The Monkey King is having a moment in America — and it's been centuries in the making.
Wildly popular across Asia for generations as the focus of hundreds of adaptations on page, stage and screen, the Chinese superhero is also the star of a 2023 Netflix animated film, a blockbuster 2024 video game, and right now, a sold-out new opera at San Francisco Opera. Not bad for a character who made his literary debut in a 16th century Ming Dynasty novel.
The monkey who would be king
The Monkey King — known as Sun Wukong in Chinese — first burst fully-formed out of a rock in the classic 1592 novel Journey to the West, widely attributed to the poet Wu Cheng'en.
Steeped in Buddhist teachings and symbols, the story follows Sun Wukong's epic journey towards enlightenment.
"He wants to be someone," Frank Djeng, a cultural historian who has written about the character, said in an interview with NPR. "So he sets out to learn how to become immortal and powerful."
The ambitious primate acquires remarkable superpowers. He can ride clouds like they're skateboards, clone himself, and bash his enemies with a magic, telescoping stick.
But despite these skills, the gods reject him.
"He's an outcast. He's a rebel," Djeng said. "He decides to go up to the heavens and kind of wreaks havoc there."
Drawn to chaos
The Monkey King isn't your typical square-jawed, noble superhero. Though he's on a quest for enlightenment, Monkey is also a loud-mouthed mischief-maker, whose antics include stealing magical peaches from a sacred garden that grant immortality to the person who eats them – and then gobbling them down.
"I think we loved the monkey because of his courage, his longing for freedom, and his defiance against the gods," said Chinese-Australian tenor Kang Wang, who plays the title role in the world premiere San Francisco Opera production and grew up obsessed with a 1980s live-action Chinese TV adaptation of the Monkey King story. "Also, he's very playful. He's always super happy and never sad."
This many-sidedness is key to understanding the character's wide appeal. In Asia, the Monkey King has been reimagined as everything from a Communist-style proletarian hero fighting an oppressive bourgeoisie in the 1960s Chinese animated film Havoc in Heaven, to a cyborg in Sci-Fi West Saga Starzinger, a 1970s Japanese sci-fi anime series.
American Monkey
Some 20th-century versions gained popularity beyond Asia. But American audiences have been slower to embrace the simian superhero — until now.
"It's really stunning how the Monkey King is finally pushing through into the American consciousness," said Gene Luen Yang, a cartoonist whose acclaimed 2006 graphic novel American Born Chinese weaves together the Monkey King legend with a contemporary story about the struggles of being an Asian American teen. Disney adapted the book into a TV series in 2023.
Yang said the character may until recently have seemed "too Asian" for most American audiences. But cultural shifts have changed that calculation, and Yang said he expects more American artists and producers will be monkeying around with the Monkey King in the years ahead.
"We all read manga, and we all watch anime," Yang said. "As Americans, we're much more used to that intersection between East and West."
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