At a time when some find relief in making China a scapegoat, Timothy Mo's The Monkey King might hit the right spot. Timothy treads the traditional trajectory of seeing the Chinese through the lens of the colonising Europeans.
From Somerset Maugham and his literary like, we 'learned' that the Chinese are filthy in their personal habits, are liars and quite crooked in their dealings. And Maugham can rest easy in his grave as such caricatures continue to infuse our view of the other.
Half-white Mo's novel, like a cartoon show, is filled with rude and ready humour. Timothy was only in his twenties when he wrote the book and the tone of the tale is probably due to chips on his shoulder.
The very first chapter of The Monkey King plunges you into a dizzying spiral of insane characters and situations. Very quickly you're stuck in a large old house - almost a vertical fortress. And up and down its entrails you go, meeting all sorts of spurious specimens.
... he is a monkey born from a stone who acquires supernatural powers through Taoist practices. After rebelling against heaven and being imprisoned under a mountain by the Buddha, he later accompanies the monk Tang Sanzang on a journey to retrieve Buddhist sutras from the West (India) where Buddha and his followers reside.
The Monkey King follows the humorous exploits of protagonist Wallace Nolasco, who finds himself in financial straits after being denied his dowry in hectic post-war Hong Kong, and must by guile better both himself and the moribund reputation of the Chinese house he has married into. The plot of The Monkey King, which is a family saga, divided into three sections, is driven by the tensions between Wallace and his father-in-law, the patriarchal Mr Poon.
It is sometime in the 1950s. Wallace Nolasco is a Macanese, of Portuguese descent. He is in his mid-twenties and has returned to Macau from the mainland where he was studying engineering:
On the whole Wallace avoided intimate dealings with the Chinese. Despite a childhood spent cheek by jaundiced jowl with the Cantonese in Macau, he still found the race arrogant and devious. Worse, they revelled in the confusion of the foreigner: turning blank faces to the barbarian and sneering behind his back. Like his fellow Portuguese, Wallace made the best of the situation. In fanciful moments, he saw the Chinese and himself as prisoners together in a long chain gang, the descendants of the original convicts.
Our hero is mercilessly mistreated by one and all or almost at his in-laws'. But the joint family hell is not only why you should dive into the world of The Monkey King.
It's not likely that we'll be able to travel around much for, perhaps, months to come. Why not visit the Macau and Hong Kong of the fifties then? Mo's story is often like some Hong Kong slapstick comedy.
The closing page leaves you with something that echoes many prejudices - a monkey brain as food scene. Exotic enough? Dip into the novel and relish the unusual!
