The Argument for a Woman’s Authorship of the Hou Honglou meng

This article argues Hou Honglou meng (Later Dream of the Red Chamber; in circulation by 1796), the earliest sequel to the 120-chapter Dream of the Red Chamber, was likely written by a woman. The author of Hou Honglou meng makes the reborn Lin Daiyu the central protagonist of the novel. Over the duration of thirty chapters, Daiyu transitions from the role of daughter, to bride and daughter-in-law, and finally to mother. This pragmatic Daiyu has no patience for the romantic cult of qing values of the parent novel; instead, her sentimental attachments are directed toward her natal family, and her expressed will is to escape marriage in order to pursue Daoist transcendence. Daiyu returns to life as an extremely practical household manager who revives the fortunes of the Jia family. This image of an empowered Daiyu who insists on her autonomy from Baoyu, who is still obsessed with his qing-based yearning, conforms to the types of protagonists found in female-authored tanci. The article concludes with the argument that the prolific woman of letters Yun Zhu (1771-1833) deserves serious consideration as the author of Hou Honglou meng.

From erotic desire to egalitarian romantic passion

Informed by the sociological theory of “Conventionalization” developed by Frederick Bartlett, the article examines transformations the expression “love” brought to the indigenous Chinese socio-moral-emotive paradigm during the early twentieth century. It focuses on examining usages and semantic connotations of “愛”, a loose Chinese equivalence of love, in Yínbiān yànyǔ 吟邊燕語 (Chanting the Swallows’ Talks), a translation by Lín Shū 林紓 (1852–1924) of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare published in 1904, a time that witnessed a vast number of translation projects as well as the transformative impacts they brought to China. By illustrating how “ai” in Lin’s translation has departed radically from its traditional usages as depicted in the mid-Qing novel The Story of the Stone (紅樓夢 Hónglóu mèng) and become a close equivalence of the western notion of love, the article shows that the Chinese’s emotional experiences during the early modern period may in all likelihood be different from those of the West, but the two seem to have become increasing comparable. When we seek to understand modern Chinese emotional experience, apart from asking how it is ethnically, socially, culturally, historically different, it might be equally important to ask in what ways the West has made it different from before, and how it has managed to retain its unique identity during a time of radical transformation.

Hongloumeng, Honglou Meng, Hong Loumeng, or Hong Lou Meng

The current Pinyin Romanization of Chinese book and journal titles is rich in examples of inconsistencies, and this problem has much more been identified than examined. The current paper traces the problem back to the guiding documents, analyzes their inborn problem. It is argued that the currently dominant practice of aggregating syllables is the source of the inconsistencies, and it results from ambiguous wordings and misconception of “ci” as the basic unit in the guiding documents. Based on this analysis, a practice of Romanizing Chinese on the basis of “zi” is put forward, and the underlying rationale analyzed. The purpose is to contribute to the solution of the issue of inconsistency and offer an approach to standardizing the practice of Pinyin Romanization of Chinese book and journal titles.