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Film / A Chinese Odyssey

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• A Chinese Odyssey Part Two: Cinderella (西遊記大結局之仙履奇緣, Journey to the West Grand Finale: Cinderella note  Chinese dub title for Cinderella . Go figure ): Having travelled back in time 500 years thanks to the Moonlight Treasure Box, Joker encounters a woman with the split personalities of Zixia and Qingxia Fairies (Athena Chu), and enters an unwilling relationship with her. He then reunites with Tripitaka (Law Kar-ying) and his other two disciples, but the Bull Demon King (Lu Shuming, i.e. Guan Yu from the 1994 Romance of the Three Kingdoms TV series) shows up and captures Tripitaka, with the intention of making a banquet out of the monk's flesh and forcibly making Zixia/Qingxia his concubine. Now, Zhu Bajie (Ng Man-tat) and Sha Wujing must find a way to rescue their master from Bull, while Joker has to contend with whether to continue the relationship between him and Zixia/Qingxia, or take up his true destiny as the Monkey King.

A third film, A Chinese Odyssey: Part Three (大话西游3), was released in China on September 14, 2016. Han Geng replaces Stephen Chow as the Monkey King.

In 2017, the TV series A Chinese Odyssey: Love of Eternity (大话西游之爱你一万年) which further explores and combines all three films was released.

This franchise contains examples of the following tropes:

• Adaptational Heroism : Part 3 introduces the fake Sun Wukong from the original text, the Six-Eared Macaque - due to Joker not being ready to resume the duties of the Journey to the West (having been flung back in time before his sentence was up), the Macaque takes his place in the legend proper.
• Affectionate Parody : Of Journey to the West . At one point, the movie questions why would demons go through great lengths to consume the sought after "divine" flesh of Tripitaka... by having someone pretending to be Tripitaka and naming their child after Tripitaka!
• Trope Maker : started the trend of playing whenever something really epic in a Journey to the West film happens.
• Bait-and-Switch : Joker's second-in-command, who is mind controlled by the Spider Demoness, steal the pouch that seals demons, and bluffs at Joker as the she and Jingjing prepare to whoop their bare asses, only to reveal that he is actually Grandpa Buddha in disguise and then seals the two demons, revealing that the real, mind controlled guy is already caught by him and the bandits.
• Brainwashed : The Spider Demoness hypnotizes Joker's second-in-command to do her bidding, and attempts to sabotage Joker's attempt to seal the two demons by burning the invisibility talismans provided by Grandpa Buddha. Fortunately, Grandpa Buddha manages to catch him being mind controlled by the demons off-screen.
• And while sneaking up on the demons in nothing but (tampered) talismans, Joker's "loincloth" catch fire. And asks for his crew to stomp out the fire on his crotch. And it happens again. But just as Joker has his crotch on fire for the third time, he decides to take off his "loincloth" and just charge at the demons in plain sight.
• When the Monkey King rebels against Tripitaka in the first act and tries to attack Guanyin, she squishes the Monkey King, then wraps him in a leaf and seals him in a vase.
• Any time Joker and his bandit gang takes on the demons . You can tell where is this going.
• And then she commits suicide again after the Spider Demoness forced Joker's second-in-command to lie about their child being Joker's. Joker managed to stop her suicide after multiple attempts of using the Moonlight Treasure Box.
• Played for laughs with one of the Bull Demon King's guards committing suicide out of irritation of Tripitaka's ramblings!
• Earn Your Happy Ending : Albeit also a bittersweet one. After many deaths and one final battle, Joker — fully transformed back into an atoning Monkey King — is transported to a timeline where everyone is living happily, including Zixia and another Joker. After helping the two admit their love for one another, the Monkey King properly begins the Journey to the West, accompanied by a less annoying Tripitaka, and a Zhu Baije and Sha Wujing who are actually friendly to each other.
• Fix Fic : Part 3 is really a straight-up redux of the first two movies, establishing their conclusion as a case of You Can't Fight Fate , then retcons said fate so that the Zixia that dies and the Monkey King that follows Longevity Monk on the quest were both impersonators the whole time, allowing Joker and Zixia to remain together.
• Foreshadowing : Joker has visions of a cave full of monkeys in his dreams. This would eventually hint at his past life being the Monkey King.
• One of the few cases where this trope is weaponized somewhat horrifically : Xiangxiang attempts to uses this technique to imprison Wujing's soul inside a rock , but Wujing managed to grab Xiangxiang just in time to swap minds with each other.
• Xiangxiang does it again in Bull's festival. While Bajie and Wujing managed to get their souls back, but a dog passing by causes Xiangxiang to be stuck in said dog's body, and Qingxia in Xiangxiang's body.
• Game Face / Nightmare Face : The White Bone Demon / Jingjing pulls off this in her demon form.
• Giant Spider : The Spider Demoness can transform into one. However, it's rendered harmless for some reason when one of Joker's goons grab one, yet the other bandits flee in fear from the guy carrying it.
• He Cleans Up Nicely : When Joker declares he will no longer be a bandit and become a scholar after meeting Jingjing, he shaves his beard. Then Jingjing complained that he should have continued being a bandit and keep his beard, causing Joker to try to paste back his beard.
• Hurl It into the Sun : Bull Demon King uses the Iron Fan to lift an entire demon village towards the sun to try to kill the Monkey King.
• Info Dump : When Joker finally finds Jingjing in the past, and winds up spilling everything about her future all at once in 2x speed.
• Invisibility Cloak : The invisibility talismans provided by Grandpa Buddha makes the holder invisible to demons. So Joker and his gang try to sneak up on the two demons... by wearing nothing but the talismans around their crotches (while Joker's second-in-command wears the talismans like a hula dancer) , not realizing that Joker's second-in-command tampered with the talismans as a result of being mind controlled by the demons.
• Ironic Echo : The speech Joker gives Zixia to trick her into believing he loves her so she wouldn't kill him with her sword. The second time was sincere but he was already dead. At the very end, he finally manages to say "I love you" to her but only by possessing the reincarnated Joker and he can no longer be with her . Zixia describes her ideal fated lover as someone who was larger than life and will walk on seven coloured clouds to marry her. As she says herself, she got the beginning description right but not the ending.
• MacGuffin : The Moonlight Treasure Box.
• The Mirror Shows Your True Self : The Magic Mirror given by Grandpa Buddha can reveal demons disguised as humans, as shown by Jingjing's demonic face being shown on the mirror when Joker takes a peek of her reflection. It also reveals what a person was in his past life, with the Joker's second-in-command being revealed to be Bajie in his past life. The Monkey King's face does not appear when Joker looks into the mirror until he travelled back 500 years.
• Mugging the Monster : Joker and his bandit gang takes on the Spider Demoness and Jingjing. The results are predictable .
• Never Found the Body : As Joker arrived with the antidote to heal Jingjing's venom from the Spider Demoness, he assumes that he's arrived too late to save her and caused her to commit suicide to avoid dying from the venom as a result, not realizing that Bull has found her body and resurrected her under his control.
• Never Trust a Trailer : A peacock demon is seen during the trailer for Part Two after the end of Part One. That guy is nowhere to be found in Part Two.
• Once More, with Clarity : Part 3 - Zixia uses the Moonlight Box and sees her eventual death, in the arms of the Monkey King , but the Six-Eared Macaque has been forced to stand in for the Monkey King the whole time, and in the end, it's actually Qingxia who dies in her sister's place.
• Only a Flesh Wound : Joker's second-in-command ignores a dagger wound to his thigh by accident (which he then tries to cover the blood leakage). Then got his thigh slashed by the Spider Woman's blade.
• Trope Maker : A Chinese Odyssey started the trend of playing this whenever something really epic in a Journey to the West film happens.
• This incarnation of Tripitaka being unnecessarily longwinded.
• For a given value of 'gag', every time Joker uses the Moonlight Box to jump back in time to save Jingjing always leads to him reaching her a second too late (in reality, she committed suicide until Joker stopped her suicide attempt after his third time travel attempt) . Every. Single. Time. Alongside his second-in-command's reaction to him using the Moonlight Box. Until an unexplained hiccup causes the Moonlight Box to send him back 500 years instead of the ten or so minutes he was aiming for.
• A passionate moment when Joker and Jingjing start stripping off for sex... and end up taking way too long.
• Playing with Fire : Jingjing. A running gag involves Joker's hand being burned by her flames.
• Rule of Funny : It's a Stephen Chow movie, so of course there will be mo lei tau involved.
• Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer : More like Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Film . The peacock demon in the trailer for Part Two doesn't appear in the proper movie at all.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here : Once the Bull Demon King shows up and wreaks havoc on Joker's lair, the Spider Demoness and Jingjing retreat back to the Spider Web Cave alongside Joker and his second-in-command as their attempts to repel Bull are useless. Grandpa Buddha retreats on the sight of Bull, saying that he's no match for him.
• Split Personality : Zixia/Qingxia Fairy. Zixia's personality shows during the day, while Qingxia's personality shows during nighttime.
• Stable Time Loop : The first two films are self-contained - Joker goes back 500 years to save his girlfriend Bai Jingjing, only to fall in love with Zixia, go through a lot more shenanigans involving the rest of the team and then have an epic showdown with the Bull Demon King to save Zixia and his master.
• Stylistic Suck : Tripitaka is played by Law Kar Ying, a veteran Chinese opera singer - and yet his horrendous rendition of "Only You" reached memetic levels.
• Time Travel : The Moonlight Treasure Box forms the crux of the plot, which combines approximately 500 years of separation from two different points of events. Yeah, time-travel shenanigans.
• The Tooth Hurts : Joker had to knock out one of his teeth with a rock when it gets stuck to the sticky threads of the Spider Demoness.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom : After sealing the Spider Demoness and Jingjing with a magic pouch provided by Grandpa Buddha, Joker's pet dog chews off the strings that keep the pouch closed. Cue the two demons resurfacing...
• Visible Invisibility : Played with. Joker and his goons decide to go naked in nothing but invisibility talismans when they attempt to sneak up on the two demons having dinner, but the two demons are still able to notice them as a result of the talismans being tampered by a mind-controlled second-in-command, so they decide to play along with the goons' "unseen" presence.
• What Happened to the Mouse? : After Xiangxiang mistakenly applied her "Freaky Friday" Flip technique into a dog's body, she (the dog) was never seen again. It's unknown whether she got roasted into a crisp as Bull lifted the entire demon village towards the sun, or she managed to leave the village just in time before Bull lifted the village.
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Myths, Legends, and Beliefs in China

Course of The College of Wooster

August 14, 2020

”A Chinese Odyssey“ Series (Three Parts)

A Chinese Odyssey is a two-part 1995 Hong Kong fantasy-comedy film directed by Jeffrey Lau and starring Stephen Chow. The third film was released in China on September 14.  The films are very loosely based on the Wu Cheng’en novel Journey to the West.

The first part

A Chinese Odyssey Part One: Pandora’s Box

Review 1 / Review 2 / 评论 1 / 评论 2

Fantasy adventure about the arrival of Buddhism in China. When the Goddess of Happiness tosses the Longevity Monk and his disciples out of heaven (because the Monkey King tried to attain immortality), the Monkey King is reincarnated as the Joker. He now spends his time chasing two jealous women. When one of them is dying, the Joker goes back in time in an attempt to save her.

Watch with English subtitle

Watch from Mainland China

The Second Part

A Chinese Odyssey Part Two: Cinderella

The convoluted continuation of the adventures of the time-traveling, now-human Monkey King, who attempts to fulfill his divine destiny.

The Third Film

A Chinese Odyssey Part Three

It won the Golden Angel Award for Film at the 12th Chinese American Film Festival. The film is a sequel to parts one and two of A Chinese Odyssey.

Taking place in an alternate timeline, Fairy Zixia used the Pandora’s Box to travel forward in time to see the consequences of leaving a tear drop in Joker’s heart, which led to her “demise” and Joker being revealed as the reincarnation of the Monkey King. Fearing for her life and Joker’s mental well being, she denounced her relationship to Joker, which led to him asking about what happened in the future. Zixia revealed to him the fact that she left a mark in Joker’s heart, leading to Bai Jing Jing realizing that Joker will eventually stop having feelings for her, leading him to fall for Zixia.

However, Zixia withheld the information about Joker being the Monkey King’s reincarnation and tried to make things right by forcing Joker into meeting with Bai Jing Jing much earlier than in the original timeline.

Unfortunately, Joker had already stopped having feelings for Jing-Jing and prevented Zixia’s plan from going any further resulting in a slap from Zixia. After having a talk with Qingxia (Zixia’s twin sister trapped in her body), Zixia decided to go the Bull Demon King and marry him so Joker can stop falling for her so she left Joker – who was looking for her after being slapped – alone by himself.

Joker continues his search for Zixia in the desert, where he witnessed this timeline’s version of the Monkey King being subdued by Guanyin, with the difference being that the Longevity Monk used the Pandora’s Box to escape from being killed by the Monkey King and the time to subdue the Monkey King took longer than expected. After Guanyin left with the subdued Monkey King, Joker found himself left with the returning Longevity Monk and both were caught together by the Bull Demon King, being happy about having a second wife and the Longevity Monk being captured.

Bibliography：

周奕, 浅析《大话西游》的美学意蕴,2017. DOI:10.19395/j.cnki.1674-246x.2017.05.102

刘泽江，世纪末的爱情寓言——影片《大话西游》赏析，《写作》，2017。

Journey to the West: Introduction

by That's Mandarin | Oct 11, 2022 | Guest Blogs & Media

To spark your interest, our guest author Jeff Pepper from Imagin8 Press has shared a brief introduction of the book.

TIP: Scroll the the bottom of the article to discover links to a version of the book written for English-speaking students of Chinese!

Q: What is Journey to the West about?

Journey to the West (西游记, Xīyóu Jì), is a Chinese novel written in the 16th century by Wu Cheng’en (吴承恩, Wú Chéng’ēn).

It is probably the most famous and best-loved novel in China and is considered one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature. Its place in Chinese literature is roughly comparable to Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey in Western literature. Wikipedia sums up the book’s role perfectly, saying, “Enduringly popular, the tale is at once a comic adventure story, a humorous satire of Chinese bureaucracy, a spring of spiritual insight, and an extended allegory in which the group of pilgrims journeys towards enlightenment by the power and virtue of cooperation.”

Q: Is Journey to the West based on a real story?

The novel’s storyline is loosely based on an actual journey by a Buddhist monk also called Xuanzang who traveled from the city of Chang’an (today’s Xi’an) westward to India in 629 A.D. and returned 17 years later with priceless knowledge and texts of Buddhism.

Q: In short, what is Journey to the West about?

A long time ago, in a magical version of ancient China, the great Tang Empire is ruled by an emperor named Taizong. Due to a mixup involving the wrongful execution of a dragon king, Taizong falls ill, dies, and is dragged down to the underworld. There he comes face to face with the Ten Kings of the Underworld, survives a harrowing journey through hell, and finally escapes with the help of a deceased courtier.

When Taizong returns to the human world he is a changed man. He decides to send a monk to the Western Heaven (that is, India), to visit the Buddha, obtain holy scriptures, and bring them back to the people of the Tang Empire. This task is nearly impossible, requiring the crossing of thousands of miles of wild and dangerous territory. With guidance from the bodhisattva Guanyin, the emperor selects a young monk named Xuanzang.

Xuanzang is a brilliant young man but has a complicated history. In an earlier lifetime centuries before, he was a student of the Buddha but was careless in his studies. Expelled from the Buddha’s temple, he spent the next ten lifetimes meditating and acquiring merit. As an infant in his current lifetime he is nearly killed by bandits, placed in a floating basket by his widowed mother and sent downriver, rescued by a monk, and raised in a monastery. At age eighteen he learns his true history, and goes off to avenge his father’s death.

Later he is chosen by Taizong to undertake the epic journey to the west. Now called Tangseng (“monk from Tang”), he faces a near-impossible task: he must cross hundreds of mountains and thousands of rivers, and survive encounters with a horrifying series of bandits, monsters, demons, ghosts, evil kings, scheming monks, false Buddhas, and much more.

Q: How about the Monkey King and other famous characters?

Tangseng could never survive the journey on his own. Fortunately he acquires three powerful but deeply flawed disciples.

First is the monkey king Sun Wukong (孙悟空, S ūn W ù kōng , his name means “ape awakened to the void”), who he frees from a 500-year imprisonment under a mountain in punishment for creating havoc in heaven.

Second is Zhu Bajie (猪八戒, Zhū Bājiè, “pig of the eight prohibitions”), a gluttonous pig-man who is constantly fighting, and often succumbing to, his desires for food, sex and comfort.

And third is Sha Wujing (沙悟净, Shā Wùjìng, “sand seeking purity”), a reformed man-eating river demon.

All three have been converted to Buddhism by the monk, but they often slip back into their bad habits and cause Tangseng a great deal of trouble. Fortunately they all have great magical powers which come in handy for battling demons and monsters, and saving Tangseng from all sorts of trouble.

The story of this journey is described in this epic novel.

Q: How long is the original book?

The original Journey to the West is a very long book. It contains 100 chapters and is 588,000 Chinese characters long. It uses a very large vocabulary of 4,500 different words, over 90% of which are not included in HSK Levels 1-6, making it quite difficult for most non-native Chinese speakers to read.

The novel is also available in English translation, the best one being by the scholar Dr. Anthony Yu. His version fills four volumes and runs over 2,300 pages.

Q: Is the book suitable for Chinese beginners?

Fortunately for people learning to read Chinese, there is now another way to read this book. My writing partner Xiao Hui Wang and I have spent the last five years writing a series of 31 books that retell the Journey to the West story in language that is accessible to anyone learning to read Chinese at the HSK 3 level. The stories in these books are told in a way that matches the original as closely as possible, but because they are graded readers they are much easier to read. The first book, Rise of the Monkey King, is relatively short and uses just 512 Chinese words. Each book adds more new words and slightly increases the length of the story and complexity of the writing, leading step by step to the longest and most challenging book, Book 31, The Final Trial. All told, the entire series uses about 2,200 different Chinese words excluding proper nouns.

Fortunately, the original novel is not written as a single continuous story, but is broken up into more or less standalone episodes, each one between one and four chapters in length. This makes it possible to read and enjoy any of the 31 graded readers without having to read the ones that came before it.

Each book is written in Simplified Chinese. The books include pinyin, English translation, and a glossary. Free audio versions of each book are available free of charge on YouTube.

Q: Where can I get these books?

A list of all 31 books in the series, along with short descriptions and links to the Amazon product pages and free YouTube audiobooks, can be found on the Imagin8 Press home page, www.imagin8press.com .

by Jeff Pepper

Jeff Pepper ([email protected]) is President and CEO of Imagin8 Press , and has written dozens of books about Chinese language and culture.

Over his thirty-five year career he has founded and led several successful computer software firms, including one that became a publicly traded company. He’s authored two software related books and has been awarded three U.S. patents.

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Journey to the West Research

A repository for research on the great 16th-century chinese classic, the story of sun wukong, the monkey king.

One of the most famous primate characters in world literature appears in the great Chinese classic  Journey to the West  ( Xiyouji , 西遊記 , 1592 CE). The story follows the adventures of Sun Wukong (孫悟空, a.k.a. “Monkey”) (fig. 1), an immortal rhesus macaque demon, who gains extraordinary power via spiritual cultivation and rebels against the primacy of heaven. Like Loki in Norse mythology and Lucifer in Judeo-Christian mythology, this trickster god falls from grace when a supreme deity, in this case the Buddha , banishes him to an earthly prison below. But unlike his western counterparts, the monkey repents, becoming a monk and agreeing to use his abilities to protect a Buddhist priest on his journey to collect sutras from India.

What follows is an overview of Monkey’s story. It will primarily focus on the first seven of the novel’s 100 chapters, but chapters eight through 100 will be briefly touched upon, along with lesser-known literary sequels to Journey to the West . I will also discuss the novel’s impact on pop culture and religion.

In the beginning, the mystical energies of heaven and earth and the light of the sun and moon come together to impregnate a boulder high atop the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit ( Huaguo shan,  花果山), an island that lies to the east of the easternmost continent in the Buddhist disc world system. The stone gestates for countless ages until the Zhou Dynasty (1046-256 BCE), when it hatches a stone egg that is eroded by the elements into a simian shape. The Stone Monkey ( Shihou,  石猴) awakens and bows to the four cardinal directions as light bursts forth from his eyes. The light is so bright that it reaches heaven, alarming the Jade Emperor ( Yuhuang dadi,  玉皇大帝) and his celestial retinue. The light soon subsides, however, once he ingests food for the first time.

The Stone Monkey happens upon other primates on the island and becomes their king when he proves himself in a test of bravery by blindly leaping through a waterfall, thereby discovering a long-forgotten immortal’s cave. He rules the mountain for over three centuries before the fear of death finally creeps in. One of his primate advisors suggests that the king finds a transcendent to teach him the secrets of eternal life, and so Monkey sets sail on a makeshift raft and explores the world for ten years. His quest eventually takes him to the western continent , where he is finally accepted as a student by the Buddho-Daoist sage Subodhi ( Xuputi,  须菩提). He is given the religious name Sun Wukong , meaning “ monkey awakened to emptiness ” or “monkey who realizes sunyata .” The sage teaches him the 72 methods of earthly transformation , or endless ways of changing his shape and size; cloud somersaulting , or a type of flying that allows him to travel 108,000 li (33,554 mi / 54,000 km) in a single leap; all manner of magical spells to call forth gods and spirits, grow or shrink to any size, part fire and water, create impassable barriers, conjure wind storms, cast illusions, freeze people in place, make endless clones of himself , unlock any lock, bestow superhuman strength , bring the dead back to life, etc.; traditional medicine ; armed and unarmed martial arts ; and, most importantly, an internal breathing method that results in his immortality. He is later disowned by the sage for selfishly showing off his new found magical skills to his less accomplished classmates.

Sun eventually returns to his cave and faces a demon who had terrorized his people during his prolonged absence. After killing the monster, he realizes that he needs a weapon to match his celestial power, and so his advisor suggests that he go to the undersea palace of Ao Guang (敖廣), the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea. There, he tries out several weapons weighing thousands of pounds, but each one is too light. He finally settles on a massive nine-ton iron pillar that was originally used by Yu the Great ( Dayu,  大禹) to set the depths of the fabled world flood, as well as to calm the seas . Named the “ As-You-Will Gold-Banded Cudgel ” ( Ruyi jingu bang,  如意金箍棒), the iron responds to Sun’s touch and follows his command to shrink or grow to his whim, thus signifying that this weapon was fated to be his. In addition to the staff, Monkey bullies the Dragon King’s royal brothers into giving him a magical suit of armor .

Shortly after returning home to the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, he shows off his new weapon by turning into a frightful cosmic giant and commanding the staff to grow, with the top touching the highest heaven and the bottom the lowest hell. This display of power prompts demon kings of the 72 caves to submit to his rule and host a drunken party in his honor. Soon after falling asleep, Sun is visited by two psychopomps who drag his soul to the Chinese underworld of Diyu (地獄). There, he learns that he was fated to die at the allotted age of 342 years old. But this enrages Monkey since his immortality freed him from the cycle of rebirth, and so he bullies the kings of hell in to bringing him the ledger containing his info. He promptly crosses out his name with ink, as well as the names of all monkeys on earth, thus making them immortal, too. He wakes up in the mortal world when his soul returns to his body.

Fig. 1 – A modern depiction of Sun Wukong (by the author) ( larger version ).

Both the Eastern Dragon King and the Hell King Qinguang (秦廣王) submit memorials to heaven concerning Sun’s misconduct. But the court advisor, an embodiment of the planet Venus , convinces the Jade Emperor to give Sun the menial task of watching over the Heavenly Horses in order to avoid further conflict. Monkey accepts and steadfastly performs his duties, that is until he learns that he’s just a glorified stable boy. He immediately returns to his earthly home in rebellion to proclaim himself the “Great Sage Equaling Heaven” ( Qitian dasheng, 齊天大聖). The celestial realm mobilizes an army of powerful demon hunters, including the Heavenly King Li Jing ( Li Jing tianwang, 李靖天王) and his son, the child god Third Prince Nezha ( Nezha santaizi , 哪吒三太子), but they all fall to Monkey’s magical and martial might. The embodiment of the planet Venus once again steps in to convince the Jade Emperor to acquiesce to Monkey’s demand for higher rank, thereby granting him the empty title of Great Sage Equaling Heaven and even promoting him to watch over the immortal peach groves.

Sun takes stock of the magical peaches that ripen every few thousand years, but he eventually succumbs to their heavenly aroma. He eats all but the youngest life-prolonging fruits, thus gaining another level of immortality. His theft is soon discovered, however, when fairy attendants of the Queen Mother of the West ( Xiwangmu, 西王母) arrive to pick the choicest specimens for her long-awaited immortal peach banquet. Sun is alerted to there presence and, upon questioning, learns that he has not been invited. Naturally, Sun becomes enraged, freezing the maidens in place with fixing magic and then crashes the party before the hallowed guests arrive. He eats all of the celestial food and drinks all of the immortal wine, and then drunkenly stumbles into the laboratory of Laozi (老子), a high god of Daoism. There, he gobbles up the deity’s alchemically-derived elixir pills , thereby adding several more levels of immortality.

Sun returns home once again to await the coming storm of heavenly forces. Tired of the demon’s antics, the Jade Emperor calls up 72 heavenly generals, comprising the most powerful Buddhist and Daoist gods, and 100,000 celestial soldiers. In response, Monkey mobilizes his own army comprising the demon kings of the 72 caves and all manner of animal spirits, including his own monkey soldiers. But soon after the battle commences, the demon kings fall to heavenly troops, forcing Sun to take on three heads and six arms and multiply his iron cudgel to meet the onslaught. Once again, the heavenly army is no match for him. However, he soon loses his nerve when his monkey children are captured in great heavenly nets. He flees with Erlang ( Erlang shen,  二郎神), a master of magic and the nephew of the Jade Emperor, taking chase. The two battle through countless  animal transformations , each trying to one-up the other. Monkey is finally captured when Laozi drops a magical steel bracelet on his head, incapacitating him long enough for Erlang’s celestial hound to bite hold of his leg.

Sun is taken to heaven to be executed for his crimes, but fire, lightning, and edged weapons have no effect on his invincible body. Laozi then suggests that they put him inside of the deity’s alchemical furnace to reduce the demon to ashes. They check the furnace 49 days later expecting to see his rendered remains; however, Monkey jumps out unscathed, having found protection in the wind element ( xun , 巽) of the eight trigrams . But intense smoke inside the furnace had greatly irritated his eyes, refining his pupils the color of gold and giving them the power to recognize the dark auras of demons in disguise. He overturns the furnace and begins to cause havoc in heaven with his iron cudgel. The Jade Emperor beseeches the Buddha ( Rulai,  如来) in the Western Paradise to intervene.

The Tathagata appears and declares that he will make Sun the new ruler of heaven if the macaque can simply jump out of his palm. Monkey agrees to the wager, and with one tremendous leap, speeds towards the reaches of heaven. He lands before five great pillars, thinking them to be the edge of the cosmos. He tags one with his name and urinates at the base of another in order to prove that he had been there. Upon returning, Sun demands the throne; however, the Buddha reveals that the five pillars were actually his fingers, meaning that the Great Sage had never left. But before Monkey can do anything, the Tathagata overturns his hand, pushing it out the gates of heaven, and transforming it into the Five Elements Mountain ( Wuxing shan, 五行山). There, Sun is imprisoned for his crimes against heaven.

Chapters thirteen to 100 tell how six hundred years later Sun is released during the Tang Dynasty (618-907) to help escort the Buddhist monk Tripitaka ( Sanzang,  三藏) (whose early story is told in chapters eight to twelve), a disciple of the Buddha in a previous life , on a quest to retrieve salvation-bestowing scriptures from India. The Bodhisattva Guanyin (觀音) gives the monk a golden headband ( jingu, 金箍; a.k.a.  jingu , 緊箍, lit: “tight fillet”) as a means to rein in Monkey’s unruly nature. It tightens around Sun’s head whenever a magic formula is recited , causing him great pain. In addition, Guanyin gives Monkey three magic hairs on the back of his neck that can transform into anything he desires to aid in his protection of the monk. Along the way, the two meet other monsters-turned-disciples— Zhu Bajie (猪八戒), the lecherous pig demon, Sha Wujing (沙悟净), the complacent water demon, and the White Dragon Horse ( Bailongma,  白龍馬), a royal serpent transformed into an equine—who agree to aid in the monk’s defense. Monkey battles all sorts of ghosts, monsters, demons, and gods along the way. In the end, he is granted Buddhahood and given the title of the “ Victorious Fighting Buddha ” ( Dou zhanzheng fo,  鬥戰勝佛) for protecting Tripitaka over the long journey.

A summary of all 100 chapters can be read on my friend’s blog (fig. 2).

https://journeytothewestlibrary.weebly.com/novel-summary

Fig. 2 – The summary header ( larger version ).

II. Sequels

There are a total of four unofficial sequels to the novel.

The first is called A Supplement to the Journey to the West  ( Xiyoubu,  西游补, 1640), which takes place between chapters 61 and 62 of the original. In the story, the Monkey King wanders from one adventure to the next, using a magic tower of mirrors and a Jade doorway to travel to different points in time. In the Qin Dynasty  (221–206 BCE), he disguises himself as Consort Yu in order to locate a magic weapon needed for his quest to India. During the  Song Dynasty (960–1279), he serves in place of King Yama as the judge of Hell. After returning to the Tang Dynasty, he finds that his master Tripitaka has taken a wife and become a general charged with wiping out the physical manifestation of desire (desire being a major theme running through the novelette). Monkey goes on to take part in a great war between all the kingdoms of the world, during which time he faces one of his own children in battle. In the end, he discovers an unforeseen danger that threatens Tripitaka’s life.

The second is the Later Journey to the West ( Hou Xiyouji , 後西遊記, 17th-century). This novel focuses on the adventures of Monkey’s spiritual descendent Sun Luzhen (孫履真, “Monkey who Walks Reality”). I have a three-part article about it ( first , second , and third ). 

And the third and fourth are the Continuation of the Journey to the West ( Xu Xiyouji , 續西遊記, 17th-century) and the New Journey to the West ( Xin Xiyouji , 新西遊記, 19th-century), respectively. As of 2023, I have not written any articles on these sequels. 

III. Cultural Impact

Stories about Sun Wukong have enthralled people the world over for centuries. His adventures first became popular via oral folktale performances during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). These eventually coalesced into the earliest known version of the novel, The Story of How Tripitaka of the Great Tang Procures the Scriptures  ( Da Tang Sanzang qujing shihua , 大唐三藏取經詩話; The Story hereafter), published during the late-13th-century.

Since the anonymous publishing of the complete novel in the 16th-century, Monkey has appeared in numerous paintings, poems, books, operatic stage plays, video games, and films (both live action and animated ).

He was sometimes “channeled,”  along with other martial spirits, by citizen soldiers of the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901). There is also a monkey-based martial art named in his honor.

It is interesting to note that there are people in southern China , Taiwan , Malaysia , Singapore , Thailand , and Vietnam who worship him as a patron deity . Thus, Sun became so popular that he jumped from oral and published literature to take his place on the family altar.

Copies of The Story  were discovered in Japan among a 17th-century catalog of books in the Kozanji Temple (高山寺, Ch:  Gaoshan si ). No copies are known to exist in China, which suggests this version came to the island many centuries ago. The complete Ming edition of the novel came to Japan in the late-18th-century, where it was translated in bits and pieces over the course of some seventy years. However, Monkey did not become immensely popular until the first complete translation of the novel was published in 1835. The last part was illustrated with woodblocks by Taito II (fl. 1810-1853), a noted student of famous artist Hokusai (1760-1849).

Other Japanese artists, such as Kubo Shunman (1757-1820) and Yoshitoshi (1839-1892) (fig. 3), produced beautiful full color woodblock prints of Sun.

Fig. 3 – (Left) Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, “Jade Rabbit – Sun Wukong”, October 10, 1889 ( larger version ). Fig 4. – (Right) Son Goku ( 孫悟空 ) from the Dragonball Franchise ( larger version ).

Like in China, Monkey has been adapted in all kinds of Japanese media. By far, his most famous adaptation is the manga and anime character Son Goku (孫悟空) (fig. 4) from the Dragon Ball   (Jp:ドラゴンボール; Ch:  Qi longzhu,  七龍珠) franchise (1984-present). Like Sun, Goku has a monkey tail, knows martial arts, fights with a magic staff, and rides on a cloud. His early adventures in  Dragon Ball  (manga: 1984-1995; anime: 1986-1989) see him traveling the world in search of seven wish-granting “dragon balls,” while also perfecting his fighting abilities and participating in a world martial arts tournament. Several of the supporting characters, such as Oolong (ウーロン), a lecherous anthropomorphic pig who can change his shape, a nod to Zhu Bajie, were directly influenced by the novel. Dragon Ball Z (manga: 1988-1995; anime: 1989-1996), a continuation of the comic book and animated TV show, follows Goku as an adult and reveals that he is actually a humanoid alien sent as a child to destroy Earth. He arrived in a spherical spaceship that recalls the stone egg from which Sun Wukong was formed. But instead of destroying the planet, he becomes its stalwart protector and faces extraterrestrial menaces from beyond the stars. Goku’s adventures have continued in the sequels Dragon Ball GT  (1996-1997),  Dragon Ball Super  (2015-2018), and  Super Dragon Ball Heroes  (2018-present).

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was Goku based off the monkey king. And was the hole dragon ball series based off chinse myths.

Yes, Goku was based on the Monkey King, but the early part of Goku’s childhood was only loosely based on Journey to the West.

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The wacky existentialism of jeffrey lau's "a chinese odyssey".

Jeffrey Lau's A Chinese Odyssey - Part One: Pandora's Box and A Chinese Odyssey - Part Two: Cinderella (2015) are showing August and September on MUBI in the United States.

During the last Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema, the period between the 1984 Joint Declaration and the 1997 Handover, generic cycles moved with lightning rapidity. The speed and sheer volume of production, combined with the relatively small group of creative professionals, meant that a genre could be born, reach its peak, and die out within a few short years. The Heroic Bloodshed cycle, for example, can be said to have started in 1986 with A Better Tomorrow , reached its peak with The Killer and A Better Tomorrow III in 1989, and had its last gonzo gasps in 1992 with Hard-Boiled and Full Contact . By the time of the genre’s decline, Chow Yun-fat’s stardom in the colony had been eclipsed by Stephen Chow, who dominated the next few years of Hong Kong cinema like few stars have at any time, anywhere in the world.

Stephen Chow’s persona defined what became known as the “ mo le tau ” (roughly, “nonsense”) genre, a blend of physical and verbal slapstick characterized by lightning-quick Cantonese puns and egregious breaks with reality. His, and the genre’s, breakthrough came in 1990 with All for the Winner , a parody of a Chow Yun-fat gambling comedy called God of Gamblers (directed by Wong Jing) that had been released a few months earlier to great success. Stephen Chow’s film was an even bigger hit, and so when it came time for Wong to make God of Gamblers II , he combined the characters from both movies: the original and its parody—like if Top Gun II teamed Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer with Charlie Sheen and Valeria Golino’s characters from Hot Shots . The first God of Gamblers came out in December 1989, All for the Winner came out in June 1990, God of Gamblers II in December 1990. There was also The Top Bet , a spin-off of All for the Winner in which Chow had only a cameo, in March 1991 and a God of Gamblers III in August 1991. 1  

But as this mini-gambling cycle played itself out, Chow quickly moved to capitalize on his sudden stardom (after spending most of the 80s working as an extra and as a children’s TV host) with a unprecedented series of box office hits. From 1990 though 1993, he appeared in at least thirty movies, most of them major hits and several now canonical comedy classics ( Fight Back to School, Tricky Brains, Alls Well Ends Well, and the Royal Tramp films among them). Beginning with 1993’s Flirting Scholar he began directing as well, and in the coming years his pace slowed considerably and he rarely worked for other directors again. His last great collaboration with another director was in 1995 with the two-part mo lei tau wuxia A Chinese Odyssey , which reunited him with All for the Winner director Jeffrey Lau. 

Lau began his career as a producer, and it’s in that role that he’s had the greatest impact on Hong Kong cinema, producing New Wave classics like Patrick Tam’s Nomad and Terry Tong’s Coolie Killer along with Sammo Hung’s Eastern Condors . His most fruitful collaboration was been with Wong Kar-wai, for whom he produced Ashes of Time , Chungking Express and Fallen Angels . It was during the famously protracted and well over-budget shooting of Ashes that Lau gathered most of that film’s cast and crew (stars Brigitte Lin, Maggie Cheung, Leslie Cheung, Carina Lau, both Tony Leungs, Joey Wang, Jacky Cheung) and made a parody of the same source novel Ashes was based on, 2 to be released as a quick money-maker during the 1993 Lunar New Year holiday. The Eagle-Shooting Heroes was high-point in the mo lei tau genre in that it featured some of the coolest and sexiest actors in the world, filmed by some of the world’s greatest craftspeople (cinematographer Peter Pau, choreographer Sammo Hung, art director William Chang), acting like complete idiots for one hundred extremely silly minutes. It’s glorious.

Lau would take something of the same approach with A Chinese Odyssey , infusing high production values into a mo lei tau comedy, while at the same time parodying the source material, in this case the story of the Monkey King and Journey to the West . Anticipating the slightly more serious turn Chow would take later in his career, A Chinese Odyssey would have plenty of nonsense slapstick, but it would also take the themes of the novel, the reformation of the Monkey King, bringing him into line with Buddhist orthodoxy, completely seriously. It’s an unexpectedly profound blend of wacky comedy and existential melancholy. It’s the acme of the mo lei tau genre, the high point at which its absurdity becomes elevated to something like a philosophy of life.  

The first half of the film is subtitled Pandora’s Box , and details how, after he rebelled against the monk Xuanzang (the version of the movie I have, a Chinese BluRay which looks good but is poorly subtitled, calls him “the Longevity Monk”) and the goddess Guanyin, the Monkey King was going to be killed but the monk sacrificed himself to save him. 500 years later, a pair of demon sisters (the Spider-Woman and the White-Boned Demon, played by Yammie Lam and Karen Mok, respectively) are searching for the reincarnation of the Monkey King, who is fated to meet the monk again. 3 Stephen Chow plays Joker, unwittingly destined to be the Monkey King, but now the head of a gang of threadbare and dim-witted robbers. The gang and the demons have various run-ins, which usually end with Chow’s groin on fire and its subsequently being stomped on at length. Eventually Joker and the White-Boned Demon (called variously “Boney M” and “Pak Jingjing” in my copy) fall in love, as she’s convinced that he’s the Monkey King in disguise. The Spider-Woman despises him though, because the Monkey broke her sister’s heart 500 years ago. Also a monk, not The Monk, but a different one, shows up as a bowl of grapes and is played by Jeffrey Lau himself. He tries to explain things but doesn’t really help. Eventually everyone is chased by the Bull King to Spider Web cave, where Joker discovers the time-travel device Pandora’s Box and uses it a few times, eventually ending up 500 years in the past.

This is where the first film ends and Part II, called Cinderella , picks up. Joker meets a fairy named Zixia, who has escaped from heaven where she and her sister serve as the wick in Buddha’s lamp (I’m sure that’s a metaphor, but I have no idea what it means). Zixia is in search of her true love, the man who will draw her magic sword from its scabbard. Her sister is less interested in that, but the problem is that the two share the same body: Zixia by day, Qingxia by night (kind of like Brigitte Lin’s character in Ashes of Time ). Chow somehow ends up with Zixia’s sword though, so she falls in love with him, but he just wants to go back to the future to rescue Jingjing. But the Bull King finds him and forces him to marry his sister, Xiang Xiang while he tries to marry Zixia himself, neither of which happens when his wife, Princess Iron Fan (another former flame of the Monkey King) shows up. Somehow Zixia/Qingxia, Pigsy, Sandy, and Xiang Xiang all end up switching bodies for awhile, but eventually Joker realizes he loves Zixia (in a scene parodying Chungking Express ) but is still committed to reuniting with Jingjing, which he does, but the 500 years younger version of her who has no idea who he is. He explains everything as best he can, but eventually realizes that love and other human affairs are just too darn complicated to deal with and renounces all desire and returns to being the Monkey King again, whereupon he saves almost everyone. 

So, in the end, the story amounts to nothing more than a brief detour in the journey to the West. Like most of the other chapters in the novel, the pilgrims are put to the test, their commitment to withdrawing from the world in the name of a greater enlightenment threatened by the greatest temptation the material world has to offer: love. Seen in this light, A Chinese Odyssey , a goofy, dizzyingly lunatic slapstick comedy packed with cheap looking special effects, rubber masks and wildly unrealistic fight scenes is basically a Buddhist Last Temptation of Christ , a fantasy of normal life for a supernormal hero, one that must be sacrificed for the good of humanity.  

This isn’t, with the perspective of twenty more years of Stephen Chow films, as far-fetched a reading as it must have seemed at the time. Chow’s work as a director is more or less all infused with this spiritual sensibility, with his characters in films like The God of Cookery, Shaolin Soccer , and Kung Fu Hustle all ultimately achieving a specifically Buddhist enlightenment through slapstick physical degradation. And his own adaptation of Journey to the West , 2013’s Conquering the Demons , is very much about the renunciation of love as the precondition for spiritual transcendence (though in this case it is the monk who must let go of the woman he loves). 

This kind of weightiness is less apparent in the later work of Jeffrey Lau, although his Chinese Odyssey 2002 is terrific. Unrelated to Journey to the West , it’s a farcical adaptation of the huangmei opera The Kingdom and the Beauty (filmed by Li Han-hsiang in 1959) starring half of the cast of Chungking Express , Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Faye Wong, along with Chang Chen and Vicky Zhao Wei. But like A Chinese Odyssey , it too ends up more moving that it has any right to be: it’s somehow one of the great romantic films of the 21st century. In 2016, Lau released A Chinese Odyssey Part Three , which doesn’t star Chow or any of the major figures of the original film (though Karen Mok makes a brief appearance), but reprises all the roles with new, younger actors. It twists and recapitulates the events of the first two films, with some more dizzying time travel, in an attempt to give everyone the happy ending they deserve, inadvertently revealing that the whole problem was caused in the first place by a clerical error on the part of the Jade Emperor, the absolute ruler of Heaven, which turns the whole series into a kind of allegory about lunatics from Hong Kong being given all the power and resources of a vast and incompetent state and turning the whole world upside down for the sheer anarchic thrill of it all. May they never stop.

1. There were further spin-offs and prequels over the years, including another film called “ God of Gamblers 3 ” that is actually a prequel to the first film but with Leon Lai in the Chow Yun-fat part and the recent From Vegas to Macau series in which Chow Yun-fat returns to Wong Jing’s inane world to make whole a bunch of money.

2. Louis Cha’s Legend of the Condor Heroes . “The Eagle-Shooting Heroes” is the more literal translation of the title.

3. All through the Journey to the West story, the pilgrims are attacked by demons, because they believe that if they eat the monk they’ll gain eternal life. It’s the job of the Monkey King, along with a Pig Demon named Pigsy and a Fish Demon named Sandy, to protect him while he travels to India in search of Buddhist scriptures.

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Counseling alum writes her trauma and journey to heal with memoir

Demarra West, author of "Me Too: A Therapist's Journey to Heal, Find Liberation, and Joy"

KALAMAZOO, Mich.— Demarra   West , a graduate of Western Michigan University's clinical mental health counseling program, is inspiring readers with her memoir, " Me Too: A Therapist's Journey to Heal, Find Liberation, & Joy ." As a therapist and self-healer, she offers insight for readers seeking to overcome past trauma and live abundantly in every area of their lives. A survivor of trauma herself, West shares her healing journey and offers a roadmap to overcome even the most challenging of obstacles.

"The book has been 26 years in the making, and I started writing it before I even realized I had a lot of my own healing to do," explains West. "Before my healing journey, I really was under the impression that my past was my past and I was moving forward. I had gotten married, became a mother, attended graduate school and started a business."

"Then about 10 years ago when I stared learning about holistic practices, I found myself gravitating to doing trauma sensitive yoga, reiki, forest bathing, breathwork and other types of healing practices. Initially I thought these are going to be modalities that I use to help support my clients and community. But what I realized through finding these practices that I had my own healing to do myself," says West.

West's earliest recollection of trauma occurred at age six, although trauma was present long before that with her absentee father and the violence she witnessed from her stepfather. By age 13, she had already experienced eight of the 10  Adverse Childhood Experiences , including substance abuse, incarceration and homelessness. According to the Cleveland Clinic, these negative experiences affect a child’s brain and health as they grow into adults. They can also lead to mental health or chronic health conditions.

West describes the trauma suffered in her childhood as nearly obliterating her existence.

"In the book I talk about the most significant things that I faced in terms of trauma, the aftermath and struggle to talk about it and allow for my healing journey," says West. "So it's really a blueprint for people to understand some of the research-based holistic modalities that are revolutionary to helping us heal ourselves."  

ABOUT DEMARRA WEST

Demarra West

Demarra West is a community advocate, counselor, entrepreneur and author of "Me Too: A Therapist's Journey to Heal, Find Liberation, & Joy." She has a bachelor's in family life education from Spring Arbor University and masters in  clinical mental health counseling from Western Michigan University . West is also the former chair of YWCA Kalamazoo and led the organization's CEO search in 2023.

Starting her own full-service consulting practice in 2008, West's Change Agent Consulting has provided expertise in strategic planning, fund and program development, coaching and DEI training to organizations in Southwest Michigan. Additionally, she is the founder of Be Well Beautiful Women (BWBW), a non-profit aimed at supporting female leaders and entrepreneurs in business and wellness by providing business planning, executive coaching, training and retreats. BWBW also has a  podcast  featuring women who are experts in their field.

To learn more about West,  visit her website .

UPCOMING WORKSHOP

West will be holding a free workshop to demonstrate the therapeutic powers of writing, offering everyone—from trauma survivors to those simply seeking personal growth—tools to turn their experiences into powerful narratives on Tuesday, May 7, at Kazoo Books from 4 to 5:30 p.m. To learn more about the event or RSVP,  visit her website .

For more WMU news, arts and events,  visit  WMU News  online.

A journey through central Australia by rail

Before I even stepped foot on The Ghan, I knew it was no ordinary train.

Renowned for being one the world’s greatest rail journeys, I’ve had countless people recommend I do the legendary train trip, which travels between Adelaide in South Australia and Darwin in the Northern Territory.

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