Rereading A Family of Gold and Powder

There used to be a copy of the first volume of A Family of Gold and Powder at home, so old and tattered it was practically falling apart. I read it through in elementary school. What left the deepest impression was unexpectedly the Mid-Autumn Festival trip to Fragrant Hills, and to this day I can still more or less recall the poem Jin Yanxi composed:

A curved arm like flawless jade, Slightly flushed, reflected through thin gauze. I cannot bear to view her by the window, side by side, For last night she newly set aside the palace maid’s red seal. Looking back now, such days seem to have been truly lived. Perhaps the best way to understand a novel is to live as its characters do. In any case, after climbing mountains with Chen and watching operas together, I feel I can grasp something of how much of Jin Yanxi’s feeling for Leng Qingqiu was genuine and how much was pretense. This time, reading the second half, I realized Zhang Henshui was rather fond of the Jin family. Though the novel claims to imitate Dream of the Red Chamber, the ending is not truly tragic—merely a great fire that burns everything clean. Perhaps he found this symmetrical with the structure of old novels, but as a result, reading the two volumes separately, Jin Yanxi feels like two different people.

Did Jin Yanxi truly love Leng Qingqiu? Judging from their first meeting alone, one cannot see what he understood of her before deciding to pursue her; it was practically love at first sight, or rather, lust at first sight. As for his later conquest, it was less a conquest of Leng Qingqiu herself than of the Leng family—her uncle and mother, each with their own calculations. So-called young-master sentimentality is nothing but the self-fantasy of a wealthy household. In short, Jin Quan’s incisive comment that Jin Yanxi manufactured his offensive with money hits the mark. It is like clearing an RPG, or perhaps Zhang Henshui’s mockery of the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School’s fantasies, much like Grandmother Jia’s critique of the talented-scholar-and-beauty plays.

As for the second volume, though the sudden downturn has its logic, Jin Yanxi also remains entangled with his old lover—indeed, the lotus root was never even severed. Jin Yanxi’s tragedy lies in being so mean-spirited despite his noble birth. Only the rich can afford to be kind, for the rich must be kind. His treatment of Leng Qingqiu was too brutal, more like a family from a mean alley. I once read a novel about Zhang Jian; his son Zhang Xiaoruo was also a young master, yet not so contemptible. Looking at the young masters of the Republican era, each had his own brand of absurdity, yet none handled romance so crudely. I feel such chapters are Zhang Henshui’s template for divorce, forcing both parties toward a tragic end by applying a conflict arc he had perhaps seen or written before.

This brings to mind Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu. Perhaps Zhang Henshui also thought of Jin Yanxi and Leng Qingqiu as an alternate-history Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu. Of course, Baoyu’s talent towers above the ignoramus Jin Yanxi; yet who can say that on some alternate timeline Baoyu would not also flirt with every flower? And naturally, Lin Daiyu of the feudal era would never be as resolute as Leng Qingqiu.

What is Leng Qingqiu to do? In A Doll’s House, Torvald is at least kind to Nora. For a Jin Yanxi who is both unfaithful and unkind, should she leave? Leaving would be as difficult as it is in the original plot. If she stays, at least Old Lady Jin supports her; yet the Jin family’s deficit is a fact. How to maintain such a facade from collapsing? In that era, was there truly leisure to invest in industry?