Sewing Another Girl's Wedding Dress

The raw emotional power of Dream of the Red Chamber

Sewing Another Girl's Wedding Dress

My grandmother sent us a bunch of towels with this phrase stitched on:

“Decisions Determine Destiny” is what it says; that final y looks like it’s slipped off a bit.

This is precisely the opposite of what Zhen Shiyin and the Taoist priest have been discussing in our segment of Dream of the Red Chamber. In fact, at first glance you’d conclude that Zhen Shiyin has resigned himself to his fate — that there’s simply nothing he can do, so he might as well adopt the absurdist attitude and figure that life just makes no sense.

In other words, decisions not only don’t determine destiny, but you’re a fool for even trying to decide.

But don’t lose heart. Cao Xueqin isn’t telling us here that there’s no point in doing anything in life, that fate is completely random, and that we might as well give everything up and do psychedelic drugs or something similar. But to figure out how Cao Xueqin really feels about this, we’re going to have to dig into these two poems and see how Zhen Shiyin’s comments change things.

By way of a preview: there’s a very early brand of what you might call “feminism” in Cao Xueqin’s writing. However, I’d argue that he goes beyond feminism and towards a general humanist feeling, one that emphasizes people over systems, and emotions over stone-faced “morals.”

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