First Impressions

The Red Chamber Chapter 3

From the strange netherworld of talking rocks, we finally reach the setting of the main plot with the Rongguo mansion.  My favorite character in the story Lin Daiyu meets everyone in the family, I assume the first time.



(This photo is the 2010 remake of The Dream of the Red Chamber)

The  2010 remake is eye candy.  When I found it, I realized it was better than my imagination.  Here's essentially the video of the 3rd chapter.  Even if you don't know Chinese, body language tells you everything.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tanlyBZoVRQ

Reading the book the second time, new details about the beginning that gave me chills.  But let's stick with Lin Daiyu for a moment.

Here's a teenage girl at the prime of her youth who just lost her mother.  Her father just sent her to her maternal family to be taken care of. Her maternal family is one of the most powerful people in China,  She has to quickly shift from her personal problems and fit in because she's an outsider.

First impressions are like a facebook picture, it only gives you a shell.  But once we crack the shell and see more of the individual, we can't fully determine the goodness of the other person.

I make terrible first impressions.  In the beginning I would introduce myself with the wrong name.  I'm an introverted person.  It takes all of my effort to not choke on my own saliva or defecate in my own pants.  But once I tell myself that the stakes aren't high, and most of the time other people's judgment doesn't matter, I've gotten better about it.

When I first read this scene, I thought Daiyu would feel at ease with rich family wanting to ease the pain of death.  But I didn't consider her status before entering the mansion.  Other than familial obligations between the Rongguo estate and Lin Daiyu, Daiyu is completely alone.  She doesn't know if she can receive unconditional love like what her parents provide her.  She has no idea what these new people value.

Before stepping into a room full of new people, everyone is trying to weigh and calculate value of each other.  If one is going with trustworthy companions, one feels safer in this setting because their reactions can give more clues and details about strangers.  Then again, your certainty could be dead wrong.

The only thing you can do is guess.

 

 

Why the House Always Wins

The Dream of the Red Chamber Chapter 2



That zero means millions of dollars in profit!
When Jia Yucun (賈雨村) was going out for a walk, he encounters a dilapidated temple.  The two columns at the front of the door has a couplet:

身後有餘忘縮手

When there's plenty behind, one forgets to hold back

眼前無路想回頭

When one there's nothing ahead, one thinks of turning back

There's something called the sunk costs fallacy.   It says one makes decisions about current conditions based on how one invested in the past.

Here's an example I used for my niece that simplifies gambling.

Let's say we bet on a coin toss game and I'm the house.  If it's heads, I win a dollar.  If tails, you win a dollar.  If we decide to play one round, one dollar is at stake.  If we decide to play 100 rounds, 100 dollars at stake.

If we assume the coin is fair, most likely you and I will win 50 dollars.  There might be a chance that I win 49, and you win 51, or visa versa.  There's also the possibility that I win 1 dollar, and you win 99.  But the probability of getting a 49-51 state is much higher than 1-99.

Here's a cute website about binomial probability.  You do the math.

But let's simplify things for the math inept.

Let's go back to the coin toss.  If you win, I give you a dollar.  But if I win, you have to give me 1.01.  After 100 rounds, most likely you WIN 50 dollars, and I WIN 55 dollars.  No big deal, right?

Ah, but let's look at this way, I LOST 50 dollars to pay your winnings, but you LOST 55 to pay my winnings!  If we just take the difference between what was lost and won for each person, I WON five bucks, you LOST 5 bucks.

But if you're a little sunk in the hole, you can win it back right?  SUNK COSTS FALLACY!!!!

1000 rounds?  I win $50.

10,000 rounds?  I win $500.

What if I lived in a world where many people agreed to play against much more than their odds for 24 hours a day?  It would be like some sort of cash gathering machine!

It's called a casino!

Comment to conversate!

The Book Opens with a Dream

SPOILER:  The Dream of the Red Chamber Chapter 1.

Most people fall asleep by trying to blank out their minds, or sing a tune inside their heads.  I have to the think of the weirdest possible thing and follow the logic.  For instance, I might think about the United Nations roll call with all zoo animals, or ostriches might try to sell different kinds of sand on the home shopping network.

For some reason odd situations turn into though provoking dreams.  Last week I dreamt I was a children's raffle and I was sitting next to the President Obama and the Supreme Court.  We were discussing whether the common man had the moral capacity to judge fairness for other people.  I was sitting next to Justice Kennedy, while Sotomayor dyed her hair blonde.

The Dream of the Red Chamber opens with a talking rock.  The story of the stone, which happens to be the alternative title to the book, is about the stone's dream to experience the mortal world.  The story is already written on the stone, so the author forces the reader to frame the story as a recollection of the stone's dream in the mortal world.

When we were kids, our uncorrupted imaginations dreamt of fanciful realities that felt possible to exist.  Dreams feel possible because kids lack the capacity to account for reality.

There were three things I wanted to be when I was a kid:  a power ranger, the president of China, or a food critic.  I learned about the communist party in China.  My parents discouraged me from spending my life critiquing food, there's Yelp for that.  I still want to beat up someone of comparable stature though, that's number 1 on my bucket list.

Sometimes having the temptation of a dream is better than it becoming reality. Sometimes its a reason for living.   Sometimes it can be a foolish fantasy.  Here's a blog post from Mark Mason about someone's rape fantasy almost coming true.

So what does Cao Xueqin think?  Here's his poem that sets the tone for the rock's dream:

滿紙荒唐言

Man1 zhi3 huang1 tang2 yan2

Paper full of gibberish

一把辛酸淚

yi4 ba3 xin1 suan1 lei4

All full of bitter tears

都云作者癡

dou1 yun2 xuo4 zhe3 chi1

All say the writer is crazy

誰解其中味

Shei2 jie3 qi2 zhong1 wei4

Who can understand the meaning of all this?

* I left the pinyin and tone because

the sound of the words are rhythmic.

What are/were your dreams?  Have they changed over time?  Comment to converse!

The Power of Narrative

SPOILER ALERT!  GAME OF THRONES!

Here's a conversation between two bureaucrats of within the fictional kingdom.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH7sIOBJqLA

Start from 1:48 onwards.

Narrative is the most powerful motivation behind human action.  Without narrative, action has no relation of consequence and becomes chaotic.

American history has no utilitarian purpose.  One can't build roads and bridges with this knowledge, yet American history is taught for the good majority of public school education.  Americans roughly agree that all men are created equal and the individual can determine one's fate in life.

But why aren't we taught Norwegian history?  Are the past actions of Americans more important than the peoples of Norway?  Wouldn't that imply that one group of people are more important than another?

To a large extent, American history is public propaganda.  Instead of our education system providing critical thinking tools to analyze and contextualize history and culture that an individual may value, any other culture that doesn't relate of fit within the narrative is implicitly sub-par.

One could counter by noting that studying the movement of American history charts a path of progression and improvement.  Without understanding this evolution we do not see how the thoughts of the past are relevant to our core beliefs today.

Hogwash.  Sociology and philosophy provide enough reasons to justify compassion to our fellow man, but to assume knowing history is reason enough to justify present actions and conditions is a dangerous lie.  Blind attachment to narrative is a cheap and lazy way to justify our actions.

The American narrative believes that the Constitution and democracy is the source of its current advance.  Our moral narrative justifies capitalism and our right to profit.

The Chinese narrative believes its age and history gives it precedence to be "superior" to any other foreign culture.  The name Zhongguo literally means "center country."

Narrative is not absolute truth.  It's only a frame.

This is the lesson I learned from "The Dream of the Red Chamber" (紅樓夢)。

So far my blog has been a semi-random mish mash of little curios in Chinese literature.  At first I thought following Chinese literature anthologies like DeBary and Bloom or Stephen Owen could carry an interesting narrative framework, but a chronological framework is only useful for academia and reference.

From now on my blog will discuss Chinese culture from the standpoint of "The Red Chamber."  Hopefully the narrative frame will be interesting as it was 300 years ago.