【英文原声版12】Ronald Egan: The Red Chamber

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What’s the story of the book?

《红楼梦》讲了什么？

Zachary Davis: I read a lot. And most things I read, even when they’re good, sound like other things I’ve read before. They are familiar, and they fit a pattern. Every once in a while though I come across a work that just feels different, in a good way. Its feels fresh and new, and like a work of genius.

扎卡里·戴维斯：我经常读书。大部分我读过的书即使内容不错，却总有种似曾相识的感觉。看起来很熟悉，总是落于窠臼。不过有次我读过一部书，给我一种截然不同的奇妙感觉。它读起来非常新颖，像是神来之笔。

Zachary Davis: I recently spoke to someone about one of these rare books that broke completely new ground. Even before this book was published, the manuscript circulated among the author’s friends and family.

扎卡里·戴维斯：我最近和别人讨论了一部新奇的书。这本书甚至在出版前，手稿就已经在作者的亲朋好友之间传阅。

Ronald Egan: And there was immediate enthusiasm as if people are saying, “Wow, we've never read anything like this before.”

艾朗诺：手稿一下子点燃了人们的阅读热情，似乎人们都在说：“天呐，我们从来没读过这么精彩的内容。”

Zachary Davis: This is Ronald Egan, a professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University.

扎卡里·戴维斯：这位是斯坦福大学东亚语言与文化教授艾朗诺。

Zachary Davis: The book in question told an entirely new kind of story—one that had characters and plot, but that also had a deeper message. It was finished around 1750 in China, during the Qianlong Emperor’s reign, in the Qing Dynasty. These times are remembered as high points of the Qing Dynasty—a time of power, prestige, and social harmony. But this book tells a different story: one of harmful traditions, political corruption, and intergenerational conflict.

扎卡里·戴维斯：刚刚提到的这本书讲述了一个全新的故事，它既有人物和情节，又包含着更深刻地信息。这部中国小说成书于1750年前后、清朝乾隆皇帝统治期间。那时被认为是清朝最鼎盛的时期，皇权至尊，皇威浩荡，海清河晏。不过这本书揭开了截然不同的一角，讲述了封建传统的危害、政治腐败以及代沟冲突。

Ronald Egan: This is not a frivolous novel. You know, this is not just escapist. This is about as far away from escapist as you could get. Okay? Because it's really shining a very harsh light on things that are very worrisome, that are very bothersome.

艾朗诺：这可不是那种聊作消遣的小说。要知道它并没有消极避世，相反它跟消极避世大相庭径，对吧。因为它清清楚楚地揭露了当时令人忧心忡忡的社会现状。

Zachary Davis: So what was this book?

扎卡里·戴维斯：这本书叫什么呢？

Ronald Egan: It's the great Chinese novel known in Chinese as Hónglóumèng, author name is Cao Xueqin.

艾朗诺：这本伟大的中国小说叫《红楼梦》，作者是曹雪芹。

Zachary Davis: The traditional English translation was titled The Dream of the Red Chamber, but today, the best and most available translation is called The Story of the Stone. To this day, its reputation remains.

扎卡里·戴维斯：这本书英文版的传统译名是The Dream of the Red Chamber，意思是“红楼之梦”。不过如今最好的、最广为人知的译名是The Story of the Stone，意思是石头的故事，也就是中文的“石头记”。直到今天，这本书都享誉颇丰。

Ronald Egan: This novel almost unanimously would be considered by Chinese readers from the time it first began to circulate down to the present day as the finest piece of Chinese literature that was ever produced.

艾朗诺：这部小说自从传阅的第一天以来，被几乎所有的中国读者公认为有史以来中国最好的小说作品。

Zachary Davis: Welcome to Writ Large, a podcast about how books change the world. I’m Zachary Davis. In each episode, I talk with one of the world’s leading scholars about one book that changed the course of history. For this episode, I sat down with Professor Ronald Egan to discuss The Story of the Stone.

扎卡里·戴维斯：欢迎收听：100本改变你和世界的书，在这里我们为大家讲述改变世界的书籍。我是扎卡里·戴维斯。每一集，我都会和一位世界顶尖学者探讨一本影响历史进程的书。在本集，我和斯坦福大学教授艾朗诺一起讨论《红楼梦》。

Zachary Davis: The novel is set at the end of the 17th and into the 18th century.

扎卡里·戴维斯：小说的背景设定在17世纪末至18世纪。

Ronald Egan: The novel is centered on one family who lived in Beijing, a very wealthy, a very elite, aristocratic family named the Jia clan. And the novel over the course of 120 chapters describes the life, and the rise, and eventually the decline of this great family who ends up in deep political trouble with the emperor and the court.

艾朗诺：整本小说围绕着贾府的故事展开，贾家是京城一个富裕的精英贵族家庭。这部长达120回的小说描述了贾家的生活与兴衰。在结尾，这个大家族最终因卷入皇室和朝廷的政治漩涡而衰落。

Ronald Egan: Woven into that story is a love story, and the love story takes place, surprisingly enough, among young members of the family. Really, they're not even adults. They're adolescents.

艾朗诺：书里还涵盖了一段爱情故事。故事发生在家族的年轻一辈身上，着实令人惊奇。他们年纪还很小，还只是少男少女。

Zachary Davis: The young people are cousins who live together in the family’s large estate. In traditional China, cousins could marry if they didn’t have the same surname.

扎卡里·戴维斯：这些年轻人都是彼此的堂兄妹或者表兄妹，他们共同生活在家族的庄园里。在中国古代，如果旁系兄妹或姐弟姓氏不同，他们便可以结亲。

Ronald Egan: The girl's mother could be a member of the Jia family, but her father cannot be. So consequently, she has a different surname. So even though she's a first cousin, she's a potential future wife for the young man.

艾朗诺：嫁入贾府的女孩，母亲可以姓贾，但父亲不可以。这样才能确保她的姓氏不同。所以就算他是男孩的嫡亲的姑表姐妹，未来她也有可能成为这个男孩的妻子。

Ronald Egan: And the crux of the love story is to see which of the many female cousins is going to end up getting betrothed to the young boy, whose name is Baoyu.

艾朗诺：这段爱情故事的核心就是，最终哪位姑表姐妹或姨表姐妹会和这个叫宝玉的男孩结亲。

Ronald Egan: So there are these two stories that are going on simultaneously, the story of the lives of the young people who are maybe 13 or 14 when the novel opens and maybe 19, which is fully marriageable age by the time the novel closes. And that story is embedded in this larger story of the fortunes of the clan.

艾朗诺：两条故事线同时进行。在爱情故事的开篇，这些年轻人只有十三四岁，到结尾处，他们差不多十九岁，正好是当时中国人的适婚年龄。这条线隐藏于家族兴衰故事的主线中。

Zachary Davis: The story doesn’t end well for Baoyu and his love.

扎卡里·戴维斯：对于宝玉和他的恋人来说，故事的结局并不圆满。

Ronald Egan: The tragedy of that love story part of the novel is that eventually the young man is forced against his will to marry a young woman, not of his choice, not the one he really loves. And this is not just a disappointment in love. It actually brings about the death of the woman that he's really in love with, Daiyu, who he's not allowed to marry. And it ruins the young man's life, too. He's married by trick to an alternate cousin, not the one he would have preferred to marry.

艾朗诺：这个爱情故事的悲剧之处在于，宝玉最终被迫违心地迎娶自己不爱的人，而没能选择自己深爱的黛玉。这不仅仅让他们对爱情心灰意冷，更导致了黛玉的离世，也毁了宝玉的生活。他被瞒着与另一位表亲成婚，新娘却不是他以为的黛玉。

Ronald Egan: And when he realizes how he has been tricked, shortly thereafter, he leaves the family and becomes a Buddhist monk, which is, from the family's point of view, this is not very different from suicide, actually. And so it's not just a little youthful, you know, adolescent disappointment in love. It actually, the novel depicts the destruction of these young people's lives by parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles who are cast in the novel in a very unfavorable light.

艾朗诺：在宝玉发现自己被糊弄之后，不久他就离开了贾府，出家当了和尚。从整个家族的角度看，他这么做无异于自杀。这不仅仅展现了年轻人对爱情的绝望。实际上，它展现了父母长辈如何干涉、破坏了年轻人的生活，他们的存在为小说蒙上了一层悲剧色彩。

Why is the book admired?

《红楼梦》为什么备受称赞？

Zachary Davis: So this book reminds me a little bit of Marcel Proust in that it's not really about the plot. It's about a lot of other things. Could you talk about some of the texture of the book? What are some of the details that readers of centuries have found so rewarding?

扎卡里·戴维斯：这本书让我想起了马塞尔·普鲁斯特，打动我的同样是情节之外的很多东西。您可以跟我们谈谈这本书的深层内涵吗？几百年来，读者们发现了哪些值得关注的细节呢？

Ronald Egan: First of all, it presents an extremely rich texture of life in an age which is, let's face it, gone. This is the texture of life in Imperial China, when imperial China was at its height, before Imperial China came to realize there were other civilizations and cultures beyond its borders that would in the 19th century begin to threaten it.

艾朗诺：首先，它展现了旧时代丰富的生活内涵，但那个时代已经不复存在了。这是中国封建王朝鼎盛时期的生活万象，当时清王朝还自认为是天朝上国，没有预想到19世纪会有别的文明侵略自己。

Ronald Egan: I've heard Chinese scholars say, and I think they are right, that this novel could not have been written 100 years later, because 100 years later, now you're in the era of the Boxer Wars with England. You're in the era of the encroachment on Chinese borders by European colonial powers. The sense of pride, the sense of confidence is already eroded, if not gone. But in the world of that novel, not even an inkling of that has begun to appear.

艾朗诺：中国学者曾有过一个观点，这点我也很赞同。他们说要是晚一百多年，这部小说根本不可能写出来，因为一百多年之后，中国正处于义和团运动时期，正处于被欧洲列强半殖民的时期。民族自豪与民族自信即便没有消失殆尽，也减损了一大半。但在《红楼梦》的故事里，你丝毫看不到这种痕迹。

Ronald Egan: Another reason the novel is admired as much as it is, is that all is not rosy in the portrait of China that this novel conveys. Okay? This novel is famous for being extremely candid, extremely honest at looking at the aspects of Chinese society that Chinese people at the time would have been troubled by.

艾朗诺：《红楼梦》之所以备受称赞，另一个原因是它展现的中国封建社会的形象并不是完全正面的。这部小说受人瞩目的一点就在于，它是如何坦率地揭露了当时社会中困扰着人们的方方面面。

Zachary Davis: For example, there’s the unequal treatment of men and women.

扎卡里·戴维斯：比如男女不平等。

Ronald Egan: Without exception, all of the young daughters and female cousins in the family, as they turn 16, 17, 18 years old, one by one, they're all married off by the grown-ups in the family. And without exception, these are unhappy marriages.

艾朗诺：家族里所有姑娘在16至18岁的时候，都纷纷嫁给了她们的男性成年表亲。而且他们的婚姻都极其不幸，无一例外。

Zachary Davis: In the world of the novel, arranged marriages were the norm. There was really, no getting around it.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在小说里，包办婚姻是常态，没有谁能抵抗得了。

Ronald Egan: And the novel goes out of its way to show that it’s worse than the young people having no choice. It's rather that the older generation who's doing the arranging of the marriage makes these arrangements for the worst possible reasons. Okay? So, like, they owe somebody a debt. And in order to cancel the debt they agree to marry one of the 16-year-old girls to that father's son. The novel in this respect could be considered a kind of an indictment of Chinese society of the time. In other words, it has this subversive aspect to it.

艾朗诺：小说竭力表明，包办婚姻的恶果不仅仅是剥夺了年轻人的选择权。确切地说，这些包办婚姻是长辈在用婚姻做交易，给一些极其糟糕的事情交差。比如，他们欠了别人一笔债，为了免除债务，他们同意将一个16岁的姑娘嫁给债主的儿子。从这个角度看，这部小说是对当时社会的批判。换句话说，它具有颠覆性思考的一面。

Ronald Egan: And I think especially if you're female in the 18th century or 19th century China, this novel has enormous interest for you. We can imagine a female reader saying to herself, “Wow, this is the society I'm living in.Look what I have to be prepared to face, you know?”

艾朗诺：我觉得，如果你是18、19世纪的中国女性，你会对这本小说充满兴趣。想象一下，一个女性读者会喃喃自语：“天呐，这就是我生活的社会。看看，这就是我要面对的生活，对吧？”

Ronald Egan: Now, this is not to say that there's no happiness, that there's no joy, that there's no gaiety in in the novel, there’s, there's plenty of laughter. There's parties, there's wit, you know. But there's this other thing, too. There's this other element, too.

艾朗诺：倒不是说这本书总是阴云密布，没有欢声笑语。小说里确确实实有很多欢乐的时刻。他们会聚集在一起，吟诗作对，展现他们的才华。但书里也有别的内容、也有别的元素。

Ronald Egan: So if you ask why Chinese readers have for 300 years so loved this novel, they respect it for its honesty. Because to face these problems, which are really endemic problems in traditional Chinese society, to face them as candidly and as openly as this author does takes a lot of courage, actually. Takes a lot of courage.

艾朗诺：若是问为什么三百多年来中国读者一直这么喜欢这本书，我会说那是因为这本书展现的坦率。像作者一样敞开心扉，正视这些问题，这些中国封建社会特有的问题，需要莫大的勇气。

Zachary Davis: Yeah, it strikes me as a testament to the power of a great artist who can shed the illusions that we might have of the past.

扎卡里·戴维斯：没错，这点很让我震惊。而这正是曹雪芹这位伟大文学家的伟大之处：打破我们对往昔时代的美好幻想。

Ronald Egan: You know, it sometimes happens in the world of literature that a particular work comes along, in this case a novel, and you say to yourself, “How did he do that?” Because there's really no precedent for doing it this way. So this novelist, he must have been a genius to somehow transcend the conventions. There is earlier fiction in China, there are earlier novels, some excellent ones, but they don't begin to have the psychological depth or the critical eye turned on society that this novel does.

艾朗诺：要知道，文学史上会时不时地出现这种情况。出来了一部作品，比如说《红楼梦》这部小说，让你忍不住赞叹：“作者是怎么做到的？”因为并没有这样的先例，作者一定是个天才，才能打破惯例。在《红楼梦》之前，中国也有别的小说，有的也很优秀，但从没有哪部小说对人物心理的刻画如此深刻，也没有哪部小说带着这样的批判视角看待社会。

Zachary Davis: Who was the author? What do we know about his life and what caused him to write this work of genius?

扎卡里·戴维斯：《红楼梦》的作者是谁？他的一生是怎样的？是什么让他写出了这部旷世奇书呢？

Ronald Egan: We only know bits and pieces about the author's life, but what we do know, what we can reconstruct, it seems that to some extent that this novel is based on the author's own family and his own family experiences. And that's an experience of decline and eventually disaster. Some of the worst things that happen to the family in the novel, including an imperial search and confiscation of their property toward the end of the novel, we now know that happened to the author's family and it probably happened when he was a young boy. And so he has, understandably vivid memories of that.

艾朗诺：我们只了解作者生活的一些片段。不过据我们所知，《红楼梦》某种程度上是基于作者家族的经历写成的。他们家家道中落，最终一蹶不振。书中贾家遭遇的最严重的的打击，包括小说快结尾处的官府抄家，据我们所知都切切实实地发生在作者的家族中，而且很有可能发生在作者的幼年时代。所以不难理解为什么他对这些印象如此深刻。

Ronald Egan: The author's father was a high official in the Qing court. um the author himself was not a high official, but the family has a hereditary title. And so they're well off. But beyond that, some scholars like to speculate that the young boy named Baoyu, who is the hero of the romantic subplot some scholars like to speculate that is the author as an adolescent. But that may or may not be true.

艾朗诺：作者曹雪芹的父亲是清朝高官，曹雪芹自己虽然并不是高官，但他们家家世显赫，生活优渥。除此之外，一些学者推测书中爱情故事的男主角宝玉的原型，便是青年时期的曹雪芹。当然这个说法的真实性有待考证。

What’s the influence of the book?

《红楼梦》有哪些影响？

Zachary Davis: So let's move now into a discussion of this book's longer term influence and impact.Apparently, Mao was a fan. Can you tell us about what we know about his admiration and its role in kind of communist leadership?

扎卡里·戴维斯：我们来谈谈这本书的长远影响吧。显然毛泽东非常喜欢《红楼梦》。您可以跟我们讲讲为什么他会喜欢这部小说，它对共产党人领导、治理国家有什么影响呢？

Ronald Egan: He was a fan. He was a fan. He is said to have read it several times cover to cover. One of the things that generally is so admired about the novel, and I have to imagine that this is one of the attractions it held for Chairman Mao, is the subtlety of the psychological portraits of these characters. We see their public face, and we see their private face. We see them scheming. We see them plotting. We see them doing all kinds of underhanded things小动作. And if you want to learn about, you know, human nature, if you want to learn about not just the sunny side of human nature, but the darker sides. This novel can provide a great education.

艾朗诺：毛泽东很喜欢这部小说，据说他反复读过好几遍。小说的一个令人钦佩之处在于对人物的心理描写细致入微，我猜或许这也是它吸引毛泽东的原因。我们可以看到书中人物人前的一面，也可以看到他们私下的一面。我们看到他们打着小算盘，搞各种各样的小动作。如果你想了解人性，不光是人性阳光的一面，还有阴暗的一面，这本小说便很有启发性。

Zachary Davis: The Story of the Stone was very much of its time, commenting on personal and political conventions of its day. But it was also ahead of its time, foreshadowing changes that would come to China over a century later.

扎卡里·戴维斯：《红楼梦》有着很明显的时代烙印，展现了那个时代人们的生活和政治环境，但它也领先于那个时代，预示了一个多世纪之后中国的剧变。

Ronald Egan: So let's say it was completed around the year 1750. It wasn't until the year 1911, so more than 160 years later, that the imperial era in China came to an end. The Chinese revolution is 1911. The Chinese communist movement, the Chinese Communist Party isn't founded until about 10 years after that. And Mao and the other early leaders of the communist movement in China—who were, of course, so critical, so hypercritical of traditional Chinese society in many, if not most of its respects—of course they seized upon this novel because what we could say about it is that it's 150, 180 years ahead of its time, you know.

艾朗诺：小说于1750年前后完成。直到160多年后，也就是1911年辛亥革命爆发，中国才结束了封建帝制。之后又过了十年，中国共产党建立，开始发动共产主义运动。毛泽东等中共早期领导人对中国的旧传统即便不是全盘否定，也是持尖锐的批判态度，《红楼梦》自然受到他们的推崇。这部小说如此超前，超越了时代150年乃至180年。

Ronald Egan: So in many of the reforms that the Communist leadership will be calling for in the 1920s, 1930s, and up until they come to power in 1949 and then begin to implement their new vision of Chinese society in the 1950s and 60s, many of these like equal status for bothgenders, equal rights for women. Challenging the authority of older generation over young generation, challenging the blind acceptance and obedience to the dictates of filial piety, these all become mainstays of the Chinese communist vision for reform in Chinese society. And they’re there in the novel. So this author, he's way ahead of his time.

艾朗诺：中共领导人在上世纪二、三十年代呼吁进行多项改革。1949年开始，中共执政。此后的五、六十年代，领导人开始建设新社会，落实诸多畅想，如男女平等、妇女平权。挑战旧社会的父权，挑战愚孝观，这些都成了中共社会改造的重要内容。而这些观念在《红楼梦》里都有体现。所以说这部小说的作者领先于自己的时代。

Zachary Davis: So we've discussed how it criticizes certain, you know, gender inequality or perhaps abuses of elders towards their children. What Chinese values does it affirm or does it pass on? And if you're a Chinese reader of this text, what scripts does it provide to you about how to live a good life?

扎卡里·戴维斯：我们刚刚聊了《红楼梦》是如何批判男女不平等和长辈权力滥用的行为。那这部小说传递了怎样的中国价值观呢？中国读者会觉得这本书是如何展现幸福生活的呢？

Ronald Egan: There are admirable characters in the novel. They aren't shallow in the respect that they lead very, very simple, happy lives. There are admirable characters who struggle with the problems of the society that the author goes out of his way to depict. And yet they struggle with these problems without allowing themselves to become corrupted by them. For example, the father of Baoyu. Baoyu is the young man protagonist. His father is a respectable man. He is completely out of touch with his son and out of tune with his son. But you don't finish the novel thinking that he's a bad man. You finished a novel with a keen sense of here's a good man who is struggling to retain his ethics and morality in a society in which it is challenged almost every day.

艾朗诺：小说描绘了一些令人钦佩的人物。他们过着简单幸福的生活，但一点也不浅薄。他们很让人钦佩，与作者所描绘的社会问题作斗争，努力让自己出淤泥而不染。一个典型的例子就是宝玉的父亲。宝玉是小说的年轻主角，他的父亲很受人尊敬。他跟儿子不怎么亲近，看不惯儿子平素的所作所为。你要是没读完全书，可能会觉得这是个反面人物。但一旦读完整本书，你就会马上发现这是个好人，他每天都在道德崩坏的社会中竭力维护自己的道德准则。

Zachary Davis: There’s a broader lesson to the book as well—a lesson embedded in yet another story.

扎卡里·戴维斯：小说还有另一层更广泛深刻的内涵，这个内涵涉及到书中隐藏的另一个故事。

Ronald Egan: The novel has a mythological frame that I haven't even referred to yet. It's called The Story of the Stone, Shitou Ji in Chinese, which is an alternate title to the Dream of the Red Mansion.It's called The Story of the Stone because in this mythological framework, which appears in the first chapter and in the last chapter and pokes through the day-to-day life of the family at various points in the novel. The several leading characters, including the young boy and the young girl that he falls in love with, they originally are inhabitants of the heavens. They are beings in heaven, and they are sent down to the earth to lead a human life by a fairy in heaven whose express purpose in sending them down to our world is to get them to see the illusion of human life.

艾朗诺：我刚刚一直没提到，《红楼梦》还披着一层神话的外衣。《红楼梦》又名《石头记》，之所以叫这个名字，跟首尾两章的神话故事有关，这个故事贯穿了全书中贾府的生活，在书中出现了好几次。小说的几个主要人物，包括宝玉和黛玉，前世都生活在仙界。他们是仙界的生物，被仙人带入凡间，化为人形，过着人类的生活。仙人送他们下凡的明确目的，是让他们体味红尘中的虚幻。

Ronald Egan: So this is very much a Buddhist message. And I mentioned that at the very end of the novel, Baoyu withdraws from society, rejects his family and goes off and becomes a Buddhist monk. So that, that's another way of thinking about this novel. It's a story about disillusionment with the world, especially with the aspects of the world concerned with prestige, material wealth, society’s honor, etc., which Buddhism, of course, has no patience for.

艾朗诺：这很大程度上体现了佛教的思想。正如我之前提到的，在小说结尾，宝玉退出红尘，抛却家庭，出家做了和尚。所以也能这么解读《红楼梦》：它讲述了尘世幻灭的故事。尘世间满是功名利禄、荣华富贵，但显然佛教对尘世没什么兴趣。

Zachary Davis: Yeah, no, if you think about it, I mean, you could title this illusion of a big house that can be taken from you by earthly power.

扎卡里·戴维斯：没错，仔细想想，或许可以把这部小说概括为：红楼梦难逃纷繁世俗，最终沦为南柯一梦。

Ronald Egan: That’s right. That’s right.

艾朗诺：没错。

Zachary Davis: Is there any other influence or impact of the book on Chinese or world culture that you would like to comment on?

扎卡里·戴维斯：《红楼梦》对中国和世界文化还有什么其他影响呢？您可以和我们讲解一下吗？

Ronald Egan: One of the features that is the most vivid in readers’ minds as they read and after they finish the novel is the brightness, the sparkling quality of intelligence and wit that we see in the young girls in this novel. The girls are shown throughout to be smarter, quicker, and not only that, but, but even purer. more, more wholesome, more admirable than, than the young men. And if you look at the way writers in the centuries after writeabout young girls in Chinese culture, there's a tremendous amount of influence.

艾朗诺：读完小说之后，读者们印象很深的便是小说里姑娘们令人称赞的才情与智慧。全书中，女孩们比男孩们更聪慧机敏，甚至更单纯正直，更身心健全，更叫人倾慕。而且若是看看几个世纪之后中国作家笔下姑娘们的形象，你会发现他们受《红楼梦》的影响很大。

Ronald Egan: Because what this author does, of course, is that he captures this aspect of young female life, at the stage of their lives when they are so carefree and they are so smart and they haven't begun to feel the constraints that will be imposed upon adult women. And, you know, in patriarchal Chinese society, which is the society our author lived in, to do this, to show the girls you know, being smarter than the boys, this is this is also very, this is very unexpected, this very iconoclastic, actually.

艾朗诺：曹雪芹显然捕捉了姑娘们生活中惹人怜爱的这一面。她们在这个年纪里如此无忧无虑，如此冰雪聪明，尚未体会到成年女性所受的种种束缚。在作者生活的大家长统治的时代，中国社会尊崇父权。可想而知，书里描写这些女孩比男孩聪明，是多么出人意料，与传统多么相悖。

Ronald Egan: There is even a preface by the author in which he says this, andI'm going to paraphrase, he says,now in my old age when I reflect back on the young female companions of my youth, I realize that they were in every way, both intellectually and morally superior to the grave gentlemen I am supposed to have become but have not become. And so I vowed then and there, having had this realization, that I would write a portrait of these charming companions of my youth. And that's what he says in the preface.

艾朗诺：曹雪芹甚至在序言中写道：“今风尘碌碌，一事无成，忽念及当日所有之女子，一一细考较去，觉其行止见识，皆出于我之上。何我堂堂须眉，诚不若彼裙钗哉？实愧则有馀……何为不用假语村言，敷演出一段故事来，以悦人之耳目哉？”这就是他在序言中说的话。意思就是，现在我已经是个风烛残年的老人了，当我回想起自己青葱岁月里，生命里出现的那些年轻的女孩，我意识到她们在我才智和道德层面上，都比我所料想我会成为的那种人还要更加优秀。所以我写下了这些伴随在我年少时光里的这些迷人的女伴们。

Zachary Davis: If someone asked you to cocktail party, how did this book change the world? What would be your pithy response?

扎卡里·戴维斯：如果有人在鸡尾酒会上问你，《红楼梦》如何改变了世界？你会如何简短作答？

Ronald Egan: This book changed the Chinese world as soon as it appeared by providing readers with an unprecedented portrait of the complexity, the problems of Chinese society of the day, and the way that what had been assumed to be unquestionable social values of patriarchy, of older generation over younger generation, of male empowerment over female, pointing out the human cost of all those assumptions.

艾朗诺：《红楼梦》改变了中国，为读者史无前例地描绘了当时社会充满弊病的复杂一面，质疑了人们一贯遵从的父权制度、愚孝观念以及男尊女卑的思想，指出了这些社会观念对个体的伤害。

Zachary Davis: Writ Large is a production of Ximalaya. Writ Large is produced by Galen Beebe and me, Zachary Davis, with help from Feiran Du, Ariel Liu, Wendy Wu, and Monica Zhang. Our intern is Neil Luczai. Music is by Blue Dot Sessions. Don’t miss an episode. Subscribe today in the Ximalaya app. Thanks for listening.

扎卡里·戴维斯：本节目由喜马拉雅独家制作播出。感谢您的收听，我们下期再见！