Taking in Zhu Bajie at Gao Village

A monk is walking from China to India to fetch Buddhist scriptures, and the road is long enough that he will not survive it alone. So the goddess Guanyin (Guānyīn) has been going ahead of him, finding monsters who owe Heaven a debt and promising each of them the same bargain: wait by the road, join the monk when he passes, and the debt is cleared. He already has one of them. Sun Wukong (Sūn Wùkōng), the Monkey King, can take any shape he likes and once fought the whole of Heaven; his face frightens people before he opens his mouth.

Heaven, in this story, is a government. It has ranks, banquets, a code of law and a court that hands down sentences, and an official who disgraces himself at a party can be beaten, stripped of his post and thrown down to earth — where he is reborn into whatever body is waiting.

One evening the two of them stop at a village where nearly everyone is called Gao. The richest man there, Gao Taigong (Gāo Tàigōng), has a problem he has been paying men to solve for three years: his youngest daughter's husband. He arrived as a strong young labourer who could plough without an ox. Lately he has been keeping her locked in the back court, and nobody in the house has seen her face for half a year.