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Before I could question his logic, he slipped out the bathroom door.
When I came back to the table, Mr. Sun was unwrapping a gift. It was a huge urn of horridly expensive baijiu, big enough to toast the entire Communist Party. It probably cost more than our car.
“The legend of Sun Wukong can get pretty long,” he said. “We should hear it over a drink.” He winked at me, willing to run with the diversion I’d handed him. Bless his heart.
Mr. Sun poured us all a bit, even me and Quentin after getting a nod from my mom. I took a single tiny sip and felt it etch a trail down my throat like battery acid.
“All right, so Sun Wukong,” I said. “What gives?”
“I tried telling you these stories at bedtime when you were young,” said Mom. “You never wanted to listen back then. But here goes . . .”
10
So to paraphrase my mother’s story . . .
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there was China. Ancient China.
Here, in a long-lost place called the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, all the wisdom and splendor of the sun and the moon poured into a stone until—crack!—out popped a monkey.
When the monkey was born, a light shone from his eyes all the way up to the Heavens. But the Jade Emperor who ruled the universe from atop the celestial pantheon ignored the obvious sign of greatness, and the monkey was left to fend for himself on the lowly Earth.
It didn’t go so badly. The monkey was much stronger and braver than the other apes of the mountain, and he became their king. But he wanted more than to feast and frolic with his subjects until he died. He wanted to keep the party going forever. He wanted to become immortal.
He left the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit and searched the lands of the humans until he found the Patriarch Subodai, an enlightened master who had transcended death. Subodai was so impressed with the monkey’s grasp of the Way (the Way being one of the many things that Asian culture refuses to explain but vigorously condemns you for not understanding) that he taught him the Seventy-Two Earthly Transformations, spells of kickass power that allowed one to change shape, split into multiple bodies, and leap across the world in a single somersault.
Subodai also gave his
star pupil a name. Sun Wukong. It meant Monkey Aware of Emptiness.
Once he achieved these new abilities, Sun Wukong wasted no time in getting kicked out of school for bad behavior. He left Subodai and went home to his mountain, only to find that it had been taken over by a monster known as Hunshimowang, the Demon King of Confusion—
I nearly dropped my glass when my mother got to that part. I whipped around to look at Quentin. He just tilted his head and motioned me to keep listening.
The Demon King of Confusion had been terrorizing the other monkeys in their king’s absence. Sun Wukong defeated the hulking monster with his bare hands, but he was dissatisfied that demons should think of him and his kin as easy targets.
What he really needed was a weapon. A big, threatening, FU kind of weapon that would show everyone the Monkey King meant business.
He paid a visit to Ao Guang, the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea. Ao Guang was willing to let Sun Wukong take a gift from the armory, but what the Monkey King really wanted was the great pillar from the old dragon’s underwater palace.
This beam of black iron, end-capped with bands of gold, had once been used to measure the depths of the celestial ocean and anchor the Milky Way. It glowed with heavenly light as Sun Wukong approached, much as his own eyes had when he was born. Ao Guang thought the pillar couldn’t be lifted and was unusable as a weapon, but at Sun Wukong’s command it shrank until it became the perfect staff. That was how the Monkey King got his famous weapon, the Ruyi Jingu Bang. The As-You-Will Cudgel.
The first thing that Sun Wukong did with the Ruyi Jingu Bang was to march straight into Hell. It turned out that Subodai hadn’t actually taught him immortality, and that his name was still in the big book of people scheduled to die. Sun Wukong threatened the horse-faced and ox-headed guardians of Hell with the Ruyi Jingu Bang, and out of fear they let him strike his name from the ledger.
So that was how Sun Wukong became immortal. Not through mastery of enlightenment. But by carrying the biggest, baddest stick in the valley.
The Jade Emperor didn’t take kindly to monkeys subverting the laws of life and death willy-nilly. On the advice of his officials, he invited Sun Wukong into the celestial pantheon in order to keep an eye on him. And hopefully a tighter leash.
The Monkey King was pleased to be in Heaven at first, rubbing elbows with noble gods and exalted spirits. But he was repeatedly humiliated with low-status assignments in the Thunder Palace, like grooming the divine horses in the stables, and kept from attending the great Peach Banquets. Sun Wukong got fed up with his treatment and went AWOL from Heaven after trashing the joint like a rock star on a bender.
The Jade Emperor sent a whole army of martial gods to Earth after him. And Sun Wukong beat the tar out of them all. The only one who could take him down was the Jade Emperor’s nephew, Erlang Shen, Master of Rain and Floods.
The duel between the two powerhouses shattered the scales. Erlang Shen chased Sun Wukong down through many forms as they fought and shapeshifted all over the Earth. The rain god finally got the upper hand, but even then securing the win took the combined effort of Erlang Shen’s six sworn brothers, a pack of divine hunting hounds, and an assist from Lao Tze, the founder of Daoism.
The celestial pantheon dragged Sun Wukong to Heaven and tried to execute the Monkey King by throwing him in the furnace used to create elixirs of longevity. It didn’t work. The dunking only gave Sun Wukong even more strength, plus the ability to see through any deception. Sure, his now-golden eyes also developed a lame Kryptonite-like weakness to smoke, but that didn’t matter. He broke free from the furnace, grabbed his Ruyi Jingu Bang, and began laying waste to the heart of Heaven.
All the gods hid from Sun Wukong’s rage. He was actually close to seizing the Dragon Throne of Heaven for himself, deposing the Jade Emperor to become ruler of the cosmos, but at the last minute a ringer, an outsider, was called in to help.
Buddha. Sakyamuni Buddha. The Buddha.
