If there is a TV serial that has kept being popular for more than 20 years in China, it can only be Journey to the West.
It was on TV as early as in 1984 and tells a story of a monk in Tang Dynasty going on a pilgrimage to India for Buddhist scriptures with his three fellows: a monkey, a pig and another monk. They come across many devils and ghosts on the way and most of the time it is the monkey, the magic monkey, who helps them out.
Sounds like a cartoon, right? It is actually one of the four famous classic novels of China. The monkey is born from a stone and then learns some magic kungfu from a Taoist. Born to be unusually audicious, the monkey doesn’t care any authorities including all the immortals in the heaven. He goes to the heaven and steals the immortality pills and ruins heaven parties and finally angers the immortals, who then gather together to fight against the monkey. Even 100,000 heaven soldiers are no matches of the monkey. In the end, Tathagata (seemed to be the highest level of Buddha) comes and presses the monkey under a mountain for 500 years until that Tang monk passes by and saves him.
This is just the beginning of the story, the first four parts of the 25-part serial. But it is many people’s favorite, I believe. It is such a pleasure to see those immortals fail in groups while the magic monkey wins.
Last year, I went to watch a theatre play Journey to The West, which is adapted from the novel. The play just stopped after the monkey is pressed under the mountain. The director of the play, of my age, said on the stage that part is the end of his Journey to The West, even though the monkey finally became a Buddha for being smart and brave to fight against all the ghosts along the trip, “I am not happy for that.”
Neither am I. If, as the teachers taught us in the primary class, the immortals in heaven represent the authorities of the feudalism, how to explain that the monkey, as the one who fight against them, finally becomes one of them? The representation explanations that people impose on the classic novels are just bullshit. We prefer to compare the good-for-nothing immortals to the stupid teachers that make us suffer a lot in the school, and we dream to be that monkey, tearing the homework and exam papers into pieces and flying to any other places as we want.
In this summer vacation, this serial was still on the screen to attract the vacation students and my cousin, a ten-year-old boy, was still imitating the monkey’s kungfu movements in front of the screen as we did before. The complex of getting freedom and being a hero applies to every generation.
The original serial has only 25 part, which doesn’t show the full picture of the novel, thus, in 2000, ten more parts were directed again with the same actors, adopting some modern technologies. But these ten parts turn out to be just crap and nobody, definitely nobody likes the new 10, which looks clumsy and scary. Either because of the overuse of computer technologies or the director and the producing team don’t have patience at such fast-money-making era.
So the memory of the monkey can only stop by the childhood, I guess.
Two years ago, on my birthday night, I bumped into a rock bar for the performance of a rock band from France–Le Singe Blanc (white monkey in English). Never heard that band before but I was totally amazed by the monkey noise they made in the music. Vivid and rad–being totally soaked in nice memories of the monkey.
