百花羞 The Princess Reveals Herself
長老聞言，淚眼偷看，那婦人約有三十年紀。遂道：「女菩薩，不消問了。我已是該死的，走進你家門來也，要吃就吃了罷，又問怎的？」那婦人道：「我不是吃人的。我家離此西下有三百餘里，那裡有座城，叫做寶象國。我是那國王的第三個公主，乳名叫做百花羞。只因十三年前八月十五日夜，玩月中間，被這妖魔一陣狂風攝將來，與他做了十三年夫妻，在此生兒育女，杳無音信回朝。思量我那父母，不能相見。你從何來，被他拿住？」长老闻言，泪眼偷看，那妇人约有三十年纪。遂道：「女菩萨，不消问了。我已是该死的，走进你家门来也，要吃就吃了罢，又问怎的？」那妇人道：「我不是吃人的。我家离此西下有三百余里，那里有座城，叫做宝象国。我是那国王的第三个公主，乳名叫做百花羞。只因十三年前八月十五日夜，玩月中间，被这妖魔一阵狂风摄将来，与他做了十三年夫妻，在此生儿育女，杳无音信回朝。思量我那父母，不能相见。你从何来，被他拿住？」
逐句解 Line by line
Hearing her, the elder stole a glance through his tear-filled eyes: the woman seemed some thirty years of age. Then he said, 'Bodhisattva-lady, there is no need to ask. I am already a dead man; having walked in at your household's door, if you would eat me, then eat and be done — why ask further?'
Tripitaka has decided he is somebody's dinner and is trying to be dignified about it. 女菩薩 ("bodhisattva-lady") is a polite way for a monk to address a laywoman — perfectly correct, and very funny when the woman you are being courteous to is, as far as you know, part of the household that plans to steam you. 該死 is "doomed, deserving to die." The flat colloquial run — 要吃就吃了罷, if you are going to eat me, eat me; 又問怎的, so why ask — gets its pathos from having no ornament on it at all.
Said the woman: 'I am no eater of men. My home lies three hundred lǐ and more to the west of here, where there stands a city called the Land of Precious Images. I am that king's third princess; my milk-name is Hundred-Flowers-Shy. Thirteen years ago, on the night of the fifteenth of the eighth month, in the very midst of the moon-gazing, this fiend snatched me away on a gust of wild wind; I have been his wife these thirteen years, have borne him sons and daughters here, and no word of me has ever gone back to court. When I think of my father and mother, whom I cannot see — And you, whence come you, that he has taken you captive?'
She corrects him in five words and then hands over her whole life. 寶象國, the Land of Precious Images; 百花羞, "Hundred-Flowers-Shy," and note that she gives it as a 乳名, a milk-name, the private nursery name a family uses — she is telling a stranger something intimate. The date is exact and cruel: 八月十五, the fifteenth of the eighth month, and 玩月, moon-gazing, which places the abduction at Mid-Autumn, the festival of family reunion. 攝將來 uses 將 to carry the sense of bearing-off. Two phrases here are still in everyday Chinese: 杳無音信, "not a word, not a trace," which is what you say when someone has vanished on you, and 生兒育女, to bear and raise children — a warm domestic phrase doing horrifying work in this sentence. Its 兒 is the noun ér, sons, not a suffix; 相見 takes 相 as xiāng, each seeing the other. Then she breaks off and turns the question back on him.
This is the chapter's recognition scene, and it runs on a double misunderstanding. Tripitaka, certain he has blundered into an ogre's larder, offers himself for the pot with a resignation that is pious and faintly ridiculous at once; and the woman he addresses as 女菩薩 turns out not to be a demon at all, but a fellow prisoner, and a king's daughter. Her flat disclaimer — 我不是吃人的, I am not one of the people-eating sort — punctures his fatalism and turns the encounter from a death scene into an alliance.
The princess 百花羞 is one of the novel's captive royal women, and her short autobiography is exact about everything that matters: taken on the night of the Mid-Autumn moon thirteen years ago, made a demon's wife, mother to demon children, cut off from her parents entirely. Choosing the eighth-month full moon — the festival of reunion — as the moment she was stolen gives the loss its particular sting. And the fact that she has 生兒育女 by the ogre complicates any easy sympathy: she is tied to Baoxiang by one set of blood ties and to the cave by another, and it is out of that doubled captivity that the letter she is about to write asks for release.