Ben Wang on The Story of the Stone
The 18th-century novel The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin is a bildungsroman, a tale of a battle between the flesh and the spirit, a mixture of mysticism, romanticism, realism and fatalism, a record of Taoist-Buddhist disenchantment and enlightenment, and a critique of a society abiding by the rules of Confucianism, and a novel […]