“Zhen” and “Jia” in The Story of the Stone

It would be great to live in one’s personal dream or fantasy, but that cannot happen. Instead, when the person wakes up from a dream or breaks out of a fantasy, the only things that awaits them is reality. In various parts of The Story of the Stone, the theme of the separation between what is true and what is false is repeatedly mentioned directly or inferred. Though some things are not easily identified to have connections with the theme, like the last names of the two male main characters, other things like the small characters inscribed on the arch have connections that are easier to be realized by the readers.

In Shiyin’s dream, he sees an arch with small characters inscribed on either side of it. The characters state “Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true; Real becomes not-real where the unreal’s real” (page 528). Later on in this chapter, it suddenly sinks in that the meaning of the small characters from his dream relates to Shiyin’s real life. Again, as though unreal becomes real, though Shiyin met the monk and the Taoist in a dream, he soon sees them approaching them when he was outside at the front of his house. The monk warns him to “beware the high feast of the fifteenth day”, which is the upcoming Mid-Autumn Festival (page 529). The truth that Shiyin is good in wealth and happily lives with his wife and daughter makes the warning of the monk seem like an unreal prophecy because the bad things haven’t happened. Assuming that the “unreal” prophecy made by an immortal is true, the characters inscribed on the arch should describe that all the Shiyin’s happiness disappears when the unbelievable situation of his family being devastated by a misfortune becomes real. In this case, it is as if the unreal overwrites the real, making what was real now false.

The last names of the two main characters also have a role in assisting the portrayal of the theme. It wasn’t really easy to realize at first that in Chinese, “Zhen” and “Jia” mean “real” and “fake” respectively. Despite the total contrast of the meaning of their last names, these two characters coincidentally also have different social statuses. Zhen Shiyin is happily wed and supplied Yucun with money to the capital, Jia Yucun is a poor scholar that keeps himself alive by being a copyist. As if that was the end of the contrast between these two characters, they also become opposites by the end of chapter one. Shiyin becomes devestated according to the monk’s predictions and Yucun becomes less as poor when he returns to a near-by village. However, it is later revealed in chapter three that despite their outward appearance as being rich, Jia Yucun’s family members are having financial and family problems. Due to the false outward appearance of being wealthy, it relates back to the last name of “Jia” meaning fake. The author, Cao Xueqin seems to not have only portrayed contrast between truth and false directly, but he also uses “Zhen” Shiyin and “Jia” Yucun as a method to contrast truth and false in human form.

Brian Tang