Continuing now with brief summaries of Chapters 3-7, which are all the summaries I wrote years ago when I first read this novel. I’m posting them here for posterity. Maybe some day I can get to summarizing the rest of it.

Chapter 3

This chapter won’t be as detailed, but there’s not a lot that actually happens anyway. Instead, it’s mostly background information on our main character, Zhuo Muqiu, who is referred to usually in the novel as “白衣客” (the white-clothed guest/traveler).

The chapter opens first with the lady from the end of the last chapter, who had looked at the rear wall and was shocked. The servant girl, “Little Ice”, returns having not found Old Tong, and the lady says that Old Tong is long gone because the rain cape is covered with dust. Old Tong has to go to the river every day to collect water because there is no well in the vicinity, so the fact that the rain cape has not been used (remember it’s been snowing heavily for days) is an indication that he has not been here for some time.

Little Ice points out that the stove has recently been used, and the lady recounts what she thinks happened with the four dead bodies in the room. She gets it right, that Dan Qingtian (the man who was blocking the doorway with the poison dagger) was killed from behind, and Ten Feet of Flying Red came in. Ten Feet then killed the other three with his red copper rings which have red cloths attached to them. He killed them as they were trying to escape out the back. But she says that Ten Feet did not kill Dan Qingtian, because the wound does not match the kind of wound Ten Feet’s copper rings would have inflicted. She concludes that “he” did it. The only thing she got wrong was that Ten Feet came from outside; actually, he was working at the hut. Read more

Blood Flower, Blood Flower《血花．血花》by Dugu Hong 獨孤紅 was published in 1971. My edition is a later reprint in two volumes. This was the first wuxia novel that I sat down to try and read in Chinese back when I was just learning to read Chinese. This would have been 2011-2012. I was already taking classes at NCKU and had been translating already, mostly Tang chuanqi and some Ming-era short stories. I started reading this book because it was the shorted wuxia novel I had, so I figured I would get through it in a reasonable time. I ended up reading half of it before getting sidetracked and onto something else.

Those days were frought with frustration. It would take me an hour to read a few paragraphs, going line by line, looking up nearly every character I came to, it seemed, and asking my wife often for help with troublesome phrases and sentences that she often had trouble explaining to me. Just part of learning to read Chinese. I used Wenlin software (which I still use today), which allowed me to paste a chapter of the text of the novel I found online, then mouseover each character to get the definition. I highly recommend that software for learning to read Chinese. It really made the whole process faster.

As I read the novel I also wrote a summary of each chapter, though these first two chapters presented in part one are by far the most detailed. I quickly discovered that writing a detailed plot synopsis is a lot of work! I wrote summaries for seven chapters; there are twenty chapters in the novel. I ended up reading twelve. Chapters 3-7 will be presented in part two since they are shorter than these first two chapter summaries. Read more