洞房花燭 No Bridal Chamber No Candles
我我
逐句解 Line by line
I am
One character on its own, opening the verse — and a tag is never parted from the lines it introduces.
not one driven out by a husband's parents, nor one who filched from strangers and scrounged off friends.
She answers the insult clause by clause, using his own words back at him — the second 㧚 of the chapter and of the novel, and the only two are these.
It is that my lot in a former life was thin, and I was matched to a husband young in years.
子 takes the literary zǐ in the word for a husband, a compound of formal register. 命薄, a thin fate, is the standard phrase for a woman's bad luck in marriage.
We never had our bridal chamber and painted candles; this is the tale of a wife who fled her husband.
洞房花燭, the bridal chamber and the flowered candles, is the set phrase for a wedding night, and it names one of the four great joys of a Chinese life.
Six lines of verse, delivered on the spot, and it is a complete fabricated biography. She was unlucky in a former life, married too young, never had a wedding night, and ran.
Every element is chosen to earn sympathy from a monk. Bad karma from a previous existence, a marriage she did not choose, a wedding that never happened. It is the same performance that got her cut down from a tree in the pine wood, refined for a new audience.
The phrase for a wedding night is worth knowing on its own. The bridal chamber and the flowered candles is one of the four traditional great joys, alongside rain after drought, meeting an old friend far from home, and seeing one's name on the examination list.