Mooncakes and Home

Hello everyone,

This is Pam. I'm taking over Parker's blog for one entry, to say a few words about poetry and yesterday's Mid-Autumn Festival.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is one of China's big national holidays. Like Chinese New Year, it's calculated according to the lunar calendar, so it's on a different day every year.

There are a lot of stories and legends associated with the holiday. But it also seems to be a lot like many of our holidays – schools and many businesses are closed, and everyone goes shopping. All the stores have big sales. Then most families meet in the evening for big family dinners.

You are supposed to look at the moon and talk about the future, but the sky looked cloudy last evening, and we were tired, so we didn't go out. All that reflection was a little much for us, coming on the heels of the 9/11 anniversary. We did look this evening, which is called "chasing the moon." The day before the festival, when the moon is one day from being full, you "welcome" the moon. The day after the festival, when the moon has begun to wane, you "chase" it.

The Hong Kong Google server that we go through commemorated this year's event with a Mid-Autumn Festival doodle.

The doodle shows a moon, a rabbit and a flower-shaped cake, known as a mooncake. This is a soft cake with different kinds of fillings, such as red bean paste, coconut and egg. For the past couple of weeks, the city has been flooded with mooncake vendors, just like the umbrella sellers who appear from out of nowhere whenever it begins to rain.

According to Time Out Shanghai (although I'm not sure that's the most reliable source), China alone produces about 250,000 tons of mooncakes a year and the industry is worth something like 14 billion RMB (see previous entry for how to convert RMB to dollars). The festival is also celebrated in other Asian countries, such as Vietnam and Malysia. 

Everyone gets in on the act (look closely).

 

A lot of mooncakes get bought. In our various metro trips around town, we've seen hundreds of riders carrying fancy bags with boxes of cakes. On Sunday, when we paid our rent to the man from whom we're renting our apartment (more on that later), he gave us a box of mooncakes.

This means someone is making a lot of money on mooncakes. It doesn't mean people are that excited about eating mooncakes (although I like them, especially the red bean paste ones). The L.A. Times just published an article entitled "Mooncake becomes the fruitcake of China." Time Out Shanghai has a fun cartoon about it.

On a more serious note, as I was researching the festival, I saw a reference to a famous poem written on the occasion of a much earlier festival – back in the year 1076 (In China, "much earlier" generally means much earlier). Su Shi, a renowned poet of the Song era, wrote "Mid-Autumn Festival Night." while he was off in one of China's provinces, and missing his brother and the royal court. (Side note: Su Shi is a fascinating person, worth learning more about, but you have to be careful when Googling his name.)

It made me remember that a lot of the most famous Chinese poems are about homesickness, because educated people often had to do a lot of traveling. Sometimes it was because they were given administrative jobs in remote outposts. Sometimes it was because they fell out of favor with the emperor and were sent into exile.

I thought that Parker might appreciate some of them, since he's feeling homesick too. I found a couple of them in a collection called 100 Poems from Tang and Song Dynasties, translated by Qiu Xiaolong (a Chinese poet living in the U.S. who also writes detective novels set in Shanghai).

Night Thought

Li Bai (701-762)
 

The bright moonlight

in front of the bed

appears like frost

on the ground. I look up

at the fair moon, and

lowering my head,

I think of home.

 

Random Verse
Wang Wei (701-761)

Coming from our home village,
you should know
what has happened there.
Tell me, when you left,
whether the winter plum blossoms
were blazing again
in a riot of bright color
against the embossed window?


Then I asked Parker to try writing about how he felt. Here are a couple of the best examples.

 

I feel the cool breeze on my face.
I open my eyes. I see the broken moon
shattered from my loneliness.
I cry for home.


A bird flies alone in a bamboo grove.
Nobody sees it, nobody
hears it. The bird flies on all alone.
Its companions are long gone.

 

I think it's pretty cool that he can feel a connection with poets who wrote halfway across the world, and more than a thousand years ago.

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival, everyone.


pamela