All Men Are Brothers : Wu Sung, the Tiger Slayer

When I was a kid, my mum told me the story of "Bu Seong Pak Hor" ie Hokkien for "BO Seong fights with a tiger" It was much later when in 1995, I bought the pictorial stories of the Chinese Classic the "Water Margin" that I realised that Bo Seong was actually Wu Sung one of the prominent 108 heroes of Liang Shan Pao :-)

I was first exposed to the Water Margin when I borrowed Water Margin from the PFS library when I was in Form 2, Then, I did not get pass the first few chapters as there tonnes of description of A Vs B fighting 100 rounds... so boring :-)

Last year, my youngest, Krystle discovered the 5 pictorial volumes and actually completed reading them within a week and surprise... surprise, we discovered quite by accident that the story of Wu Sung was shown on Astro Channel 708 (TV 8) !

Although, I knew the tragic ending, Krystle and me were just hooked on "All men Are Brothers" which ended 2-3 weeks ago. Then I remembered that I had several years ago bought the Shaw Brothers Celestial Movies, "Water Margin" and the sequel "All men are Brothers"

You may wonder why I even bother to blog about this Chinese classic. Well, after re-reading the 5 volumes, we noted that there were significant distortions in the TV Series, Celestial Movies and the original classic.

This series of articles serves to point out the discrepancies and solve certain mysteries about the Water Margin.

To kick off this series, let's take a look at Wu Sung..

In the Celestial Movies, Wu Sung's arm was chopped off by Fang La, the rebel Emperor and he died after capturing Fang La thus ending the campaign against Fang La.

However, in the TV series, Wu Sung chopped his own left arm off after being pinned by Fang La with a pitch fork. He subsequently defeated and captured Fang La. He was reported to live up to a ripe old age of 80 after retiring to a Monastery where his sworn brother, Major Lu Ta had passed away peacefully before the rump Liang Shan heroes returned to the Eastern Capital.

In Episode 28 (Suffering Great Losses in Suppressing the Revolt of Fang La)  of the original classic, Wu Sung's left arm was chopped off by a flung sword knife thrown at him by Fang La's General Pao Taoyi. He was then rescued by Major Lu Ta. It was Lu Ta who eventually captured Fang La.


More to come...