When people talk about Chinese literature, do not mention The story of the Stone is impossible. The influence of the novel is so great that many specialists spend their whole life on this book. I first read this book in Chinese when I was sixteen years old. The author lived in Qing dynasty, so the language of this book is ancient Chinese. Ancient Chinese has some difference with the Chinese which we speak right now. It is much harder to translate into another language. The language gap of translation cannot be avoided, but the story is still wonderful.
The story is about a big family Jia. It also includes love stories and reflects the social problem of the dynasty. In Chapter 1, the author introduced the origin of the stone. The stone was used by the goddess Nu-wa to repair the sky. Why did the author use the traditional Chinese folk tale to be the background of the story? Many specialists believe that the author was not satisfied with the society and hope the society can be fixed just like Nu-wa repaired the sky. Readers have their own understanding on the work. Furthermore, many people find that every time you read the story you can create new understanding of the novel. This is the reason why so many specialists spend their whole life on reading and studying this work. I believe the lecture of the work will be interesting because we can share different understanding of the novel. It may be hard to understand the traditional Chinese culture in the novel. So I attached the TV series of the novel, I hope you will enjoy it.
New link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hib6pl9sLgI&list=PL492F687D0FC34E90
I agree with you that author use the traditional Chinese folk tale to be the background of the story because the author did not satisfied with the society, and I think they used folk tale to attract the readers’ attention. The author used ancient Chinese, so it’s hard to understand even though you are Chinese. If you want to understand the ancient Chinese you need to learn what each words’ meaning, and they have different meanings during different periods. You also need to find which meaning satisfied with the word in different sentences. That is why the Chinese ancient literature hard to understnad.