Ep. 100: Rereading Hong lou meng 紅樓夢 Chapter 47 part 1

So in the last couple of chapters, we have been dealing with the pursuit by Jia Sha, who's one of the kind of older male members of this central family, the Jia family, at the heart of the book.

So it's Jia Sha pursuing a younger woman who he wants to make his concubine.

So this woman is a maid.

She's known in the Chinese as Yuan Yang and in the Hawke's English translation as Faithful.

She is the chief maidservant to Grandmother Jia, the kind of matriarch of the household.

And she's very kind of beautiful and intelligent and accomplished.

And I guess for this reason, she's already much depended upon by Grandmother Jia.

So, you know, Grandmother Jia really relies on her for her hard work and her kind of attention to detail and her naturally kind of honest nature.

Anyway, so Jia Sha wants her as his concubine and he's ordered his wife, Lady Xing, to make it happen.

So Lady Xing follows his orders dutifully.

She speaks first to Wang Xi Feng, who's one of the other women in the household.

And she's the one most involved in kind of running the household affairs.

So she's a kind of good person to speak to, I suppose.

So, yeah, so Lady Xing speaks to her to kind of get the lay of the land.

Xi Feng is initially dismissive of the idea.

But once she realizes there's no changing Lady Xing's mind, she, you know, appears to help.

Lady Xing goes to speak to the maid in question, Yuan Yang, Faithful.

And Yuan Yang is kind of too embarrassed to actually say she doesn't want to be a concubine, but she simply says nothing.

You know, she adopts this attitude of almost kind of passive resistance.

And so once she doesn't play ball, Lady Xing goes to speak to Yuan Yang's family, who are very keen on the idea, obviously, because, you know, that means she would be elevated from a mere servant to almost kind of second wife of one of the most senior members of this noble family.

And that would mean the rest of them would kind of get to bask in her kind of reflected glory.

Anyway, the longer that Yuan Yang refuses, the kind of nastier that Jia Sha, the man pursuing her, becomes.

You know, he promises that he will never let her escape, you know, and even if she refuses to marry him, she will never have the chance to marry anyone else.

And in the end of the chapter, Yuan Yang kind of being faced with no other option, she makes a dramatic declaration in front of Grandmother Jia and many other members of the household.

That she will never marry and she will remain faithful to Grandmother Jia until her death.