再次阅读「红楼梦」等于第一次读懂

So as not to be entirely consumed by this trying moment, with its apocalyptic fears and its messianic hopes, I decided to read again the 18th century Chinese mega-novel 红楼梦, variously known (in Chinese as well as English) as the Dream of the Red Chamber or The Story of the Stone. (There are other names too.) You might remember that I've read all 2500 pages of it once before - the year I spent in Shanghai - only to learn that I should have read another translation, the one on which I've now embarked. But what you don't know is that in the interim I've also watched two Chinese television adaptations! Overkill, maybe. But as we came to the end of the second adaptation last month, having spaced it out for as long as we could manage, I found I couldn't bear not to be involved with this story and procured the Hawkes translation from a used bookstore upstate. Proud to report that I've just finished the first of its five volumes!

I suppose rereading - indeed never stopping reading and rereading - a beloved novel is nothing remarkable. One hears of Jane Austen afficionados who read all her novels again each year. I've reread some novels in my time, too. But this is my first time deliberately taking another lap with a novel this way, and I'm relishing the experience.

Making my way through it the first time I had few points of reference for making sense of what was happening and quickly lost track of most of its hundreds of characters. I didn't even know what kind of book I was reading, though I realized it offers cameos of pretty much every genre besides the martial. Now is different. The TV series have given me visuals and even a soundtrack for the world of the Jia household in early Qing Beijing (or perhaps Nanjing), and the different emphases of the two versions have left openings in understanding what's truly important. And Hawkes' translation is a delight, too. Knowing now the world Dream of the Red Chamber comes from and the kind of world it conjures it's like I'm reading it for the first time the way a Chinese person might.

I also know, as I didn't back in 2014, that the world so lovingly depicted here is doomed. I had read somewhere that the novel is sort of like the story of Siddharta Gautama, the Buddha-to-be, whose father had locked him in a garden full of young beauties to prevent him from learning of the seriousness of life and becoming a renunciant. I see that now, too.

But Chinese Buddhism is Mahayana, relishing the beauty of the evanescent joys of the world of samsara and even finding meaning in its sorrow, and married to Daoist ideas too. As I think about the world of the novel now, a fifth of the way in, seeing the characters emerge and engage with each other once again, I feel like I'm seeing the transitory congealing and melting away again of beings of the Zhuangzi. And there's fate, too, or karma if you wish. Early in the book the main protagonist (there are in fact scores of major characters) is taken in a dream to the world of the fairy Disenchantment, who lets him look through some books in her library of lives, where he finds poems describing the exquisite fates of a dozen people named after flowers. He doesn't then know, but readers do, that these describe the fates of people he will meet and love. Describe, foretell, predestine: the story of every character in every book is of course fully told before the reader even meets them, but here this is known to be the nature of reality, not just of fiction... though just which of those is which is another question!

The entrance to the fairy Disenchantment's Land of Illusion bears a couplet with multiple puns, one on the word jia, which means fiction but also sounds like the name of the family whose story the novel tells.

假作真时真亦假
（假作真時真亦假）
 Jia zuo zhen shi zhen yi jia

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true

无为有处有还无
（無為有處有還無）

 Wu wei you chu you huan wu

Real becomes not-real when the unreal's real

The Story of the Stone: A Chinese Novel by Cao Xueqin in Five Volumes,

trans. David Hawkes, Volume I: 'The Golden Days' (Penguin, 1973), 130