The Story of the Stone is a wonderful book, even if, like an iceberg, we only see the fraction above the surface, in translation without scholarly apparatus.
There are literary and cultural references continuously dropped left and right throughout the novel. My eyes were opened when I read the few chapters excerpted in Norton's Anthology of World Literature, which included notes. Wow, a text almost as literarily allusive as Nabokov's (but not as Joyce's, that is more Pu Song Ling's turf).
A Dream of Red Mansions shares with Coetzee's Jesus novels the same departure point. There are two realities, and beings that were glorious in one of those, when they come to the reality of the novels, might not fare as well. So, the heavenly stone and flower, so perfect in that domain, when they incarnate in our world, go through a lot.
In Coetzee's trilogy, beings like Jesus, who in our world achieved messiahhood, once reincarnated in the alternate world that contains Novilla and Estrella, lead what amounts to a frustrated existence.