難難難 His Ankle Goes Soft
行者心驚道：「難難難。怎麼我長他也長，我小他也小？如之奈何？」說不了，孤拐上有些疼痛。急伸手摸摸，卻被火燒軟了。自己心焦道：「怎麼好？行者心惊道：「难难难。怎么我长他也长，我小他也小？如之奈何？」说不了，孤拐上有些疼痛。急伸手摸摸，却被火烧软了。自己心焦道：「怎么好？
逐句解 Line by line
Wukong took fright in his heart: "Bad, bad, bad."
Three characters, all the same, and it is the sound of somebody with no plan. 難 occurs seven times in this stretch of the chapter — hard, difficult, unbearable — and here it is used as a bare noise of dismay.
"How is it that when I grow it grows, and when I shrink it shrinks? What is to be done?"
The four-character 如之奈何 is classical rather than vernacular — a formal, slightly stagey way of saying what now — and in the source it is its own scrap of text, four characters closing the speech. Anything that short closing a quotation gets folded back onto the sentence it belongs to.
Before he had finished speaking there was a soreness on his ankle bone.
說不了 keeps 了 as liǎo, to finish — not the light le that marks a completed action. 孤拐 is the ankle bone, and choosing that of all places is what makes the moment land: it is where a shoe rubs.
He reached down quickly and felt it — the fire had burned it soft.
燒軟, burned soft, is a horrible and very precise idea. Not charred, not blackened. Softened, the way a candle softens.
He fretted to himself: "What am I to do?
心焦 — heart scorched — is still ordinary Chinese for anxiety, and the book is using it in a passage where something is literally being cooked.
The bottle has stopped being a puzzle and started being an injury. Everything up to here Wukong has met with a technique — a charm against fire, a fist against snakes, size against the walls — and none of it addressed the fact that he has been sitting in a furnace for two hours.
The ankle is the detail that makes it real. The book could have burned his hands or his face; instead it picks the bone at the bottom of the leg, the part resting on the hot floor while he sat cross-legged doing his fire charm. He beat the fire and the floor got him anyway.