The Red Chamber Read Free Page A

bowl. There is a sleepy shout from the bedroom. Lian must be waking up.
    “I’ll go see what he wants,” Ping’er offers, hurrying down the hallway.
    After Xifeng has eaten half the bowl, she notices that there is no sound from the bedroom. Even though she knows she should go to Lady Jia’s, she slips down the hallway and pushes aside the door curtain. Ping’er is standing next to where Lian is still lying near the edge of the kang . He is smiling and reaching up a sinewy brown arm to grasp her by the hand, as if to pull her down to the bed. Ping’er blushes and pulls away, giggling. Xifeng is suddenly struck by how pretty Ping’er is, the tail of hair hanging down her back glossy and black, her fair skin set off by her apricot gown.
    “Excuse me for disturbing you,” she says in a brittle voice she can hardly recognize as her own.
    Lian and Ping’er jerk apart, Ping’er turning a stricken face to her mistress.
    “What dirty business you get up to while I’m not here is none of my affair,” she tells Ping’er. “But you’d better watch out, or he’ll give you some nasty disease he’s picked up at a whorehouse.”
    “Be quiet!” Lian says threateningly, but of course, he can’t think of a retort. What could he say? What she says is true, after all. He started staying out all night within three months of their wedding.
    He gets up out of the bed, raising his hand. Though he has never hit her, she moves instinctively towards the door. Then he lets his arm drop, looking sullen and defeated. “It’s not like that—” he begins.
    “I don’t want to hear it,” she says, and turns on her heel to go to Lady Jia’s.

3
    “What do you think?” Oriole asks.
    Xue Baochai looks at her reflection in the West Ocean mirror, trying to hide her disappointment. Oriole had promised that doing Baochai’s hair in the newest style would be far more becoming, but the two heavy buns on either side of her head make her face look broader and flatter than ever. Her small, single-lidded eyes, lacking in any expressivity, stare back at her in the mirror. She turns away from her reflection.
    “Don’t you like it?” the maid says. “Or, I can do it with the front combed up and—”
    “Do it the usual way. I’m in a hurry. My mother had a headache last night and I have to go see how she is,” Baochai says curtly. She waits impatiently as Oriole re-dresses her hair. It is always the same each time she tries a new gown or hairstyle. The promised transformation never occurs, and she is forced yet again to confront the disappointment of her appearance: the plain uninflected expanse of her face, the solid, almost matronly figure, even though she is not yet nineteen.
    After Oriole is done, Baochai hurries from her apartments across the Garden to see her mother. Like Baoyu and her unmarried female cousins at Rongguo, Baochai lives in one of the apartments clustered around the lake in the Garden, while the matrons—her mother, Granny, Xifeng—live in more imposing and formal apartments in the front part of the Inner Quarters. Skirting the lower end of the lake, she makes her way to her mother’s apartments and goes straight to the bedroom. She finds Mrs. Xue sitting before the dressing table while her maid Sunset combs her hair. There are heavy bags under her mother’s eyes.
    “You don’t feel any better?” she asks.
    Mrs. Xue shakes her head, putting a hand to her temple. “I had a bad night. I can’t find my pills. Do you know where I put them?”
    “Perhaps you left them at Granny’s last night at dinner. Why don’t I go check?”
    She hurries to the principal apartment of the Inner Quarters, occupied by Lady Jia. As she passes through the small reception hall into thelarge courtyard, she sees Jia Huan using a straw to tease a cockatiel in one of the cages hanging along the verandah. She tries to slip by unnoticed. Jia Huan is Baoyu’s half brother, born to Uncle Zheng by his concubine Auntie Zhao. Though