Dream of the Red Chamber Nightmare

Author: Eileen Chang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-02-01
Features: Highly recommended by the redology master Zhou Ruchang, the only legally authorized and sold simplified Chinese edition. Only Eileen Chang can truly be called a confidant of Cao Xueqin. I am now deeply impressed by her and consider her one of the most extraordinary figures in "redology history," beyond reach for most. Eileen Chang's extraordinary talent lies in her incredibly sharp mind and exceptional memory, unmatched by anyone. I felt ashamed to have called myself a "redologist"! This was around eight or nine years ago. I sent some outlines of my research on Dream of the Red Chamber to Song Qi for review, and some of the content seemed quite peculiar. Song Qi jokingly called it Nightmare in the Red Chamber (), and from time to time, he would ask in his letters, "How's your Nightmare in the Red Chamber coming along?" I thought that title was excellent and indeed captured the situation—a kind of madness. Those years, I happened to have the opportunity to borrow books from the Harvard-Yenching Library and the University of California Library, where I saw the Zhi edition of Dream of the Red Chamber. Modern scholars view it from a standing perspective—there's no time to sit down. As for my own work, my only qualification is that I am thoroughly familiar with Dream of the Red Chamber. I don't need to pay attention to different editions; the slightly unfamiliar characters will naturally jump out at me. However, I haven't written much theoretical text, so of course, my mistakes are quite obvious. I suppose I'm (addicted) to classical Chinese. I remember Bacon's prose has this line: "Brevity is the soul of wit," but I believe it applies beyond just wit, so I see each character as a basket (), and it's better to save one if possible. Because I hate being verbose, my explanations aren't clear enough, so I'll just refer to the complete manuscript—the so-called Draft of the Red Chamber—as the manuscript. In fact, all these editions are manuscripts. No wonder after Preliminary Notes on the Red Chamber was published, a friend told me they didn't understand it—of course, he put it more delicately. It reminded me that there was a book review saying the title Zhang's View () was hard to understand. I'll take this opportunity to clarify. Zhang's View is just a play on the common phrase "I see CC," substituting the subject or name. "Zhang's View" means Zhang's perspective or a glimpse—looking in—a shallow pun. In the past, Whispers () introduced an English line—was it a poem?