Don't Call Me a Maid: Reclaiming Myself in Dream of the Red Chamber

Everyone in the Grand View Garden waited for a favor. She was the only one who seized control of her own fate.

She was the daughter of the Rongguo Mansion's steward, originally named Lin Hongyu. Because the character "Yu" was taboo, they forcibly cut her name down to "Xiaohong." In Happy Red Court, she was a lowly maid who wasn't even fit to pour tea, spat on, trampled underfoot, and told, "Take a look in the mirror and see if you deserve it." But she refused to accept her fate. She dropped a silver-red silk handkerchief, embroidered with the character "Yu," on a path Jia Yun was sure to take. With a tongue-twisting message, she got Wang Xifeng to demand her on the spot. And before the great mansion began to fall, she had already woven a secret network to secure her escape. From "Xiaohong" to "Lin Hongyu," from having her name erased to making everyone speak it aloud, she devoted her entire life to that transformation.

This book sprouts from a gap in the original novel's twenty-fourth chapter. It preserves Cao Gong's original text without changing a single word, while embroidering a gripping inner epic into every blank left by the question, "What was she thinking at that moment?" This is not a transmigration story, nor a rewrite. It lets the overlooked maid push aside the beaded curtain and step into the spotlight herself.

She isn't some great heroine. She simply refuses to be called "maid" anymore.

Don't call me maid. I have a name. My name is Lin Hongyu.