It all started with the day I decided to spend my entire summer holiday in front of an antiquated TV set at my grandma’s place. I turned on the TV, and a show with an equally antiquated vibe was being aired. It was a story of the westbound journey of a monk and his three disciples, and I was immediately enthralled by one of the disciples: the rascally, rebellious monkey. My six-year-old self would, between the pieces of watermelon that I was nibbling, breathe a sigh of satisfaction as I watched the Monkey King wreak havoc in the Heaven’s Palace. Of course, the rebel was my hero. I was too young; the monk was too upright, too impeccable, too boring.
It took me several years to realize that the 1986 TV adaptation of Journey to the West was such a classic that, with all its decidedly limited special effects, it continues to be aired in China every summer for kids (and their grandparents). Since childhood, I have returned to the story myriad times: on TV, in theater, and finally reading the book, a 100-chapter behemoth. Each time, I got something different out of the experience. At one point, the book appeared to be a sophisticated political satire. Then I began to see the journey as a quest for spiritual enlightenment. The bottom line is, I find the book much richer than a mere energetic, slapstick fantasy.
In 2015, thirty years after the TV show was first broadcast, a crowdfunded animation film reigned over the Chinese box office. It was a loose adaptation of the same Chinese novel, and was aptly titled Monkey King: Hero is Back. I sat in the theater, contentedly eating my popcorn, and mulled over the wisdom of our ancestor who decided that Journey to the West should be one of “the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese Literature.”
Partly because the novel carries such a heavy burden of cultural significance, it almost took me off guard when I learnt that Journey to the West is to be performed on stage in Boston. Ten days later, I was reading a deft distillation of the epic Chinese novel in the form of an English play script. And the truth is, I was skeptical. At first.
As an amateur translator, I am too familiar with the power of language, which manifests itself not only in words, but also in silence — the absences, the untranslatable. One fine example is a dialogue from the beginning chapters of the novel, where Master Subodhi asked after the monkey’s name, and the monkey replied that he did not have one, since he lived without ill temper. To help readers make sense of this dialogue, the translator needs to explain that the words “family name” and “temper” have the same pronunciation in Chinese. But it would take a much longer footnote to dig up the Buddhist allusion: the monkey’s first exchange with his Taoist master bears a striking resemblance to the first conversation between the fifth Patriarch of Chan Buddhism, Hongren, and his Buddhist master. And as such, when Subodhi named the monkey as Wukong, or “awake to vacuity”, he is making a Buddhist allusion to Hongren’s quote: “The name is the essence of Buddhism… It is emptiness”.
So I asked myself, even before I started reading the script, how it is possible that someone could translate the intricately woven poems, the witty wordplays, and the veiled references to a strange culture. How could a two-hour play epitomize all the sophistication, the history, the culture that are so uniquely Chinese?
Reading the English script — a very literal translation of a heavily abridged plot — allows me to take a step back and revisit the all too familiar Chinese epic. And I realized that the answer to my questions is surprisingly straightforward — it does not have to be uniquely Chinese. What is lost in translation can be found elsewhere, and what is left untranslated makes room for the creation of new meanings. An audience does not need the dialogue of name and temper to realize that the story is set against a backdrop of religious syncretism. And a fresh viewpoint from a cultural “outsider” can yield valuable insights. I was amazed, for example, when a colleague compared the story of the monk to The Wizard of Oz, a connection that I have never made before.
The essential question, then, is why. Why here, why now, why this story? How are the Odysseus-like adventures of a monk and his three disciples relevant to contemporary US? I cannot venture to provide the right answer. However, I would contend that in this world of violence and xenophobia, of greed and impatience, of chaos and confusion, this journey to the west allows us to take a step back and revisit the reality, to see human frailty in non-human characters, and to find some form of liberation in the way these characters endure the eighty-one ordeals.
At the end of our story, the monk — spoiler alert — acquired the Buddhist scriptures and brought it back to the Tang emperor. Mary Zimmerman, the American playwright, added one line of her own as a buoyant expression of a westerner’s reaction to this Chinese epic. And for this one line, if not for anything else, it is worth going to a theater to be on a one-hundred-and-eight-thousand-mile journey with a Chinese monk from centuries ago.
The emperor asks the monk: “The world, what is it like?” I find this question to be a bit of magic as impressive as the prowess of the Monkey King.
by Jiawei Cheng, Assistant Dramaturg for Journey to the West