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Hongmei Sun. Transforming Monkey: Adaptation and Representation of a Chinese Epic. Nonfiction. Seattle. University of Washington Press. 2018. 219 pages. $90.00 USD. ISBN 9780295743189
While the study of Asian American and Chinese culture is a busy field, the intersections of myth-making and global cultures have not been adequately studied. Hongmei Sun has made a major contribution to our understanding of the complex interactions between the construction of the image of a lasting mythological hero and a culture's projection of its anxieties upon such a figure. Transforming Monkey: Adaptation and Representation of a Chinese Epic argues that the figure of the Monkey King shifts from a trickster, a rebel, and a demon to a revolutionary and, later, postsocialist hero. Monkey King has a major impact, according to the book, on the formation of Chinese identity across borders.
The strength of Transforming Monkey lies in its theoretical acumen and coherent narrative drawing together diverse materials ranging from theatrical, graphic novel, and Maoist posters to Asian American musicals. The book opens and closes with the author's astute comparison of the ways in which the trickster figure is associated with Chineseness and how Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s "signifying monkey" operates in a similar fashion in its power of representation of ethnic cultures....