even if she has to crawl.

  But the dizziness and nausea she felt after her nap return. Blackness fills her eyes, and she sways and almost falls. She stops walking to catch her breath. She can feel the pounding of her heart in the vessels behind her eyes. Sweat pours down her face. She stands there, blinking, propping her hands on her knees to keep herself standing. Eventually, her eyes clear. She sees that she is still standing on the path. She drags herself forward. A few steps more, a few steps more, she tells herself. She lifts her head and sees a linden sapling at the crook of the path perhaps twenty-five feet ahead. If only she can get there, she can hold on to it and rest.