The Pilgrim said, "Changed how?" Old Gao said, "When he first came he was a stout dark fellow;

The Pilgrim asks the one question the old man had hoped to slide past. 黑胖漢 is a dark, heavy fellow — nothing remarkable at all, which is exactly the point.

afterwards he turned into an idiot with a long snout and great ears, with a ridge of bristles down the back of his skull,

長 is cháng, long, not zhǎng, to grow; the default reading goes the wrong way. 獃子, dolt or blockhead, is the name the Pilgrim will use for this creature for the next eighty chapters — and it arrives here, in a father-in-law's complaint, before the two have even met. 一溜鬃毛: 溜 is liù, a row or a ridge.

his body coarse and frightful, his head and face for all the world like a pig's.

模樣 takes 模 as mú. And notice the order: the pig arrives last, after the snout, the ears and the bristles have made it unavoidable — and six lines after the surname 豬 was handed over without comment. The novel is letting the reader get there first.

And his gullet is prodigious: at one sitting he must have three or five dǒu of rice,

食腸 is the eating-gut, meaning the capacity of a man's appetite. 甚 is shèn here, the intensifier, very. A 斗, dǒu, is a dry measure for grain — about ten litres in Ming terms, and the middle rung of a decimal ladder that runs ten to the step. So three or five of them is something like thirty to fifty litres of cooked rice, at one sitting, for one guest. The default reading gives dòu, to fight, which would make an odd sentence indeed.

and for his morning bite a hundred-odd flat cakes are barely enough.

點心 here is the morning meal, not the sweet snack it later becomes. 也得 takes 得 as dé, requires. And a hundred flat cakes for breakfast is a joke the novel will keep making at Zhu Bajie's expense until the last chapter.

It is a mercy that he still eats vegetarian. If he took to flesh and wine,

喜得 is happily, as luck has it, with 得 as dé. 還 is hái, still. 齋素 is vegetarian abstinence — and here is the detail worth stopping on. The fiend has kept a Buddhist rule for three years unasked, and his father-in-law counts it as a saving on the grocery bill.

then all this old fool's holdings, land and stock and the rest, would be eaten clean away inside half a year."

家業田產 is the household's whole estate, land and stock together. 罄淨, qìng jìng, is emptied right down to the bottom. 不上半年 is in less than half a year.

Sanzang said, "He eats so because he works so." Old Gao said, "The eating is the small matter.

Sanzang's one contribution to the interview is a piece of plain justice: 只因他做得，所以吃得, both 得 the dé of ability. He can do the work, so he may eat the food. It is the only word spoken in the monster's favour by anybody in the entire chapter, and it comes from the man who is about to become his master.

Nowadays he raises winds besides, and comes in cloud and goes in mist, and sends the stones walking and the sand flying, so that he has frightened my whole household and the neighbours to left and right out of all peace.

諕 is writing 嚇 and is read xià, to frighten. Then watch 得 appear twice in one line: 諕得 takes the unstressed de that introduces a result, while 不得安生 takes the full dé of ability — could not get any peace. One character, two readings, a dozen characters apart. 走石飛砂, stones walking and sand flying, is the stock formula for a fiend's wind.

And he has shut my little daughter Kingfisher Orchid away in the back court, and for a full half-year we have not seen her face, nor do we know whether she is alive or dead.

一發 here is altogether, for a full — the same word that opened the chapter with the Pilgrim's violence running to the full. 更不知死活如何: the father does not know whether his daughter is alive. Three years of free labour bought a great deal of patience.

By this we knew him for a monster, and would fetch some exorcist to be rid of him — to be rid of him."

去退去退 — the doubled verb is the old man's fluster breaking through, and the English keeps the repetition. 法師 is an exorcist of either persuasion, and by now we know he does not care which.