Reflections on Dream of the Red Chamber By Liu Zaifu

Besides, since I did not intend to write anything monumental, I only wanted to grasp some of the heartfelt messages and sentiments in the novel. The more than two hundred random thoughts collected in this book are no more than “sudden realizations” I jotted down as I read the novel. They are by no means “serious scholarship.” Some articles in this book, however, were assignments. Among them, “The Eternal Value of Dream of the Red Chamber” was an assignment from Liu Mengxi, a noted scholar of Dream of the Red Chamber. Invited by the Chinese Department of Beijing University to solicit articles from scholars of Dream of the Red Chamber and to compile the articles into a collection, he unexpectedly thought of me, an outsider to the field, and refused to let me “off the hook.” Another article was an assignment from Li Xin and Shu Fei. Li Xin is an old friend of mine and worked as the editor of my book Reflections on Literature seventeen or eighteen years ago. Now in charge of the Joint Publishing Company in Hong Kong, he asked me to write a book to reevaluate traditional Chinese novels. Of course I could not avoid talking about Dream of the Red Chamber. A third article in this book, “Repentance in Dream of the Red Chamber,” was necessitated by the contents and structure of Sin and Literature, a book I coauthored with Lin Gang. So, it was also something I had no choice but to write. As for the discussions in part III of this book, they are just pieces I wrote to amuse myself. I was extremely lonely right after I left China and had to ask for help from Cao Xueqin, a “genius of the soul.” As I wander in foreign countries, the spirit of Dream of the Red Chamber shines from time to time on my spiritual journey and literary journey. Like Dante’s guide Beatrice, Lin Daiyu serves as a light leading Baoyu forward in the novel and, at the same time, directing me out of the muddy world in my life. In short, instead of taking Dream of the Red Chamber as an object of scholarship, I treat it as an object of aesthetic appreciation, an object that inspires, in particular, reflections on life and spiritual exploration. Life is not a concept or a number. Nor is it a political slogan or a moral code. It is constituted by infinitely expandable corporality and spirituality.