Transforming Monkey: Adaptation and Representation of a Chinese Epic. By Hongmei Sun. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. ix, 219 pp. ISBN: 9780295743196 (paper, also available in cloth and as e-book).

Transforming Monkey by Hongmei Sun is an enlightening study of adaptation, tracing the rewritings, reconfigurations, and reincarnations of the Monkey King Sun Wukong from Wu Cheng’en’s Journey of the West. In fact, these adaptations can be summarized as three types of journey. First, Transforming Monkey maps a journey across time from traditional China into the twenty-first century. After all, Journey to the West in itself is a work of adaptation from various sources into what is today known as the canonical classic. The temporal journey of Transforming Monkey covers two chapters each on adaptations in premodern China, on those from the twentieth century and on those from the first decade of the twenty-first century. Second, Transforming Monkey maps a journey around the globe, varying the motif inscribed in the original title of the Journey to the West. While the “West” in the original referred to India as the origin of Buddhism, the twenty-first-century adaptations of the epic take the Monkey King from the PRC to Hong Kong and the United States. Third, Sun studies a journey across media, starting with a sutra and a drama that were among the sources of Wu’s novel, through fiction, drama adaptations, Peking opera, animated films, lianhuan hua, movies, Internet literature, and graphic novels. The twentiethand twenty-first-century works covered include the first animated feature film in China, Princess Iron Fan (1941); the Mao-era Havoc in Heaven adapted into opera, graphic forms, and animated film (1961–64); the comedy A Chinese Odyssee (1995, Hong Kong); the Internet fan fiction Story of Wukong; the television mini-series The Lost Empire (2001); the movie The Forbidden Kingdom (2008); and, lastly, with Gene Luan Yang’s graphic novel American Born Chinese (2006), which tackles the issue of Asian American identity. With its focus on the transformations of Sun Wukong in the adaptations, Transforming Monkey attains neat analytical conciseness, in terms of both content and theoretical considerations. After all, the Monkey King is essentially about transformation; he is conceptualized as a “transforming monkey” not only by Sun, but by Wu Cheng’en. He changes form and appearance, and he maneuvers between the human world and that of the gods. This renders him multivalent, allowing readers to identify with (parts of) him, which in turn explains the fascination the character has exerted over readers, as well as over other authors: with multivalence engraved into his character, he lends himself particularly well for adaptation. Unsurprisingly, then, transformations of the character continued after the “original” epic through adaptations of the text. Transforming Monkey thus feeds into an emerging stream of recent scholarship that engages with issues of rewriting, adaptation, translation, and the power of models, such as Pang Laikwan’s The Art of Cloning or Xing Fan’s Staging Revolution. While these discuss cultural production during and leading up to the Cultural Revolution, Sun traces one figure and the myth surrounding it through its various adaptations and rewritings over time. This approach brings to light two observations that may be applied more broadly to adaptation studies. First, each adaptation is a representation of the original myth; it