Her sons said, "Mother, what do you mean, monks who took his life?"

The sons have to ask, which tells you the accusation is not obvious. She has just called the pilgrims life-taking monks and neither son knows what she is talking about, because there is nothing to know. The question gives her the opening to invent an answer.

The old wife said, "The thieves were fierce and violent, and came killing their way into the room. I hid myself under the bed, and trembling as I was, I kept my wits about me and looked towards the lamplight, and saw it all clearly. Who do you think it was?"

看得明白 — saw it clearly — is the load-bearing phrase of the whole chapter, and it is a lie told in five characters. She really was under the bed; the book put her there. What she did from under it is the invention. The 得 in the middle is the light one: it comes after the verb and closes it off, the way -ly finishes an English adverb without adding a word of its own. The same five characters come back out of her son's mouth in a moment, which is how you can watch the lie being swallowed. 你說是誰？ — who do you think it was? She makes them ask for it. A witness confident of her facts does not build suspense.

"The one who lit the fire was the Tang monk. The one with the knife was Zhu Bajie. The one who carried off the gold and silver was Sha Monk. And the one who beat your father to death was Sun Wukong."

Four clauses, all built the same way, each naming a pilgrim to a crime. The repetition is what makes it convincing: it sounds like testimony because it is shaped like testimony. Keep this version in mind. She is going to say it again in writing in a few dozen characters, and Monkey will throw it back at her much later, and the three versions are not the same. The most telling change is here: the spoken charge has Bajie merely 持刀的是豬八戒, holding the knife. By the time it reaches paper he is calling for the killing. The assignment of roles is also shrewd. She gives the killing to Monkey, who is the most frightening of the four and the one anybody would believe capable of it.

The two sons heard her out, took it for the truth, and said, "Since our mother saw it clearly, that settles it."

There is 看得明白 again, fifty-two characters after she first used it, now in her son's mouth as the reason to believe her. The phrase has done its work. 認了真實 — took it for the truth. The book is careful to say the sons believed her. They are not conspirators; they are grieving men accepting their mother's eyewitness account at four in the morning. That distinction matters when they end up in front of a prefect swearing to something that never happened. 二子 keeps the full weight on its second character, because it means sons. A hundred and thirty characters further on you will meet the same character doing nothing at all at the end of a word for a household — the difference is worth listening for.