Reading note IV · The lamp-oil night
Why did Jia Huan burn Baoyu with the hot lamp oil?
第二十五回·燈油
In chapter 25 Jia Huan tipped a lamp of hot oil over his half-brother's face and left a row of blisters. The novel says plainly that it was not an accident, and plainly why: a concubine's son had spent his whole life watching the house love somebody else.
The scene, as the chapter gives it 本事
Baoyu comes home from a birthday feast at the Wangs with wine in him, and his mother puts him down to rest on her kang. Jia Huan is already in the room, set to copying the Diamond Sutra — a chore that tells you his standing: the good son does lessons with tutors, this one copies scripture in the servants' hearing. Baoyu, bored and drowsy, teases the maid Caixia, who has no patience for him because her regard is all for Jia Huan. The novel watches Jia Huan watching this — and then his hand finds the lamp.
The oil takes Baoyu across the face in blisters. It is the jade-in-the-mouth boy's first visible wound from inside his own house, and it comes from the one person in it who has the least and resents it most.
Why he did it 緣故
The novel does not leave the motive to be inferred. Jia Huan is the son of a concubine, and the book shows the arithmetic of that birth again and again: the same father, a different everything. His mother's lodgings, his share of attention, the way servants weigh him against his brother — all of it is second, and the household does not pretend otherwise. The trigger in the scene is small on purpose: a maid's coldness, a brother's ease with her. A boy supplied with years of that arithmetic does not need a large trigger.
His mother is the other half of the answer. Concubine Zhao is the novel's study of what a permanent second place does to a person, and her son is both her instrument and her echo. Chapter 25 is the first time the two of them act on it together in daylight; the curse that same night is the second time.
The scolding, and the cover story 訓斥
Lady Wang's anger lands twice: on Jia Huan for the act, and on Concubine Zhao for the son — a mother punished through her child, which is the household's usual way of reaching her. Wang Xifeng, arriving at the noise, reads the room faster than anyone and removes the boy before Grandmother Jia hears it. To the old lady it goes down as Baoyu's own clumsiness, which spares her alarm and spares Jia Huan the one judge with real power over him.
What grows out of it 後事
The same chapter runs the revenge to its end: Ma Daopo takes Concubine Zhao's silver and a pawned lot of jewellery, works her paper goblins, and both Baoyu and Wang Xifeng go into death-fits before the scabby monk and the lame Taoist talk the jade back into doing its work. The novel keeps the two events in one chapter on purpose — the lamp in the morning, the curse at night, one grudge wearing two shapes.
And the grudge does not age out. Eight chapters later it is Jia Huan's word to his father about the maid Jinchuan that brings on the great beating of chapter 33. Read the two chapters together and you have the novel's whole statement on the second son: he never gets a battlefield, so he fights where he stands.
The chapter attributions are the text's. The readings in the second and fourth sections — the arithmetic of a concubine-born son, one grudge in two shapes — are this site's, argued from the chapters cited below.