“Do you have a Chinese name?” my student Ola asked in a card welcoming me to the campus in Hunan where I taught English two years ago. I didn’t. She suggested Daiyu, for the heroine of a novel called “A Dream of Red Mansions,”  because it sounded close to Diane. Ola fretted a little because the tale does not end happily for Daiyu and Baoyu, those star-crossed cousins and would-be lovers, but she thought I might consider it anyway.

That was my introduction to one of China’s Four Great Classical Novels.

Americans are generally not exposed to much world literature. In my Pennsylvania high school circa 1970, we were issued anthologies of American and British writing – a greatest-hits tour through the centuries – and that was considered an adequate literary education. A voracious reader, I branched out on my own, occasionally reading foreign works in translation (Proust ‘s “Remembrance of Things Past” one and four-seventh times!) but little from beyond Europe. Though I’m fond of the contemporary Japanese novelist  Haruki Murakami, I had read only one classic of Asian literature, again Japanese – “The Tale of Genji” — and that was at least 30 years ago.

Ola piqued my curiosity. “A Dream of Red Mansions” (also known as “Dream of the Red Chamber”) was available for download on my e-reader but, unfortunately, not from China.  So I filed it away in the back of my mind.

Months later, in December 2010, I was browsing in a used-book store in Sarasota, Florida. A three-volume slipcased set jumped out at me. “What’s that?” I said, and nearly screamed. It was “A Dream of Red Mansions,” a 1980 edition in excellent condition, for US$60. I had it shipped, my Christmas present to myself.

On Christmas Day I like to start reading a new book, preferably something special. Cao Xueqin’s masterwork qualified on multiple counts.

First, the books themselves are the kind that we old-fashioned bibliophiles love to hold in our  hands.  The spines of the navy-blue hardbacks — a first edition published by Foreign Languages Press, “Peking” — are embossed in gold with garden motifs. On the front covers, three Chinese characters state the title. Each volume has color illustrations of key scenes and a slender red-ribbon bookmark. Mercifully for a Westerner, the set comes with a pull-out genealogical chart outlining the characters and their connections – chiefly the various branches of the Jia family at its center. The transliterations are Wade-Giles rather than pinyin, lending a note of relative antiquity.

The story, too, is just the kind I like, a long, leisurely family saga with lots of attention to period detail. It takes place mostly within the complex occupied by two branches of the privileged Jia (Chia) family in Beijing. Though the running story of Daiyu and Baoyu is at its heart, it presents countless other characters – servants, distant relatives, visitors, courtiers, comic-relief figures, even swindlers and murderers – whose stories weave a rich tapestry of life in an 18^th-century household. Its flights into the literary genre now called magical realism, starting at Baoyu’s birth with “a piece of variegated and crystal-like brilliant jade in his mouth, on which were yet visible the outlines of several characters,” were an irresistible bonus.  

Then there was the emotional connection.  I had begun 2010 in anticipation of a China adventure that would run from late winter into full summer.  “A Dream of Red Mansions” would bring my year full circle as I reflected back, now with experiences and memories that would help me “see” the book in a way mere illustrations couldn’t.

And see it I did. When I read descriptions of the Ning and Jung mansions, I envisioned places I had visited in China – say, the 450-year-old Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai, or Suzhou’s Lion Grove Garden, with their courtyards and pavilions. Characters, too, came to life as I pictured their modern-day “descendants,” i.e., my students, and none more than Baoyu’s devoted friend Qin Zhong (Ch’in Chung). When I read the description of this delicate, fine-featured young man, “with his handsome countenance, and his refined manners,” I could think of no one but Nick, the graduate student who, recruited to act as my assistant, thus conquered his shyness in speaking English to foreigners. Alas, Qin Zhong dies, suddenly and quietly, before the end of the first volume. That wouldn’t happen in a Western novel; the hero’s best friend might have been killed off, but much later, with great drama, after he had served the plot well and long.

Even with such points of reference, I couldn’t help feeling confused from time to time. For Westerners, these nearly 2,000 pages are not an easy read. Being unfamiliar with Chinese names and  their meanings, we get lost in the maze of characters and their relationships – in my Wade-Giles version,  Concubine Chao and Concubine Chou; Hsi-feng and Hsi-chun and Hsi-jen and Hsi-fun; Pao-chai and Pao-yu. (And then there’s Chen Pao-yu, Chia Pao-yu’s doppelganger late in the story.)

I began to think about the bigger picture: the form. A novel so long and so relatively even in tone strikes a Western reader as episodic (as did “Genji”); it doesn’t build to the peak we expect. There are indeed moments of high drama, but then life settles down again and goes on until the next. Perhaps the major climax – Daiyu’s death as Baoyu is being married off to his predestined Baochai – occurs, in my edition, fully 350 pages before the novel ends. The denouement is long, and their story is only one part of it.  

As I read, three comparisons came to mind. The first, and perhaps most obvious, was Chinese:  traditional hand-scroll paintings like the Song Dynasty masterpiece “Along the River During the Qingming Festival.” These tell their stories visually, scene by scene, paying meticulous attention to the details of daily life, as the “reader” scrolls from one end to the other.

The second was European: Proust, again in his scrutiny of everyday life, but also to the psychology of his characters and his portraits of women. In the opening chapter of “Red Mansions,” Cao writes: “I suddenly bethought  myself of the womankind of past ages. Passing one by one under a minute scrutiny, I felt that in action and in lore, one and all were far above me . . . I could not, in point of fact, compare with these characters of the gentler sex.” Like Proust, Cao paid tribute to the women of his world be creating a work of both epic scale and minute detail.

The third was American: the TV soap opera. Before anyone puts out the Chinese equivalent of a contract on me for daring to compare a high-culture classic to a low-culture genre, remember that I am talking not about content, only about form. Unlike most Western novels (or, for that matter, dramas), a soap opera does not build to a single climax, but moves from one to another over time. Viewers watch the characters grow and develop, sometimes over decades, and become involved in their “lives,” much as readers do in “Red Mansions.” Even the “Tune in tomorrow” that concluded old-time soaps sounds like the chapter endings in the novel; “To know whether she lived or died, read the next chapter” is a cliffhanger if ever I heard one. But the reader has only to turn the page, not wait for another day.

“One of the great charms of books is that they have to end. Soaps are without that charm,” writes Louise Spence in “Watching Daytime Soap Operas: The Power of Pleasure” (Wesleyan University Press, 2005), a scholarly treatise on the genre. Well, not anymore, as American networks cancel one long-running soap after another in favor of cheaper-to-produce cooking, game and talk shows. “A Dream of Red Mansions” does end, but by that time its readers have been transported to another world, in place, time and spirit.

For me the story ended after almost exactly a year after it began. Having started the first volume on Christmas 2010, I returned for the second sometime in the spring and saved the third for the end of 2011. In the meantime, I finally borrowed Daiyu’s name in a Chinese-language marathon weekend, even though I came to like the more spirited, if flawed, Xifeng better.

Recently I went on another teaching adventure in yet another new world: Vancouver, British Columbia. Though the three-volume “Red Mansions” had to stay at home in New York, the e-book traveled with me on a “shelf” on my new iPad. The hard plastic touch-screen may not be nearly so much fun to hold or read, but wherever I go, I can dip in at will to revisit those mansions in China, and dream.

“So where was he?” Martha asked as the closing credits began to roll.

“You didn’t see it?”

“See what?”

“The quadruple cameo?”

We had just watched “Dark Shadows,” the movie director Tim Burton’s take on the Gothic soap opera that sent teenagers rushing home from school to their TV sets from 1966 to 1971. “He,” of course, meant Jonathan Frid, the actor who created the role of Barnabas Collins, anguished lovelorn vampire thrust two centuries beyond his time. Like Barnabas, Frid returned to Collinwood – though after a mere 41 years — along with his castmates Kathryn Leigh Scott (his lost love, Josette), Lara Parker (the witch Angelique) and David Selby (Quentin the werewolf). They are guests in a party scene where the greeter is the latest Barnabas, Johnny Depp in heavy eye makeup. Thus the quadruple cameo.

Surely Martha and I aren’t the only women of a certain age who’ve gone to the movie hoping to snatch back a piece of our youth. The original “Dark Shadows” was both a Gothic romance and, unintentionally, a piece of high camp, a combination guaranteed to appeal to adolescents. Burton’s version was neither straight enough nor funny enough to send us swooning in delight, but there does seem to be something in the air. The “Mad Men” episode that aired two days after the opening was titled “Dark Shadows”; in it Megan Draper, a would-be actress, runs lines with a friend who has an audition for the soap. Megan dismisses “Dark Shadows” as “a piece of crap” but admits she’d kill for a chance at it.

Megan’s right; the show really wasn’t very good, what with its sets that wobbled every time a door  closed, a lot of bad writing and some even worse acting. Still, I always felt that someday, someone with money and production values would remake it. And sure enough, every 20 years or so, it rises like Barnabas from his coffin at sunset.

Martha and I discovered we shared this secret vice during our previous incarnations at The New York Times. As chief of the culture copy desk, she was my boss when a one-season remake starring Ben Cross as Barnabas and Jean Simmons as the matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (originally Joan Bennett, now Michelle Pfeiffer) was televised in 1991. Martha was in college during the original run and recalls cutting an especially insipid journalism class to watch it, which doesn’t seem to have hurt her career. I, a few years younger, was one of those kids who ran home to watch it at 3:30; school bus schedules being what they were, I usually missed the first few minutes. “Dark Shadows” was the fixation of my decidedly uncool high school clique. If the cheerleaders were watching, I never heard about it.

Long after the show went off the air, it lingered in our adult lives. Writing the daytime TV column for The Boston Globe in the 1980s, I did a joint telephone interview with the former head writer, Sam Hall, and his wife, Grayson Hall, the original Dr. Julia Hoffman (now Helena Bonham Carter) when they had moved on to “One Life to Live”; my clearest memory of the interview is feeling my front-hook bra open in the middle of the newsroom just as the Halls picked up the phone. In recent years, Martha told me more than once that I would have to write Frid’s obituary when the time came, and he was on the list of advance obits I proposed to The Times after leaving the staff, before 2008 economics ravaged the freelance budget.

When the movie came up during pre-show chat in the usher corps at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, I was shocked that people there had already seen it, fondly remembered watching the soap or – this being New York – knew someone who had worked on it. Here the show was no fantasy, but an enterprise that employed dozens of actors, writers and technicians. “Dark Shadows”  “saved my parents’ lives,” the Halls’ son, Matthew, wrote in a 1990 essay that went to explain that they were broke and just about ready to give up on New York when the show came calling. Anyone trying to make a living in the arts in New York knows how that feels.

As cultural phenomena go, “Dark Shadows” is fairly small potatoes. Still, it had one major effect: it made soap operas respectable. Previously derided as the guilty pleasure of housewives (and others who wouldn’t admit watching), soaps began drawing a new, younger audience. First “Dark Shadows” celebrities started popping up in teen magazines like 16 and Tiger Beat, then in more mainstream publications. Soon other daytime personalities were gaining publicity, and before long, there were entire magazines devoted to the soaps. Would Luke and Laura of “General Hospital” been such a hit if viewers hadn’t been conditioned to soaps by watching Barnabas?

In China two years ago, my student Sophia came up to me after class one day and shyly said, “I wanted to ask, what do you think about this current vampire trend?”  Sophia is of the “Twilight” generation, and I explained to her that each generation seems to have its own vampire story. As Frid himself once pointed out, these stories aren’t really about a need for blood; they’re about compulsive sex, and that’s a sure draw for audiences whose hormones are raging.

I’m sticking with my own generation’s storyline. Last week I discovered that 160 episodes of “Dark Shadows” – that’s 32 weeks, or eight months — are available for streaming on Netflix. So I’ve started watching one episode a day, Monday through Friday, to preserve the time-honored pattern of weekend cliffhangers. By sheer chance, I started streaming the first episode around 3:30 in the afternoon. I’m doing my best to stick to that time slot, except when pressing business interferes – working a matinee, or Skyping an English lesson to Poland, or going to the movies with Martha. The class I’m teaching at Columbia University this summer runs until 4 p.m., and I suspect I’ll be sitting down with “Dark Shadows” around 4:30 – right after school. What’s wrong with a little brain candy at the end of the day?

So far, I’m struck by how classically soapy the show is, at least in the early episodes before the supernatural plotlines took hold. The action is excruciatingly slow, and often silly. Still, something about it captured our youthful imagination.

It must have captured Tim Burton’s, too. His film is part homage, part send-up. At least one passage of dialogue — when Barnabas first meets the governess Victoria Winters and says her name is so beautiful that she must never be called Vicky — is lifted straight out of Episode 213. But he’s made changes, too. Burton and Depp have fun with the ‘70s in ways the soap never did, but then, Collinwood hardly seemed a part of that era. For the first time, Carolyn comes across as a plausible teenager, and a sulky one at that, instead of a Junior League candidate dressed by Orbach’s. Dr. Hoffman expresses her attraction to Barnabas in ways inconceivable on TV back then.

However much Jonathan Frid was looking forward to the movie, it may be just as well that he died just weeks before it opened. “But how can they be sure?” I asked Martha. (Well, that’s not my problem; his obit in The Times carried someone else’s byline.) The film’s final image left me crying “Sequel!” and starting to plot possible storylines. On “Dark Shadows,” nothing stays dead forever.