The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, Vol. 2 by Cao Xueqin

If a guest visits home, we get a primer into Chinese culture on how a guest is received and treated. If there is a party, it is described in a lot of detail. But there is one thing that might slow down one’s reading pace.

So once you get into the flow of the story, the pages fly. Everything contributes to moving the story forward. Sometimes there are philosophical musings which are part of a conversation, in which the characters quote classical poetry and old Chinese proverbs to make a point, but that’s it. There are no long monologues, or philosophical musings, or exploration of the inner worlds of the characters. The sentences in the story describe events in the story and move it forward, or they describe the physical surroundings and set the scene, or there is conversation between characters, lots of it. That is, there are only three things in the book. If you have read a Jin Yong book, you’ll know exactly what this means. ‘ A Dream of Red Mansions‘ is a very classically Chinese book. What follows is the story of one family as the stone perceives it. This is the reason why the book is sometimes also called ‘ The Story of the Stone‘.

A Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest pass by and when they hear the stone’s story, they take pity on it and decide to place it in the middle of a human family so that it can experience worldly joy and sorrow. Across time over the eons, that stone becomes sentient, starts thinking and it feels depressed that it is alone and it is not able to experience the world. It starts with a goddess trying to repair a hole in the sky and using many big stones to do that.

The book follows the fortunes of one family and their relatives and their near and dear ones. If I finish reading it, it will be the longest book I’ve ever read, beating Vikram Seth’s ‘ A Suitable Boy‘ comfortably. The translation I have by Yang Hsien-Yi and Gladys Yang runs into three volumes and a total of 1900 pages. ‘ A Dream of Red Mansions‘ is one of the four great Chinese classics. When Di from ‘The Little White Attic’ invited a few of us for a readalong of the book, I couldn’t resist and jumped in. I tried once but got distracted after reading 50 pages. I have wanted to read Cao Xueqin’s ‘ A Dream of Red Mansions‘ for a long time.

The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, Vol. 2 by Cao Xueqin