Monkey King Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Translation, introduction, and suggestions for further reading copyright © 2021 by Julia Lovell

  Foreword and Monkey King illustration © 2021 by Gene Luen Yang

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  Map by Laura Hartman Maestro

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Wu, Cheng’en, approximately 1500–approximately 1582, author. | Lovell, Julia, 1975– translator. | Yang, Gene Luen, writer of foreword.

  Title: Monkey King / Wu Cheng’en; translated with an introduction by Julia Lovell ; foreword by Gene Luen Yang.

  Other titles: Xi you ji. English

  Description: New York: Penguin Books, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020048511 (print) | LCCN 2020048512 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143107187 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101600979 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PL2697 .H7513 2021 (print) | LCC PL2697 (ebook) | DDC 895.13/46—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048511

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048512

  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Map

  Foreword by gene luen yang

  Introduction by julia lovell

  A Note on the Translation

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Principal Characters

  MONKEY KING

  Foreword

  I first heard about the monkey king from my mom.

  When I was a kid, my mother used to tell me Chinese folktales before bedtime. My mother is an immigrant. She was born in mainland China and eventually made her way to the United States for graduate school.

  She told me those stories so that I wouldn’t forget the culture that she had left. Even though I hadn’t ever experienced that culture firsthand, she wanted me to remember it.

  Of all her stories, my favorites by far were about Sun Wukong, the monkey king. Here was a monkey who was so good at kung fu that his fighting skills leveled up to superpowers. He could call a cloud down from the sky and ride it like a surfboard. He could change his shape into anything he wanted. He could grow and shrink with the slightest thought. And he could clone himself by plucking hairs from his head and then breathing on them. How cool was that?

  Eventually, though, I moved on to other kinds of heroes. One day when I was in the fifth grade, my mom took me to our local bookstore in San Jose, California. There I bought my first American comic book off a spinner rack in the corner of the store. Superman, Spider-Man, and Captain America soon replaced Monkey King in my heart.

  I became obsessed with comic books. I loved them so much that I went on to pursue a career in comics. Today I am a professional graphic novelist. My most well-known book is American Born Chinese, published in 2006. Monkey King is one of my protagonists, but the book isn’t a direct adaptation of my mother’s stories. Sun Wukong occupies too high a pedestal in my mind. I wouldn’t dream of attempting a project like that.

  Instead, I invited Monkey King into my story so that I could talk about the uneasiness of growing up Asian in America. The character I knew from my childhood expressed his emotions without reservation. I needed him to emote on my pages.

  For research, I tracked down an English translation of Journey to the West, the centuries-old Chinese classic that first told the monkey king’s story. Reading it was the first time I encountered him on my own, without the filter of my mother.

  Turns out, my mother was pretty faithful. As I read it, I realized that American superheroes hadn’t replaced Sun Wukong in my heart after all. Superman, Spider-Man, and Captain America were simply Western expressions of everything I loved about the monkey king.

  Superman’s epic battle with Doomsday echoes Monkey King’s epic battle with Red Boy. Spider-Man’s struggle against his own ego in the bowels of a pro-wrestling arena echoes Monkey King’s struggle against his own ego in the bowels of a mountain of rock. Captain America’s friendship with the Hulk, a thickset former foe, echoes Monkey King’s friendship with Pigsy, a thickset former foe.

  This story about a monkey with superpowers has lasted for centuries because it captures something essential about our experience. Sun Wukong might be a monkey, but his anger, anxiety, and arrogance are all too human. We all know what it feels like to be disrespected. We all know what it’s like to lose control. We’ve all yearned for spiritual enlightenment. And we all know that the effort needed for enlightenment sometimes feels like a golden band that can squeeze the life out of us at any time, without warning.

  The monkey king’s story reverberates across continents and cultures. Journey to the West is the very definition of timeless.

  And that’s why new translations like the one you’re about to read are so important. They brush off the dust so that we can rediscover what is lasting.

  My mother now has Alzheimer’s. She’s forgotten all of the stories she used to tell me when I was young, but I remember. In many ways, I’ve built my entire career on those moments before bedtime. With every comic book and graphic novel that I create, I am trying to recapture the wonder I felt when my mother would regale me with tales of Sun Wukong, the monkey king. I hope reading this book fills you with that same wonder.

  Because I want you to remember, too.

  gene luen yang

  Introduction

  Monkey King, or Journey to the West (c. 1580), is one of the masterworks of Chinese fiction. It recounts a Tang-dynasty monk’s quest for Buddhist scriptures in the seventh century, accompanied by an omnitalented kung fu monkey king called Sun Wukong, one of the most memorable reprobates in world literature; a rice-loving divine pig able to fly with its ears; and a depressive man-eating river-sand monster. It is a cornerstone text of Chinese fiction, and an index to early modern Chinese culture, thought, and history; its stature in East Asian literature may be compared with that of The Canterbury Tales or Don Quixote in European letters.

  The novel commences with a spirited prologue—seven chapters long—recounting Monkey’s many attempts to achieve immortal sagehood, in the course of which he acquires knowledge and weapons that will serve him well through the rest of the book: these include the ability to perform “cloud-somersaults” that carry him 108,000 miles in one leap, and a gold-hooped staff that can grow as tall as the sky and shrink to the size of a needle. He becomes a master of subterfuge by learning to transform himself into seventy-two different varieties of creature (though for some reason his disguises are occasionally unable to magic away his tail or scarlet buttocks). He studies freezing spells and how to turn each of the eighty-four thousand hairs on his body into other animals (including clones of himself) or objects. Yet time and again he is brought low by his irrepressible naughtiness. Finally, after taking up a bureaucratic sinecure in the Heavenly government of the Jade Emperor, he commits the unforgivable crime of gorging himself on the peaches, wine, and elixirs of immortality. Following an epic battle between Monkey and the armies of Heaven, the Buddha pins Monkey beneath the Five-Phases Mountain.

  Five hundred years later, one of the founding emperors of the Tang dynasty, Taizong, dispatches a pious monk, Tripitaka, to India in search of precious Buddhist sut
ras that will bring virtue and enlightenment to the Chinese empire. On Tripitaka’s way through China, the Buddha releases Monkey from beneath his mountain so that he can atone for his sins by protecting the monk on his journey. Joined by two more disciples, the pig spirit (Pigsy) and the sand monster (Sandy), both fallen immortals also, they advance westward through the wildernesses of the Silk Road: the territories now known as Xinjiang, Tibet, Nepal, and finally India. In the course of their travels, they encounter murderous Buddhists, perfidious Taoists, expanses of rotten persimmons, and monsters of all shapes and sizes (femmes fatales, rhinoceroses, iguanas, scorpions). They are serially captured, tied up, lacquered, sautéed, steamed, and impregnated, and come very close to being diced, boiled, liquidized, pickled, cured, and seduced by various fiends. Eventually, after eighty-one such calamities, the pilgrims reach Thunderclap Monastery, the stronghold of the Buddha in India, and are rewarded with armfuls of sutras and posts in the Buddha’s government of immortals.

  Most of the “official” version of the novel as it circulates today—one hundred chapters long—was published in 1592 by an entrepreneurial press in Nanjing, east China. But it sprang from a much older set of stories and legends about Tripitaka (c. 602–664), an indisputably remarkable historical individual.1 After taking holy orders at the age of twelve, he acquired a Chinese Buddhist education, learned Sanskrit, and grew impatient with the errors and omissions of the translations of Buddhist scriptures that had so far reached China. In the late 620s he resolved to travel to India himself and bring back to China original texts. Without permission from the emperor, he set off across the deserts and freezing mountains of China’s far northwest, surviving bandits, pirates, demanding monarchs, and an assassin-guide. After some fifteen years of traveling around India, studying religion and logic, philosophy and metaphysics, he returned to China loaded with books, statues, and manuscripts.

  Even before Tripitaka’s death, his life was shrouded in myth; in subsequent centuries it was adapted and readapted by oral storytellers in increasingly outlandish ways. Although Tripitaka himself left behind a rather matter-of-fact account of his travels—preoccupied more with recording mango and millet cultivars, soil quality, and local textiles than with fantastical trials and monstrous obstacles—the odyssey over the centuries blurred into mythology, until almost nothing of Tripitaka’s own record of the journey was left in the fictions and dramas told about it.2 By the retellings of the thirteenth century, Tripitaka had acquired a Monkey disciple, a delinquent-turned-Buddhist bodyguard; across the next three hundred years, this character would come to dominate the narrative. In prose and drama of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the stories told about Tripitaka and his charismatic Monkey disciple came to resemble a fictional Rolodex, from which writers and entertainers across East Asia could take and retell their favorite episodes. (One of the novel’s episodes—set in the kingdom of Cart-Slow—is recounted in detail by a fourteenth-century Korean primer of colloquial Chinese.) The precise origins of many of these stories are very hard to pinpoint. No one particularly agrees on the inspiration for Monkey: one interpretation traces him back to a legendarily lecherous White Ape; another to a simian water demon whose troublemaking led him to be pinned beneath Turtle Mountain; another again to Hanuman, the sage companion of Rama in Hindu mythology.3

  It has proven similarly difficult to confidently identify the author or editor who selected and organized these stories into the one-hundred-chapter version that quickly became one of the “master novels” (qishu) of late imperial Chinese fiction. Despite the obvious popularity of the text, neither the publisher, editor, or prefacer of the 1592 edition knew—or were willing to admit they knew—who had produced the book. For in the sixteenth century (and arguably until the twentieth century), fiction was a disreputable pastime; few respectable literati would want to be publicly associated with it. The literal translation of the Chinese term for fiction—xiaoshuo (lesser discourses)—captures this sense of cultural disdain. The best evidence we have points to authorship by one Wu Cheng’en (c. 1506–1582), the son of a silk-shop clerk from east China. Like many of his educated peers, Wu repeatedly failed to pass the civil service exams—the fiercely competitive entrée to a government post and conventional social status. For much of his life, he scraped a living writing elaborate, poetic birthday greetings. When the demands of this literary odd-jobbing permitted, he wrote ghost stories, humorous fiction, and poetry.4 After centuries of posthumous obscurity, he shot to fame when Hu Shi—a celebrity intellectual of the early twentieth century—wrote an essay identifying Wu as author of the hitherto anonymous novel. Although there was no more obvious candidate, Hu Shi’s proof was little more than circumstantial. A local guide from Wu’s native place, Huai’an, listed a Journey to the West among Wu’s oeuvre (though we cannot be sure whether this is the novel or a different piece of travel writing) and described him as “a man of exceptional intelligence and many talents . . . able to compose poetry and prose at a stroke of the brush; he also excelled in humor and satire.” The novel happens to contain many turns of phrase particular to the Huai’an dialect. By Wu’s own admission, he was addicted to entertaining tales of the supernatural. The mystery of Journey to the West’s authorship will probably never be resolved. The best we can say is that sometime in the sixteenth century, a talented writer with a passion for literary impishness and descriptive poetry knitted existing characters and stories together with episodes of his own creation into a single novel.

  Whoever wrote or compiled it, the book reflects the dynamic literary milieu of sixteenth-century China. The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) had begun in high tyrannical style; the dynasty’s founder and his son were ruthless, centralizing dictators who unleashed large-scale purges on the court and bureaucracy. As the dynasty proceeded, the penalties for displeasing later emperors remained terrifying. The throne’s secret police tortured those suspected of anti-imperial insurrection; court beatings were dealt out to officials found wanting. Between 1642 and 1644 alone, three high-ranking ministers were driven to suicide by imperial will. But from the middle of the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the dynasty’s violent autocracy coexisted with political and institutional paralysis—the Wanli emperor (r. 1573–1620) avoided court audiences for thirty years. Despite the terrors of the Ming political system, the actual limits to central control left room for an extraordinary cultural florescence. While China’s population expanded threefold, education and literacy surged amid a boom in publishing. During the sixteenth century, printed books for the first time exceeded manuscript copies; Ming China housed, at any one time, more books than the rest of the world put together. The growth in population fueled unprecedented migrations and a new, free-flowing traffic of information and ideas. This enhanced “mobility of economic and social opportunity translated into a corresponding mobility of consciousness,” argues Andrew Plaks, a historian of the Ming novel.5 Popular literary forms flourished, as vernacular fiction and drama—both, in the traditional hierarchies of Chinese literature, generically subservient to poetry—began claiming the earthier realms of everyday human experience as acceptable raw material for art. In addition to Journey to the West, another three of the six “master novels” of imperial China were completed during the Ming dynasty: The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a recounting of the civil war into which China plunged after the fall of the Han dynasty in AD 220; The Water Margin, a picaresque tale of twelfth-century outlaws; and The Plum in the Golden Vase, a sexually explicit chronicle of intrigue in a wealthy Ming household. Although the vernacular of Journey to the West is a long way from contemporary spoken Chinese, it is relaxed, expansive, and lively when compared with laconic, highly compressed, allusive classical Chinese. A 1620 preface to a collection of vernacular stories communicated the emotional immediacy of the medium:

  Just ask the storytellers to demonstrate in public their art of description: they will gladden you, astonish you, move you to sad tears, rouse you to song and dance; they wil
l prompt you to draw a sword, bow in reverence, cut off a head, or donate money. The fainthearted will be made brave, the debauched chaste, the unkind compassionate, the obtuse ashamed. A man may well intone the Classic of Filial Piety and the Analects of Confucius every day, yet he will not be moved so quickly nor so profoundly as by these storytellers. Can anything less accessible achieve such effect?6

  In philosophy, Neo-Confucian scholars such as Wang Yangming grew preoccupied with the workings of the individual mind, arguing that all—no matter how humble their background—are born with a capacity for innate knowledge; even uneducated commoners could attain enlightenment. The implicit egalitarianism of this argument opened the door to the kind of down-to-earth characterizations of the vernacular novels that flourished through the late Ming dynasty. Populated by gods, demons, emperors, bureaucrats, monks, animals, woodsmen, bandits, and farmers, Journey to the West presents an epic, multivocal account of imperial China.7 The cultivation of the self by highly imperfect beings is a central theme of the novel, on which more will be said below.

  Expressive of the intellectual fluidity of its time, the novel has generated diverse readings: Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, comic, satirical. It tells us something, too, about popular Ming geographies of China’s western frontier, belying the old cliché of imperial China as self-sufficient, isolationist, xenophobic. Journey to the West—an odyssey out of China, to attain the wisdom of Indian Buddhist civilization—tells a different story: one of Chinese fascination with foreign exotica. The pilgrims regularly express wonderment at the glittering city-states they encounter on their way west. Very broadly, interpretations of the novel divide between two camps: critics who see Journey to the West as a religious allegory for the human condition and those who see it as good-humored supernatural slapstick. The one clear conclusion that can be drawn from the many exegeses of the past five hundred years is that the book is a gloriously open text: one that has lent itself to multiple explanations and constant adaptation.