Cross-cultural Variation: Chinese Monkey King Legend as a Trickster in America

Abstract

The Chinese stories on Monkey King have offered a popular theme in American literature, but are also transformed in the American cultural context through cross-cultural communication. The Chinese character Monkey King is one of the most representative legends in Chinese culture, representing resistance, longing for freedom, and a somewhat individualistic heroism, and is also the protagonist in the Chinese classical novel Journey to the West written by Wu Chengen in the Ming Dynasty. When stories about Monkey King travel to the heterogeneous cultural context, variations of such cultural images inescapability occur. This article will compare aspects of the novel with the Monkey King in Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1990) and in Native American writer Gerald Vizenor’s novel Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1987). Supported by concepts from the variation theory of comparative literature, which focuses on changes, or variations, in the cross-cultural literary transfer processes, this article shows how and why variations between the Chinese cultural legend and the American re-writings is determined by cross-cultural variation by changing the cultural context, which can be seen as a framework for the study of cross-cultural communication.