Dream of the Red Chamber (Upper, Middle, and Lower) -- Supplement Version (Commentary by Wang Meng)

Author: Cao Xueqin (Qing Dynasty), written by Gao E
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—all are encompassed. 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." You understand Dream of the Red Chamber through your own experiences, and you validate, supplement, and inspire your experiences with the experiences of Dream of the Red Chamber. Your experiences 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, and profound ideas, riddles, myths, and unsorted information that require your wisdom to decipher. 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 be the same as before? Dream of the Red Chamber is a book that liberates you. Having experienced everything, there is only great compassion, indifference, joy, and emptiness. There is only nothing. All that exists are illusions, 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. 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 some 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. Dying for life is worthwhile. A hundred negative emotions cannot conceal the infinite flavors of life! Thus, reading Dream of the Red Chamber once again is like making you twenty years younger. Dream of the Red Chamber makes you sigh in wonder. 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 will think: no single individual 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 cannot drive them away. It is the unseen greatness that wrote Dream of the Red Chamber. It was written by Cao Xueqin in name, and by so many people—including Wang Meng—with their eyes discerning something, gaining something. 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, emotions, joys, and sorrows in Dream of the Red Chamber. Dream of the Red Chamber is also an intersection of intellect and emotion, reasoning and intuition, restlessness and tranquility. Have you ever had a play that you haven’t fully performed? Do you have intellectual and emotional energy that needs to be practiced and expressed? Do you have talents and knowledge that you want to showcase or share? Do you have tears that haven’t yet been shed? Come to Dream of the Red Chamber! No matter how many times you come, there is always room here! Especially, Dream of the Red Chamber actually tells you nothing. You will forever debate and suffer over it, unable to explain why it is one way rather than another, why it is him rather than her. You will never understand who is better or worse, who is more lovable or less lovable, which part is more real or more fictional. Add to it 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 will always be 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. Critiquing Dream of the Red Chamber is a great idea. To live and study with Dream of the Red Chamber day and night is a fate, a blessing. I should thank Lijiang Publishing House and Mr. Nie Zhenning for this idea. And I should also thank you, the reader, for entering this fate and blessing. You are also in a dream now.——Wang Meng