Pao yu
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Pao Yu's meaningful life unconsciously evolves slowly toward illumination. He is a Taoist saint who doesn't know he is one and doesn't want to be one. He is indifferent to and ignorant of his cosmic role. He struggles, unaware, against an embodied principle of hate. When salvation comes, it is scarcely distinguishable from its opposite. Behind commonplace life and death lurks another world which intrudes at all crucial moments, a mirror-image more real than this life, where destiny is achieved and manifest; like the dream time of the Australian aborigines where everybody is his own ancestor that lies dormant below the dust of the desert and is awakened by penances of blood and feathers.
As the story progresses, Pao-yu resists and avoids his father's attempts to force him to study for the Civil Service Examination. Pao-yu spent some of his time composing antithetical couplets, which did bring some approval from his father. Chia Cheng, however, reprimanded him and told him to study the "types of essays required in the Examinations" (Tsao 111). Wealth and prestige were dependent upon power...