My mother's favorite book was the Chinese classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as The Story of the Stone, also known as A Dream of Red Mansions. This was the only work of fiction on her bookshelf. I remember picking the novel up only once when I was young. I was drawn to its magisterial heft, to the consolidated weight of more than a thousand pages. But because I could not read Chinese, I gravitated instead to her Chinese-English dictionary, a heavy yet small book, the size of my hand that translated shapes into words (book). My mother passed away suddenly in 2002, and her copy of Dream of the Red Chamber vanished.
    The novel was written 250 years ago by Cao Xueqin, who was still writing it when he died suddenly in 1763. Approximately twelve copies of Dream of the Red Chamber existed in the years following his death, handwritten editions made by his family and friends. The manuscripts differed in small ways from one another, but each was eighty chapters long. Unfinished, the novel ended almost in mid-sentence.
    Those handwritten copies began to circulate in Beijing. Rumors spread of an epic, soul-splitting tale, a novel populated by more than three hundred characters from all walks of life, a story about the end of an era, about the overlapping lines of illusion and existence, a novel that took hold and would not let you go. In 1792, nearly thirty years after Cao Xueqin's death, two Chinese scholars came forward and claimed to be in possession of the author's papers. They proceeded to publish what they said was the complete manuscript, consisting of one hundred and twenty chapters, thirteen hundred pages. Movable type had existed in China since the eleventh century, but this was the first time Dream of the Red Chamber appeared in print.
    It has been the pre-eminent Chinese novel ever since, attracting legions of scholars-so many that they form a movement, Redology. Some believe that, for reasons unknown, Cao Xueqin destroyed the last forty chapters of his novel, that the two scholars finished the book themselves. Today in China there are more than seventy-five editions. Some are eighty chapters, others are one hundred and twenty, and some are one hundred and ten. Dream if the Red Chamber has multiple endings and it also has no ending.
    A few years ago, I began writing a novel set in Shanghai. My own novel circles around a hand-copied manuscript with no author, a story with no beginning and no end. I knew nothing about the story surrounding Dream of the Red Chamber because I had never read the novel; no one had mentioned it in any literature course I had ever taken. A couple of years ago, missing my mother, I finally began to read it. The novel took root in me. When I learned of the handwritten copies, the continuation, the unknown authorship, I felt oddly, exhilaratingly, as if I had always known this story. I had folded it into my own book: a truth unwittingly carried in a fiction, an illusion as the structure of a truth.
    Dream of the Red Chamber is hands down the most widely read book in the Chinese-speaking world, making it perhaps the most read novel in history. Professor John Minford, who translated an edition with celebrated translator and Chinese scholar David Hawkes, described it as a novel that combines the highest qualities of Jane Austen, William Thackeray, Marcel Proust, and Honore de Balzac. After 250 years, readers continue to decode its mysteries. Readers like my mother felt ownership over the novel. With Dream of the Red Chamber, none of us can ever know where the ending lies or what only another beginning is. The novel itself is a playful and profound mirror to the life of the imagination. Lines from the first chapter read, "Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true. Real becomes not-real where the unreal's real. "
    I still have my mother's dictionary. I often wonder what happened to her copy if Dream of the Red Chamber. I wonder whether it had eighty chapters, one hundred and twenty, or one hundred and ten. It was her girlhood copy. She'd had it through all her migrations, carrying it across the seas from Hong Kong to Canada. I had wanted to keep it all my life, but while I grieved my mother's sudden death, someone reached out for the book on the shelf. They lost themselves in its love triangles, its forgotten era, its intricate dance between this world and its dream. They carried the book away with them, into its next life.

By the time I was five, I was used to my impenitently spirited father bringing strange things into our lives. I could perch on the stool he'd acquired made out of an elephant's foot, spying on the robed Tibetan monks who came to him for tutoring in Plato and Spinoza. I could stare at the photo he'd brought back of the Dalai Lama, four years old, already seated on the Lion Throne in Lhasa (a present the Tibetan leader had sent me, through my dad, following their first meeting, in 1960). After three months away in West Africa teaching political theory, suddenly my old man was dancing to highlife music in our little flat on Oxford's Winchester Road, cheerfully oblivious of the duffle-coated, tow-headed professors' children just outside, heading down the street to the Dragon School or its prequel, the Squirrel.
    As a child, of course, I took this to be quite normal; the old Englishwoman we went to see in the evenings used to magick elaborate horoscopes, all circles and esoteric scribbles, from the thick ephemerides on her shelves. The tall, no-nonsense the memsahib who looked after her-her daughter and the very picture of a commander of the British Empire-had (I learned much later) spent time as a Buddhist nun in Thailand. That handsome colleague of my father 1 saw at Christmas parties at St. Antony's turned out to be the legendary photographer of Tibet in the 1930s, Fosco Maraini, who had cut off his own finger during the war to shame his Japanese captors.
    One day-my parents had, quite fittingly, moved to California by now, though 1 continued going to school in Oxford-I headed down a narrow, barely     lit staircase in the home of the former Buddhist nun, now my unofficial godmother. Waiting for me at the bottom was a sparky boy journalist in an over-coat, who'd been pierced by a vision of a stricken Chinese friend in the snow and left Europe for the Himalayas. Within seconds, I was following this cub reporter to the Caucasus and then through the forests of Yugoslavia, all sinister black limousines and grimacing operatives. I thought nothing of accompanying him into the richly colored bazaars of the Andes, through rickshaw-filled streets in a red-lanterned Shanghai, even to the moon. I would never have guessed then that a journalist, who seemed to file no stories, had no apparent bosses or office, never thought about deadlines, and simply followed adventure wherever it took him would one day be a description of me.
    Oxford in those days was a network of children's possibilities, if you knew where to look. A few hundred yards from my bedroom was the pub where C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien exchanged stories of Narnia and Middle Earth. Up the street a little was the garden in which the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat leapt into life. Toad of Toad Hall was just around the bend, along a drowsy river, and my hero and designated alter ego-another foreigner appearing in England in almost the same year as I did, Paddington Bear-inhabited a world that seemed indistinguishable from the cozy rituals that kept us happily in place in North Oxford.
    But Tintin was the one to fling open a lifestyle for me, if only because he seemed so unrooted and so restless. We never saw his home; we could never associate him with a family. All he had was a movable feast of lovably unpredictable friends, a loyal four-legged companion, and a blend of curiosity and conscience that seemed to land him always in rapturously unexpected settings that his creator, Hergé, had fashioned out of constant trips to museums and through books.
    The stories were unexceptional. The characters were one-dimensional. I can't say my imagination was deepened or stretched by the books, as it would be by, say, Ursula Le Guin's ageless and profound Earthsea novels. Yet the beauty of Tintin was that the background was the point, at least for me. It was never the protagonist, the dialogue, the plot that mattered; what it gave this small reader was a hunger to be out in the world, in the midst of bustling markets and unreadable strangers, of words lost in translation and levitating monks, where everything we once thought strange would come in time to be familiar.
    Paddington Bear gave me a template out of which to form a character; but it was Tintin who threw open the doors to an entire destiny. +

On childhood Books
Brick, A Literary Journal, n# 95, Summer 2015