by F. C. Yee
“It’s not like you got the Masterpiece Theatre references inside Sesame Street either,” I snapped. “I remember asking you to explain them, and you never could.”
The only person to smell the change in the wind was Quentin, who glanced up at me while chewing a mouthful of noodles.
“There was also the time you cracked that boy’s rib for pushing Yunie into a tree,” Mom said. “The only reason you didn’t get suspended was because he was so embarrassed he wouldn’t admit the two of you got into a fight. You should have seen yourself standing up to the principal, saying over and over that you did hit him and you deserved your proper punishment. The teachers didn’t know what to make of it.”
“Ah, so she has a sense of justice,” Mrs. Sun said admiringly. “If only our boy were the same way. He was such a little delinquent when he was young.”
“Now look at him,” said Mr. Sun. “He pretends to be good but it’s all an act. He thinks he has us fooled.”
I did look at Quentin, who was busy slurping the last of his soup. He didn’t seem at all bothered by his parents’ put-downs. In fact, he gave me a little wink over the edge of his bowl.
“I also hear that you’re the star of the volleyball team,” Mrs. Sun said to me. “Their secret weapon. Have you always been stronger than other people?”
“Yes,” said my mother. “She’s always been big.”
Oh boy. The gates were open.
“Oh, I meant in an athletic sense,” said Mrs. Sun. “Skill-wise. Good gongfu at sports.”
The distinction was lost on my mother. All those words meant the same thing to her. Masculine. Ungirly. Wrong.
“She’s always towered over the other girls,” Mom said. “The boys, too. I don’t know where she got it from.”
“Oh yeah, like my height is under my control,” I responded. “There was a button you press to grow taller and I got greedy and hit it too many times.”
“Maybe it was my fault,” she added, turning martyr mode on. “Maybe I fed you too much.”
“Okay, the implications of that are horrifying.” I raised my voice like I’d done a thousand times before. “You’re going to say you should have done the reverse and starved me into a proper size?”
“Why are you getting so upset?” Mom said. “I’m just saying life would be easier for you if you weren’t . . .” She waved her hand.
“Thank you!” I practically shouted. Okay, I was flat-out shouting. “I well and truly did not know that before you said it this very moment!”
“I think Genie’s beautiful,” Quentin said.
The air went out of the room before I could use it to finish exploding. Everyone turned to look at him.
“I think Genie is beautiful,” he repeated. “Glorious. Perfection incarnate. Sometimes all I can think about is getting my hands on her.”
“Quentin!” shouted Mrs. Sun. “You awful, horrible boy!”
Mr. Sun smacked Quentin in the back of the head so hard his nose hit the bottom of his empty bowl. “Apologize to Genie and her mother right now!” he demanded.
“No,” said Quentin. “I meant it.”
His parents each grabbed an ear of his and did their best to twist it off.
“Ow! Okay! Sorry! I meant that I like her! Not in the bad sense! I mean I want to become her friend! I used the wrong words!”
“Sure you did, you terrible brat,” Mrs. Sun hissed. She turned to us, crimson. “I am so, so sorry.”
My mother was stunned. Torn. While that display by Quentin was definitely improper by her delicate standards, she also had wedding bells chiming in her ears. The sum of all her fears had just been lifted from her shoulders.
“Oh, it’s all right,” she murmured. “Boys.”
I could only stare. At everything and everyone. This was a car accident, and now burning clowns were spilling out of the wreckage.
“Who’s Sun Wukong?” I blurted out.
I had absolutely no idea why I said that. But that was anything but this, and therefore preferable.
“Sun Wukong,” I said again, talking as fast as I could. “Quentin mentioned him earlier at school and I didn’t get the reference. Everyone knows I hate it when I don’t get a reference. Who is he?”
My mother frowned at me and my one-wheeled segue. “You want to know? Now?”
“Yes,” I insisted. “Let me go to the bathroom first, and then when I come back I want to hear the whole story.”
My outburst was bizarre enough to kill the momentum of the other competing outbursts. While everyone was still confused, I stood up and marched out of the room.
I hadn’t even filled my hands with water to splash my face when Quentin appeared behind me in the mirror.
“Gah!” The running faucet masked my strangled scream. “What is wrong with you? This is a bathroom!”
“You left the door open,” he said.
I could have sworn I heard his voice twice, the second time coming faintly from the dining table. It must have been my mind deciding to peace out of this dinner, because if not, Quentin was casually violating time and space again.
“Who’s Sun Wukong?” he repeated in a mocking tone. “Smooth.”
“You don’t get to criticize after what you did!”
“I was trying to . . . how does it go? ‘Have your back?’ ”
“Your English is perfectly fine,” I snapped. “Or at least good enough to make your point without being lewd.”
“I’ll work on it. Anyway, the situation is turning out perfectly.”
That was in contention for the dumbest comment made tonight. “In what possible way?”
Quentin reached behind me and turned the faucet off. “You’ll hear the story of Sun Wukong from someone else, so you’ll know I’m not making it up.”
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.
Even Sun Wukong would spare a moment to listen to the Venerable One. Buddha proposed a challenge—if the Monkey King could leap out of the Buddha’s outstretched hand, then he was free to overthrow Heaven. If not, he’d have to chill the eff out.
Sun Wukong took the bet and sprang forth from the Buddha’s palm. He leaped to what looked like the End of the Universe where five pillars marked the boundary. But those were nothing more than the fingers of Buddha’s hand. Buddha grabbed Sun Wukong, slammed him to the Earth, and dropped an entire mountain on top of him. The prison was sealed with the binding chant Om Mani Padme Om.
Sun Wukong, who had struck fear into Heaven itself, was trapped . . .
11
After describing the Monkey King’s imprisonment by the Buddha, my mother leaned back into her chair.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Is Sun Wukong a good guy or a bad guy?”
“He’s an anti-hero,” said Quentin. “He doesn’t play by anyone else’s rules.”
“He sounds like a tool,” I said.
Quentin gave me an angry squint. My mother didn’t know that particular phrase, so she didn’t yell at me for being vulgar.
“He redeems himself later by becoming the enemy of evil spirits and protecting the innocent,” she said. “That was only the first part, and the story is really long. I mean really long. A lot of English translations leave out whole chunks.”
“So then what happens after he gets stuck under the rock?” I said. “How does he get out?”
“I’m not telling anymore,” she said, making a face. “You have this book somewhere in your room. Go read it.”
“How long ago did all of this happen?” I said without thinking.
It’s not often that I’m the one making the verbal blunder in a conversation with my mom.
“Genie,” she said, looking at me like there was something growing out of my forehead. “It’s a folk tale.”
“But it’s one that’s very important to our culture,” said Mrs. Sun. “If you live in Asia, there’s probably some TV show or movie playing any given time of day that either tells the story of Sun Wukong or is based off it in some form.”
“It was always Quentin’s favorite,” said Mr. Sun. “I’m sure our last name helped. It would be like an American child being named Bruce Wayne. You bet he’d love Batman.”
Quentin gave me a look. See? They know Batman, but you don’t know Sun Wukong?
He yawned and stretched his arms, sending thick bundles of trapezius muscle skyward. “Genie, before I forget, can I take a look at your bio notes from today? I mean, I did mine, but I zoned out in class and missed a section.”
“They’re in my room.” I waited, and watched.
He glanced toward our parents. Mr. and Mrs. Sun gave him threatening glares, but my mother shooed at him with her hands.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You two can go upstairs.”
I led Quentin to my room. It felt way too intimate, doing that. His footsteps were heavier than mine up the stairs, a mismatched thump-thump that I could feel in my bones.
He closed the door behind us, shutting out our parents’ laughter, and looked into my eyes. I don’t know what he thought of mine, but his felt like they went all the way down to the bottom of the universe.
Dark brown, I thought to myself. Not shining gold. Just a very dark, drinkable chocolate.
“Yo, so those notes?” he said.
Ugh. The baijiu must have gotten to my head.
“Very funny. So that’s the story of Sun Wukong? You’re that guy?”
“More or less.”
“Well, I don’t believe it,” I said. “Any of it. You’re crazy and you’ve latched on to a story because you happen to bear a resemblance to the main character.”
Quentin gave me a dry stare like he was puzzling something out. What to say next.
“Your mom’s a great cook,” he offered. “I can tell how much she cares about you. I’m jealous.”
“Huh?” I was thrown off guard. “Why? Your paren
ts are awesome. They’re smart and they’re rich and they’re relevant!”
“They’re not real,” said Quentin.
“Wait, what?”
“Didn’t you hear your mom’s story? I came from a rock. I don’t have a mother or father. Never did.”
“Then who are those people downstairs? Actors? Con artists?” I was starting to get indignant at being lied to again.
“They’re no one.”
He reached into his hair and yanked a couple of strands out of his scalp. He tossed them into the air where they poofed into a white cloud like road flares.
“Goddamnit Quentin!” I waved my arms and prayed the smoke detector wouldn’t go off.
“Look.”
Once I finished coughing and fanning the vapors away, there, in my room, were Mr. and Mrs. Sun. They beamed at me as if we were meeting for the first time.
Downstairs, Mr. and Mrs. Sun and my mother laughed raucously at some joke, probably at my expense.
“Wha—what the hell IS THIS?” I half-yelled through clenched teeth.
“Transformation,” he said. “I can turn my hairs into anything. I needed parents to bring over for dinner, so I made a couple.”
He gestured at his mother and father and they disappeared with another puff of smoke.
This was . . . this was . . .
“Hoo,” I said without knowing what I meant. “Hoooo.”
I sank to the floor and began to furiously rub my eyes. Partly out of disbelief and partly because the faint white dust the Suns left behind was making my tear ducts itch. When my fingers wouldn’t cut it, I began scraping my face against my knees.
“Sorry,” said Quentin. “But I did promise to explain everything.”
I took a couple of Lamaze breaths.
“What,” I said as steadily as I could, “do you want with me?”
