Enter Jia Baoyu! In this episode of Rereading the Stone, covering Chapter 3 of the classic novel Hong lou meng 紅樓夢, we are finally introduced to the protagonist, Jia Baoyu 賈寶玉. Lin Daiyu is becoming acquainted with her new, luxurious home, her beautiful cousins, and an assortment of other female relatives, including the peerless “Peppercorn Feng“ 鳳辣子. If etiquette were a video game, would you be able to distinguish tea for mouth-washing from tea for drinking? We treat in some detail the surreal, unforgettable meeting (or is it a reunion?) of Lin Daiyu and Jia Baoyu. Kevin subjects Baoyu’s desire to be rid of the “precious jade” with which he was born, something that “none of the girls has,” to a kind of dialectical Freudian analysis, and critiques the critics who attempt to reduce the psychoanalytic treatment of Chinese literature to orientalism or chauvinism. 

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