Dream of the Red Chamber: Commentaries by Wang Meng (Revised and Expanded Edition)

Author: Cao Xueqin (Qing Dynasty)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-11-01
Features: I love reading Dream of the Red Chamber. Dream of the Red Chamber is a book that can withstand reading, analysis, and trials. It is the crystallization of experience. Life experience, social experience, emotional experience, political experience, artistic experience—everything is included. Dream of the Red Chamber is life. It helps you experience life. Reading one Dream of the Red Chamber is like living once, at least for twenty years. Reading Dream of the Red Chamber is like a dialogue with its author, an "exchange of experiences." Understand Dream of the Red Chamber with your own experience, and let Dream of the Red Chamber's experience validate, supplement, and inspire your own. Your experience and your life become infinitely richer and more vivid.
Dream of the Red Chamber is also a book full of imagination. It leaves behind too many ancient, strange, profound ideas, riddles, myths, and pieces of information that haven’t been fully sorted out, requiring your wisdom. It makes you guess, confuses you, drives you to obsession, and transports you to another world. Then you realize: there is more than one world, and you have so many worlds waiting to be explored and discovered. After reading Dream of the Red Chamber, can you still be the same as before?
Dream of the Red Chamber is a book that liberates you. After experiencing everything, there is only great compassion, indifference, joy, and emptiness. There is only nothing. All that exists seems like delusion, even deception, while only nothing is real. You no longer care or those small, trivial matters of the mortal world. You live a little more freely—but of course, a little more desolately too. After reading Dream of the Red Chamber, you will understand that freedom is intertwined with sorrow, and sorrow is intertwined with freedom.
Dream of the Red Chamber is a book of perseverance. It makes you realize that there are still things in the world worth living, dying, crying, laughing, and even going mad for. It makes you believe that life is worth living. Therefore, death can also be meaningful. To die for life is worthwhile. No amount of negative emotions can cover the infinite flavors of life! Thus, reading Dream of the Red Chamber once is like making you twenty years younger.
Dream of the Red Chamber makes you sigh. Dream of the Red Chamber makes you melancholic. Dream of the Red Chamber makes you wise. Dream of the Red Chamber makes you confused. Dream of the Red Chamber makes you heartbroken. Dream of the Red Chamber makes you marvel at the superiority of the Chinese language and characters. Dream of the Red Chamber makes you feel mysterious, as if there is an inexplicable greatness in the unseen. You’ll feel: no single person could have written Dream of the Red Chamber. The characters in Dream of the Red Chamber have already become spirits. The events in Dream of the Red Chamber have already become fate. They have entered your life, and you can’t even drive them away. It is that unseen greatness that wrote Dream of the Red Chamber. It was written by Cao Xueqin’s hand, yet it was also revealed to so many people, including Wang Meng, who saw and gained something from it.
Dream of the Red Chamber is a book of culture. It seems to have exhausted all possibilities of the Chinese language, characters, and literature, completing our culture. Dream of the Red Chamber is an encyclopedia, not just of the feudal society. Almost, you can find references, explanations, support, and resonant connections for all your experiences, joys, sorrows, and emotions in Dream of the Red Chamber.
Dream of the Red Chamber is also an exchange and intersection of intellect and emotion, reasoning and intuition, restlessness and tranquility. Have you ever had a play that you didn’t get to perform? Do you have intellectual and emotional energy that needs to be practiced and expressed? Do you have talent and knowledge that you want to showcase or share? Do you have tears that haven’t been shed yet? Come to Dream of the Red Chamber! No matter how many times you come, there is always room for you! Especially, Dream of the Red Chamber actually tells you nothing. You will forever debate and suffer over it, unable to understand why it is this way rather than that, why it is him rather than her. You’ll never figure out who is better or worse, who is more lovable or less lovable, which part is more real or more like empty words. Add to this the study of Dream of the Red Chamber, and you will forever be in a struggle with it. Yet it is powerful enough to occupy your entire life. Dream of the Red Chamber is always a newly published book. Reading Dream of the Red Chamber is a brave spiritual quest. In that world, what will you hear and gain? Through countless explorations, I have written dialogues and debates with Cao Xueqin, Baoyu, Daiyu, Jia Zheng, and Wang Furen.
Commentary—it’s a great idea. To live and study with Dream of the Red Chamber day and night, this is fate, and also a blessing. I should thank Lijiang Publishing House and Mr. Nie Zhenning for this idea. And I should also thank you, the reader—you have also entered this fate and blessing. You are also in a dream.
—Wang Meng