American Born Chinese

The first illustration of this section depicts a group of monkeys wearing shoes as they struggle to get their footing on the branches of a tree. The Monkey King, alone in his chambers, studies kung-fu and meditates in order to achieve four new disciplines that give him invulnerability. Forty days later, he is invulnerable to fire, the cold, drowning and bodily wounds. The Monkey King continues to train, and 40 days later, he is able to take on new bodily forms: that of a giant and of himself in miniature, and he can transform his individual hairs into clones of himself and shape shift.

After the Monkey King changes his appearance, he appears to his subjects, who give him a message from heaven: he has been sentenced to death for trespassing upon heaven and he must go to the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea in order to be executed. The Monkey King tells his subjects that the Monkey King is no more as he has transcended his former self; from now on, he must be addressed as “The Great Sage, Equal of Heaven” (60). He leaves his subjects on a cloud and visits Ao-Kuang the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea in his underwater chambers.